Develop own Practice from Research

There is no doubt that several theories influence design practices and further design research, which in turn, dictates design outcomes that guide every graphic designer towards achieving a clear and major goal, which is solving problems. Successful graphic design incorporates the use of design principles to communicate the intended message more effectively. They help designers organise the images and type on the page so that it feels more comfortable to viewers and makes a greater impact.

• Theories are academic models or frameworks that are developed to help explain or predict certain phenomena. They are generally discipline specific and often build upon or even contradict one another
• Practice describes the application of knowledge or skills in each situation. It might involve describing experiences you’ve had, explaining the way you’ve created or designed something, or imagining what might happen in a real-life situation.

The connection between practice and theory is important as it demonstrates your ability to use evidence to increase your understanding of key concepts, justify your decision making, and inform future practice. The strength of this theory-practice connection also contributes to the evidence of your critical thinking and growth. Ultimately, linking theory and practice shows that you understand the connections between what you are learning and how that knowledge is applied in the real-world. ²⁷

When you combine strong academic evidence with specific and relevant evidence, you will be able to make strong arguments and justifications for your decisions or interpretations of events. design seeks new knowledge to innovate while research seeks new knowledge to further the discipline. Writing is an important skill because students develop critical thinking skills by expressing your opinions and developing a coherent argument to support them. Additionally, writing develops your ability to communicate ideas to your peers. This is especially important in industry where skills in client communication and project proposal writing are essential.

As we have seen, the core of research are methodologies. These are collections of theories, beliefs, concepts or ideas, and philosophical assumptions upon which an approach is based. A research methodology describes how to undertake an investigation and how to evaluate the results. In graphic design, it could consist of a stated purpose, a process, assumptions about the content or audience, and desired responses. Often, the same problem can be solved through any number of processes to achieve an effective solution. While the process for most graphic design activity is similar (e.g., rough ideas to refined solutions), each person has a unique perspective and set of work habits and applies this basic process differently.²⁸

Graphic design processes are becoming increasingly collaborative and participatory and consider a work’s physical environment and social interactions.

^{Relationship of research and methodology}

As we have seen in previous topics, theory serves as a guide to searching, planning, explaining, interpreting, and understanding. It is the basis of any systematic investigation. Theory can help clarify problems and ideas, aid in the interpretation of data and experiences, and suggest methods by which a problem can be solved.

There are different ways to read images, photographs, drawings, charts and so on. It is a skill that needs to be developed over time, and involves the ability to:

• Engage the visual language being used
• Identify and decode embedded codes
• Assess and synthesise the information presented
• Assign value to the message

This can be achieved by the following methods:

1. Visual Literacy - is the ability to interpret, evaluate, and derive meaning from image
2. Visual Language - refers to a message’s visual elements, their arrangement and emphasis, and what they reference. It is a combination of style, taste, aesthetics, and strategy
3. Cues - visual identifiers that signal an action or help form an interpretation. Underlined text on a website, for example, is a cue indicating that the text is a clickable link.²⁹

Once you have gathered the information from your research it will need to be assessed for relevance and collated in a client-ready format and prioritised for presentation and implementation. Support documentation is essential, and this may include photographs, sketches, graphs, annotations, and other evidence. Your research will be assessed on the methodology used, the quality of the execution and documentation, the interpretation of research results and its relevance to the target market and the client’s brief.³⁰

Business Practice Considerations

Graphic designers are employed in virtually all kinds of businesses, industries, and institutions. Here are some of the typical terms used interchangeably for “in-house design department.” (The words group and team are also commonly used). Companies are organised differently, depending on their focus and goals. A large corporation may distinguish package design from promotion design, or editorial design from advertising design; a smaller business may keep all design activities under one umbrella, such as Design Department. Likewise, proprietary, or independent design firms, studios, or offices—design businesses that service large corporations and small businesses—may or may not distinguish among design functions, such as having a print design department separate from a multimedia design department, or promotion and collateral separate from editorial departments.

Designers need to make informed choices about potential design outcomes rather than just relying on aesthetic considerations. Design research helps designers to create solutions that are supported by data and interaction with design prototypes. Design research methods add value to the design outcome for the audience, the client and the profile of the designer and their profession.³¹

Social media has undoubtedly revolutionised interpersonal and professional interactions in visual communication and the wider graphic design field. Now, not only are graphic designers expected to have a well-crafted resume and online portfolio, but they must also be part of networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Increasingly, message apps like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are promotional tools for designers. However, magazines and blogs are important sources of inspiration for designers, keeping them abreast of current trends and contemporary debates. Many titles will have both digital and print-based counterparts.

Initially, a client may not make all the connections and interpretations that a designer has instilled into a job. Presenting work often requires a designer to explain the thinking behind the choices made for the client to understand its merits. Meaning can be given or generated from a subjective or objective point of view, and it is important to evaluate both when producing a design. A subjective viewpoint could be what a design means to the target consumer, while everyone else has an objective viewpoint regarding its meaning.³²

Remember qualitative and quantitative research methodologies discussed in topic 1?

• Quantitative Research - This approach is all about measuring hard facts and figures.  If you are considering a target audience, you need to collect a range of defining data to paint an exact picture of your audience.
• Qualitative Research - To contrast the ‘hard data’ of quantitative data, we collect qualitative information, which is more about defining certain qualities’ in our categories.  This information helps to flesh out the facts and figures we’ve already collected. It provides the nuance and subtlety designers need to create innovation and difference in their outcomes.

The following table puts these theories into practice, that can be used as a template for graphic designers to determine the target audience / client in industry:

This set of measured data findings will deliver a focused view of exactly who we are speaking to both at an individual and group level. By cross-referencing all the group responses for ‘matches’ there will be some key data emerging to define your audience. As designers, we are interested in formulating a set of research methods that help us see deeply into the habits, aspirations, and motivations of our target audience. Any unique lead or insight can be useful to add nuance, flavour and relevance to our design outcomes. Without this rigorous exploration our design solutions may not reach our audience at an inspirational level. The design might go only part of the way in delivering a meaningful communication result.³⁰

You also need to be aware of how the following could help you with furthering your research efforts:

• Anthropology is the science that deals with the origins, physical and cultural development, social customs, and beliefs of humankind.
• Visual anthropology is a subfield of cultural anthropology. It is the study of visual representation, which includes performance, museums, art, and mass media.

So far in this topic, you have learned about history, theory and contemporary practice. It is important for you to spects that there are many connections between the three methodologies, and that they can be spects together to create effective research solutions. You become more adept at tasks, and this includes research and the more knowledge you gain through practice, by repeating a set or sets of actions improves the outcome over time.

These are some dominant research forms used in graphic design:

• Case study (description and analysis of an activity)
• Ethnography (interpretation of a cultural group)
• Experimental (experimentation with select variables)
• Narrative (understanding individual experiences)
• Phenomenology (understanding the essence of experiences)

Research plan reflection

As the initial step in a research investigation, a research plan addresses four basic questions. Ask yourself:

1. What is the goal?
2. What methods will be used?
3. What resources are needed?
4. What are the benefits?

Understanding, developing, and applying methodologies and processes can expand possibilities, develop your ideas, and better utilise your abilities. This can lead to work that is original, appropriate, inspiring, and responsible. Technological and social changes require designers to be fluent in a variety of approaches to solving problems. As audiences diversify and as information is increasingly accessed and communities shaped by digital means, designers must be able to confront the interconnectedness of problems and society. Methodologies and processes can aid in the understanding of the connections and relationships.³³

Success still depends on your ability to be engaged, to effectively draw from your experience, and to rely on your intuition and innate abilities. Like a well-designed and appropriately used grid, a methodology provides guidance through its conceptual framework.

The following discussion questions can be used as a starting point for analysing any visual text, which can be used to reinforce the issues raised in your research.

1. What type of text is this image from?
2. What is this image about?
3. Who and what is in this image? Who are the main participants – characters, or things/objects – seen?
4. What is happening? What are different participants/objects doing?
5. Where and when and why is this happening? What information is provided in the image which tells us about the circumstances surrounding these participants and actions?
6. Perhaps most importantly – does this reinforce my research, or even does it add any credence to what I am saying in my written research.

These are examples of what not to use when including visuals in your research.

• Pictures that are obviously stock photographs.
• Generic graphics that display a clear lack of imagination.
• Poor quality images that are pixelated, low-resolution, over-compressed, or badly resized.

Being a reflective learner involves making your learning a more conscious process. It helps you to become an active learner by asking questions and thinking critically about your own ideas. There are benefits to becoming a reflective practitioner, and these will need to be practiced so that it becomes second nature to evaluate your written and designed outcomes. You can:

• Examine what you have learned and how you have learned it.
• Demonstrate how your thinking grows and develops over time
• Assist with making connections between what you already know and what you are learning
• Help you learn from mistakes by identifying how you would do things differently next time
• Encourage you to become a reflective practitioner in your future career.

Sometimes your research and visual outcomes work, sometimes they don’t. Becoming used to making mistakes, trying things differently and allowing for surprises is key to achieve successful creative solutions. You need to experiment widely in order for your ideas to mature and produce work full of interesting exploration.

What you find much more difficult is making critical decisions about which experiments have worked the best. Without being able to reflect on experimentation, it may be challenging to move forward. It is difficult because there are no right and wrong answers and making the decisions depends upon so many variables. Solutions rarely appear instantly, more often than not, they depend on a wealth of experience that allows graphic designers to compare, contrast, evaluate and plan. Adopting a reflective practice is like learning a new skill, it takes time and dedication before you will start to see the results –– the transformation won’t happen overnight.

The best approach to evaluating your work, is to do this in a structured way and this applies to creative and written outcomes, including your research effort. This enables you to learn from what you have done and be more successful in the next project, but there is opportunity for reflection to become more central to your own practice.

Reflective practices:

There are many other ways of embedding reflection, other than just a written piece at the end of a project. Here is a list of practices that include reflection and evaluation that you will encouraged to engage in over the course of your studies in graphic design.

• Tutorial
• Critique
• Presentation
• Discussion
• Peer group discussion
• Written evaluation
• Reflective annotation

Each has its own merits and each of you will have your own preference, but the reflective and evaluative element is one of the most important ways of developing creative independence. The most important factor to notice is that the reflective parts of each of the above depend on the same kinds of questions regardless of the format. Structured reflection involves identifying significant events that lead to learning, identifying their value and considering how they will contribute to your future projects and your practice as a whole.

Imagine that you come home at the end of a really bad week where everything possible has gone wrong. When you walk in the front door you are confronted with a time machine which can take you back to Monday morning so you can live the whole week over again. You use this opportunity to think about everything that went wrong and what you could do (if anything) to correct things as well as trying to repeat the things that you have done right.

Activity

Think about what reflective practice means to you. There is no right or wrong answer to this question and your answer will depend on many factors and your own background. Write your thoughts down on paper as you can refer back to them later, and you will be surprised how far you have progressed in the process of reflective practice.

This image is Gibbs (1988)³⁴ reflective model and is the most adapted in the reflection process associated with creative outcomes. It highlights an outline of the experience being reflected on. It then encourages you to focus on your feelings about the experience, both during it an after. The next step involves evaluating the experience - what was good or bad about it from your point of view?

You can then use this evaluation to analyse the situation and try to make sense of it. This analysis will result in a conclusion about what other actions (if any) we could have taken to reach a different outcome. The final stage involves building an action plan of steps which you can take the next time you find yourself in a similar situation. It promotes the idea of feelings toward the production of work, and can be used for both visual and textual outcomes that you will produce over the course of each module.

1. Description – What happened? What have you been asked to do?
   • For example: New computer programs/techniques and processes/research/things you need to do when using particular processes?
2. The Point – What was the point of learning this? How do you feel?
   • Why is this process useful and how could you use it in the future/what ideas do the processes give you/how could you use the processes in other ways/what other techniques could you combine the processes with/how could the processes support other projects you are doing?
3. The Success – What has and hasn’t been successful? How and why?
   • How does the process make your work look interesting or appropriate/what strengths does your project have/what was challenging for you?
4. The Solution – How can you address these issues? How can you improve?
   • What actions could you take next time/what could you do between now and the next module or assessment/do you need to try things in a different way?³⁵

^{- Donald Schon}

1. What did I learn?
2. What do I need to learn more about?
3. Why did I feel the way I did?
4. What was easy?
5. What went well?
6. What was difficult?
7. What went badly?
8. What would happen if...
9. How can I improve in the future?

Making time for reflection

It is important to try and build time into your schedule for reflection (especially if it is part of an assignment!) but exactly how you do this will depend on your circumstances. Some people can find time every day whilst others set aside time each week. You don't need to spend a long time reflecting but you should try to make it a regular activity. Think of reflection as a philosophy rather than as a set of tasks that must be completed as this can make it seem like too much work. If you take a short, regular amount of time to reflect at various points you will soon find that you are reflecting much more than you realise.

Key Takeouts:

• Research findings have potential for informing your graphic design outcomes
• There are definite connections between history, theory, and business and contemporary practice
• How you develop relevant ideas about research is important as it impacts on your own professional practice and its future direction.
• Reflecting and recognising connections and associations between history, theory and your own practice is important.