INITIATION TO _______. REFLECTION

It is apparent that finding a design strategy that works with this assignment is illusive. According to "The Rhetorical Act", by Karylyn Kohrs Campbell and Susan Schultz Huxman, the challenge as a rhetor is, "attempt(ing) to overcome the obstacles in a given situation with a specific audience on a given issue to achieve a particular end." Would the simple fact that I am an outsider be my biggest obstacle? Is being a human designing for another human enough, or am I unwillingly inadequate at designing for a community that I am not a part of?

For me, Project 2 became an initiation of the Raleigh Amateur Radio Society (RARS) to an extension of Twitter using morse code. The goal was to adopt RARS' existing visual conventions, while harmoniously/arrestingly introducing new visuals. The following are key questions and problems that I addressed during my process:

What constitutes an initiation?

What could I initiate my community to that would be a logical extension of their current interests?

Which conventional formats and visuals should be borrowed in the design of the initiation?

How could I create a design that felt authentic to my target audience when unfamiliar visuals were being introduced? (Which, I later realized, was an unnecessary constraint I gave myself.)

And how far could I divert from what is "standard" and still be effective?

I tried to create an operator's manual that took in consideration my audience's biases, values, expectations and knowledge. The "twitter circuit diagram" annotated with ham acronyms was an important feature of the manual that concreted my initiative mission, but this blending of twitter and RARS still fell short of the projected goal. The initiation could have been pushed farther away from the safety nets of "how a manual works" and "how twitter works". I had unintentionally given myself parameters concerning authenticity in an attempt to make the project more explicit, but ended up stagnating exploration. I really liked Tony's suggestion of Twitter CW becoming a metaphor for the lapsing time frames that exist in morse code. Although I was previously apprehensive about the complexities of that correlation, addressing the function of the interface would not have been my problem. Instead the project could have taken shape as a solely diagrammatic manual on Twitter CW that visualized twitter messages interacting with time and space.

I am trying to relinquish my approach as a practical problem solver, and let grad school nurture uninhibited theoretical exploration. Making this conscious effort to refocus my attention to the possibilities and what ifs will deter me from targeting a fully designed, functioning end product. Seeing the different interpretations of the same assignment really reveals the subjectiveness of the design process, and the difficulty in finding "the right" approach. One of the things that struck me during critique was how the assimilation of new visual methods into the initiations recurrently sacrificed legibility, conviction or incentive. As students liberated to manipulate visual conventions, what defines our success in these assignments? Does a project have to be realistic and consumable by the real world or does pushing the boundaries of comprehension show a greater strength?