Friday, January 16, 2009

Visuals Do Talk

Words and images remain side by side with one another when conveying massages. Both are pervasive in books, posters, magazines, newspapers, and on television. However, means of communication nowadays tend to be faster, easier and briefer; that is, visual communications are a much preferable option than verbal ones. Indeed, to illustrate an idea, one picture can worth thousands of words.

Visuals are capable of arousing people’s emotions and reactions to the raised issue effectively. In fact, many people are influenced by the subject that is brought up in the visual they have encountered. For instance, the political cartoon figure, Uncle Sam, who wears a top hat with white stars on the blue band and red-and-white striped trousers, has encouraged the 38% of the population of the United States to join the army during the Second World War. Today, Uncle Sam represents a national embodiment of the United States successfully. Another successful visual propaganda is the pictorial warning printed on cigarette packages. According to World Health Organization, using graphic images are more effective than text-based health messages. There are 15,000 smokers involved in the study which compares cigarette labels. 60% of the smokers from Canada, where pictorial warning labels are required, said they had noticed the warning and 15% of them said the visual warning had deterred them from lighting up. On the contrary, countries like the United States and Australia, where requires text warnings, only 30% of the smokers from the US and 45% of that from Australia noticed the warning labels.

People relying on visuals do not necessarily have poor literacy skills. Due to a lack of texts, visuals are often regarded as a medium that performs no functions for a person’s ability to read, write, and communicate. In fact, visuals serve as a tool for learning purposes. By using visuals like graphs and illustrations, people are able to link symbols representing ideas and information to clarify meanings. For example, Comic Book Project, a program, runs in Teachers College at Columbia University, has developed a comic-based curriculum for primary education: pupils create their own comic strips as an alternative pathway to literacy. So far, the program has applied to 860 schools across the United States. As a result of the program, the positive reading and writing outcomes show the effectiveness on children’s literacy skills. According to The Comic Book Project’s survey, collected from 546 youth, 82% of the youth knew more words, 78% of them spend more time reading for fun, and 70% of them like to read. For writing skill, 80% of the youth spend more time writing for fun, 74% of them like to write, and 70% of them need less help with writing.

In all, Visuals have the power of carrying messages effectively. Since visuals are pictorial expressions of words, they are able to decode connotations of words and to help people receive messages immediately. In other words, one picture is capable of telling a-thousand-word story and facts.

The Closet

There was no such thing called closet in the eighteenth century. Clothes hangers had not been invented and that is why the
the closet was absent in the eighteenth-century houses. Without hangers and closets, clothes were hung on pegs, or were folded and kept on shelves or in chests.
The built-in closet was an American invention of early nineteenth century. Witold Rybczynski, an architect and a critic, declared that "The shape and location of the closets is fully revolved and has not been improved on since: a coat closet next to the front door, a broom closet near the kitchen, a linen closet in the upstairs hall, a medicine cabinet in the bathroom." Therefore, a closet has replaced wardrobes, cupboards, and chests, not only in bedrooms, but also in the kitchen.

The Kitchen

We rarely see kitchens in watercolors of nineteen-century interiors, for kitchens represented a place where the lower classes labored. Ornament tended to be utilitarian, in the form of gleaming copper pots or brightly pattern tableware. With quality of everyday accessories, a kitchen was recorded as a humble place of work rather than as one of entertainment.

Today in many houses the kitchen has become the grandest interior, stainless steel theaters where guests congregate to admire gleaming industrial equipment and the culinary feats of the host or hostess. Unlike the nineteen-century life, cooking has been regarded as a personally rewarding and sophisticated skill.

Thinking About What Design is

The process of design is very much like that of writing- They are all about finding sense of order to things. In other words, how things fits one and another. Therefore, I always try to define design as having to do with how things fit: How furniture fits the body, how people fit in buildings, and how buildings fit the landscape. Most of all, design is about finding the sense of fit between people, place, and things. The idea of fitting covers not only the physical dimensions, but the social one as well.

Thinking About What Home is

To get people to think about what home means to them, I often come up with a question: What room do you most fondly remember from childhood? Most of the people said the bedroom. The self-entertainment or the state of being alone sum up the appeal for the bedroom. The kitchen comes in second. For most of the people, cooking with their mothers or grandmothers became the collective memory for a family. Finally, there are the basement and the garage, where have always ignited the creative spark in adults and children when doing the crafts.
It occurs to me that the bedroom, the kitchen, and the basement reflect the three basic areas of home: the private sanctuary, the place of community, and the place where thing get made. As long as the places we live are able to accommodate these three different human activities, it can be called home.

Comfort for Homes

Most homes become more difficult to map, for they today rent logic. There is no longer a single pattern or cultural recognition for comfort. In fact, it's a matter of personal choice. Individuals can hold different notions of comfort: Some think an ideal home would be light-filled such as a glass-built house; some associate home with a place of seclusion like a cave.

Privacy, undeniably, is the basic element for home comfort. Parivacy is defined not by space, but by a specific activity and by a specific time. For example, many of us use our bedrooms as libraries when reading books and use hallways with pianos as music rooms. Moreover, with a particular time, usually late at night, many of us like being alone after other family members have gone to bed.