Week 6: 3 Points and a Question

1) From the Maitra and Goswami article we can easily discern that different cultures have different methodologies and design approaches. Americans tend to lean towards clarity and simplicity (to some extent in context, to a greater extent in design). White seems to place a lot of emphasis on words as visuals. So not only how they are used within context, but their aesthetic appeal to the overall document is vital to making it functional. Functionality seems to be less of a concern for the Japanese who prefer abstractions and making the reader "work" for and towards the necessary information.

2)There is an obvious difference between how different cultures as audiences view particular pieces. Whereas Americans use visuals to do six different things:
1. describe or identify
2. concretize abstractions
3. convey spatial information
4. assist the reader to represent and to solve certain kinds of problems
5. facilitate the performance of procedures
6. help the reader remember certain kinds of information,

the Japanese, again, view visuals as nothing more than aesthetics that can be unrelated to the subject at hand. I think this is so hard for Americans to grasp simply because a document is not intended to be complicated. It's intended to aid or else it has no reason to exist.

3)White also discusses how the primary type create the personality for the printed material (121). Once again, making the point of words themselves as visuals. I think this also reveals the different design techniques employed. Americans spend much time considering the document as a whole. It is not fragmented and then put together, the purpose, the idea, and the functionality of the piece MUST be known beforehand.

I think it would be interesting to see if there exists a static design in either culture when it comes to document design. If the Japanese focus on aesthetic appeal, could it not be assumed that there is an established design that is popular and widely used, just as there are defined structures that are suggested for making American documents. So how different do documents look? For example, a memo is not really going to change appearance, but a newsletter will look radically different from another newsletter...or will it? Maybe with the use of different graphics, but what commonalities exist if any?