Audience as Co-designer

“Clear transmittance of information occurs when the encoder shares the same culture as the decoder.” I think this sentence was my favorite of the entire article because it states so plainly a truth which seems so obvious, but actually can very difficult to practice when designing. This doesn’t just apply to international situations because within any community there are numerous cultures which people identify with. All you have to do is look to the internet to see a never ending number of cultures, each with their own set of symbols. It can be very easy for a signal to be decoded the wrong way or not at all. Getting back to the experiment in Kenya, I think that its great that this group of people were trying to work together to solve these issues. I also really liked the anecdote about the thirty-six inch long bug.

I thought it was interesting to see such scientific method applied to the design process. One aim of this group was supposed to be to educate the Kenyan participants so they would be able to design on their own once the project was over. Its interesting to consider how different their design education, based on such an rigid system is from the type of education we are currently receiving here in Portland.