A Word
Wrapped in Light

By John Marstall

At Firewheel Design we take a tremendous amount of pride in our work as designers and visual communicators. However, we find ourselves having to apologize to you, dear reader, for some of the harmful side effects of our craft. You see, we are helping to make you stupid.

Yes, it’s true. With every stroke of the mouse we contribute to the weaving of a great blanket of visual noise which is slowly settling over your capacity for reason, analysis and intellectual enterprise. With every pixel fired into the ether, we force your conceptual faculties deeper into the couch cushions of mental passivity. And we do this without any regard for the consequences to your intellectual life.

Or, at least, so I have heard.

No less an authority than the late Neil Postman, professor of communication arts and sciences at New York University, said as much in an interview with Athabasca University’s online journal, Aurora. Aurora, referring to Postman’s body of work, suggests:

You’ve said that the decline of language in both its spoken and written form is resulting in a decrease in thinking and an increase of what you term stupidity. It seems that the main culprit is the new medias and in particular, T.V.

To which Postman responds:

Well I think there is no question that image-based media, which includes television, film, advertising in its various forms, photography and so on, have made the word a less powerful and binding medium in the culture. We can’t get away from that. Now, I would argue that that necessarily implies a decline in what we have traditionally meant by reasoning because our idea of reasoning and of critical thought, analytical thought, detached thought, has been intimately linked with the written word. To the extent that the written word is moved to the periphery of the culture and the visual image takes its place in the centre, there would be a natural decline in what we might call intelligence or intellectual thought.

It is true that the written word has been pushed to the periphery by the advance of new media over the past few decades. Certainly we read less, and read less challenging material, than we used to. Medieval learners, with their Latin studies and familiarity with the works of antiquity, strike us as either masochistic — or simply alien — today.

A growing number of parents and educators are trying to reverse the trend away from letters by reviving those very modes of classical education. With an emphasis on structuring all learning in the manner of the Trivium — grammar, logic and rhetoric — students are taught through the use of classical works of literature. Music, mathematics and other studies enter into the curriculum, but the insisted-upon bedrock is always the word in ink.

Susan Wise Bauer, a respected classical educator and author, explains that emphasis thusly:

Language-learning and image-learning require very different habits of thought. Language requires the mind to work harder; in reading, the brain is forced to translate a symbol (words on the page) into a concept. Images, such as those on videos and television, allow the mind to be passive. In front of a video screen, the brain can “sit back’ and relax; faced with the written page, the mind is required to roll its sleeves up and get back to work.

We at Firewheel Design are makers of images. Often, these images are icons designed for the computer and web. And if Mrs. Bauer is correct, then with every icon we construct we are coaxing your mental equipment into a state of complacency, robbing you of intellectual exertion and helping you to form habits of intellectual laziness.

We are, in short, making you stupid.

Now, I am sure neither Postman nor Bauer set out to attack our sort of work, or even image-making in general. Nor are we unsympathetic to their respective projects. (The author’s wife is a big fan of Bauer’s, so he has to be careful not to get himself sent to the couch here.) Nonetheless, both educators make wide-ranging claims which leave no doubt as to the mental hemisphere in which such visual work is thought to belong. The image replaces active thought with passive reception; cognitive content with felt associations.

As you might imagine, we do not think the dichotomy succeeds. We disagree with the notion that images cannot be as cognitive as written words. In our work, we have found that images have a tremendous capacity for conveying content. We wonder if there mightn’t be a visual avenue of expression — a visual language — which does force the brain to translate symbols into concepts. Which does require one to engage his or her faculties of reasoning and analytical thought.

Of course, some cultures have been known to rely on visual languages. Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mayan pictographs, the Chinese script and American Sign Language are all languages which are or were at least partly ideographic — that is, the graphic structures (or gestures) used in those systems relate directly to the meanings they signify. A Chinese writer draws a crescent to represent “moon”; the user of ASL sips from an imaginary glass to convey “drink.” Now, such systems may also be partly logographic in that, for some cases, a single graphic symbol (or gesture) can be reliably translated into a single, spoken word; but it remains the case that the visual appearance of many symbols are drawn from the real-world appearances of the things to which they point.

What’s interesting about ideographic language is that it is, by necessity, a kind of visual shorthand. Detailed representations are out of the question; so each pictograph becomes a kind of “thumbnail sketch.” The Chineses character for “man” is beautifully minilmalist, while the character for “ox” goes even farther by resorting to synecdoche — using the part (the ox’s horns) to represent the whole. The key is always to capture only as much detail as is necessary to suggest the thing in question. What this means, though, is that a great deal of responsibility is laid on the reader to put the detail back in — in other words, the reader has to do some mental work. Especially in the case of encountering an unfamiliar symbol, it’s not hard to see where reasoning, experience and a grasp of the symbol’s context would be necessary for a complete understanding. If you had never seen the sign for “ox,” but came across it in a treatise on inter-village travel, those horns might be just the clue your analytical faculties needed to fill in the blank.

Now, it is of course true that over time this kind of literalist image deciphering becomes unnecessary as the reader gets used to making the leap from picture to idea. Note, though, that this happens in phonetic language too. A word may start out as a metaphor founded in something very tangible; but over time that tangibility fades as the meaning becomes established. One example is the word “sincere,” which originally referred to sculptures being fashioned without wax (sine cere). A flawed sculpture would be patched with wax to hide its imperfections, so a sincere article was one with nothing to hide. This word picture came to be used as a stand-in for personal genuineness; and we all forgot about the marketplaces that gave rise to the original sense.

Other examples can be put forward. Speaking of putting forward, the word thesis originally meant just that — to put forward, from the Greek tithenai. The picture is one of presenting one’s idea as if it were a physical device to be set out for examination; though of course ideas are not tangible things to be put anywhere. In this case, we still speak with much the same figurativeness today. The lesson to take from this is that many of our most “abstract” concepts may have originated in very mundane word pictures — in words or phrases which described tangible things but became metaphors for the intangible.

This may suggest that ideography is more fundamental to language than we realize. Through our spoken and written language, we paint word-pictures in the minds of our hearers and readers. In an analogous way, visible pictures can serve a communication purpose. Ideographs are not incapable of communicating abstract ideas simply because they are visual in form. Through the use of metaphor, visual images can be used to encapsulate almost any idea; perhaps without limit.

This is not to say that the old metaphors can be easily revived. An image of “no wax” may not readily convey the concept of genuineness to the contemporary mind. Rather, new metaphors need to be constructed and established through usage. Fortunately, there are a number of common ideographic conventions which can already be relied upon. Here are a few we use at Firewheel Design, which certainly did not begin with us:

The green cross symbolizes “add or create a new object.”

A right-pointing arrow suggests “next” or “proceed.” A left-pointing arrow suggests “go back.”

A gear is used to mean “work.” It’s used to indicate a software application, or a process within an application. If it’s built into a button the user can click on, it means “begin this working process” or “do some specified work on another object.”

A pencil indicates “add or modify information.”

A magnifying glass usually symbolizes “search,” though it may suggest “closer inspection.”

There are many other established symbols such as these. The examples above all display a degree of metaphor in their signifying power; but it may be objected that these concepts are all relatively down-to-earth. What about loftier notions? Is it possible to come up with an “idea picture” for love? For justice? For truth?

The first two solutions, of course, are already widely established ideographic conventions. The third, “truth,” is offered here as a tentative suggestion. It would have to become established before we could consider it really useful. The point is that some kind of metaphor is always possible, and some such metaphors are already in wide circulation.

Tentative or not, though, the third example suggests another consideration — that ideographs can be composed of multiple “idea parts.” If ideography is a visual language, than a multi-part ideograph is that language’s phrase or sentence. The relationships between the parts become important in deciphering the whole graphic. Is one element larger than the others? More central? Does an element fall behind another part, seeming to act as a basis for it? Does one part seem to “possess” some other part?

For example, each icon below contains a primary and secondary idea element. Secondary elements are often referred to as “badges”; and, like badges, they label that on which they hang.

The first icon will tend to suggest one of a few different concepts, depending on the context: “A user who owns or creates documents’; “the event wherein a user acquires or creates a document”; or the command, “cause a user to acquire or create a document” — the last being potentially useful in a workgroup setting where users are assigned different areas of responsibility.

The second icon, on the other hand, represents document-centric concepts: “A document owned by a user” or “a document whose contents pertain to a particular user.” The document concept is primary, being merely modulated by the user badge — rather than the other way ’round.

If we require more specificity, we can draw out the intended meaning with cause-effect arrows and other established symbols. Here, the meaning is most likely that a user is creating a new document. The arrow shows the user to be the cause and the new document — “new” being signified by the sparkle common to all just-birthed objects — to be the effect.

Plurality is also straightforward: Just stack two copies of the same element together. Here a group of users gives rise to a stack of new documents. They probably work for the IRS.

We begin to see that there could be a certain semantics to this visual system. A modern, written language has the advantage of hundreds of years of established usage. If there is an emerging visual language in our age of new media, it is necessarily a nascent one. As computer technology — and, by extension, computer interfaces — infiltrate more and more areas of our lives, the semantics of ideographic representation may well become increasingly standardized. Each time an interface designer discovers a new image-to-meaning solution and uses it in her own work, the idea finds a slightly wider audience. Over time, it’s possible that an established semantic system will develop for interface ideography as it has for other languages.

At Firewheel Design, we are excited to play even a small role in exploring this communication frontier. We trust we are not making you stupid in the process. Rather, we hope we’re helping to broaden the number of avenues through which today’s conversations can take place, and making the world of technology a friendlier, more human-centered place.

Comments or thoughts? Drop us a line.

Copyright © 2005 Firewheel Design.

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