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ABSTRACT
Many of the ways in which artifacts appear to or actually do affect us-as elegant, dynamic, comfortable, authentic-are based on the fact that they are designed objects. Design is an effect-oriented process that resorts to design rules linking formal aspects of designed artifacts to specific design effects. Design rhetoric tries to capture these links between design techniques and resulting effects. This article presents design-rhetorical methods of identifying design rules of intersubjective validity. The new approach, developed at Bern University of the Arts, combines rhetorical design analysis with practice-oriented design research, based on the creation and empirical testing of design variants in accordance with effect hypotheses.
KEYWORDS
commercial graphics, design artifacts, design effects, design rhetoric, effectoriented design, information design, practice-based design research, visual rhetoric
Introduction
Rhetoric is commonly understood as the art of persuasion or effectoriented communication. Since the 1960s, there have been various attempts to extend rhetoric from speech to visual communication and to design in general. Design rhetoric addresses the effects of artifacts and especially the techniques by which they can be generated and controlled in the design process. The central problems of this approach are the identification of effects and the validation of rules linking design aspects to specific effects. The goal of this article is to demonstrate how these problems can be dealt with by means of a triangulation of analysis, expert judgments, practice-based research, and laboratory experiments. The suggestions made are based on the results and methods developed over the course of two Bern University of the Arts research projects on visual rhetoric in commercial graphics and public-transport information design. While advertising and mass communication theory as well as the psychology and sociology of media are generally more interested in the macrostructural and postcommunicative effects of their objects of investigation (that is, how they affect actions, purchase decisions, quality of life, social structures, or mental equilibrium of users and receivers), the design-theoretical approach presented here is concerned with the micro-structural impact levels: the immediately detectable effects resulting from the formal composition of designed objects, effects that are grounded in the appearance, and sometimes even in the intrinsic properties of things (that is, what kind of primary impression they make on the viewer). In the first two sections, a short...