McCoy, Katherine, 'Introduction: Digital communications design in the second computer revolution', Transformation and Collaborations in New Media, Redman, Stephanie, ed., Northlight Books 1998.

Today there is hardly a designer under retirement age that doesn't begin the workday by booting up the Mac. In the past ten years, the computer has thoroughly transformed graphic design practice. But this book is about a different revolution, a second computer revolution. Now computers are transforming a deeper level of visual communications fundamentals, becoming more than a sketching, composition and production tool for graphic design. Electronics are becoming communications' delivery medium, the context, the content and a conceptual world as well. This form of graphic design is no longer linear and two dimensional. It is hyperfluid and six-dimensional, adding the dimensions of real time, motion, sound and interactivity to our two traditional XY coordinates.

Increasing amounts of visual communications are delivered to our audiences via screens. Will a conventional printed piece soon be the exception, rather than the typical output of graphic designers? Digital graphic design shapes computer operating system logic and displays, software interfaces, smart product interfaces, hypermedia, electronic publishing, interactive education and information systems, digital interactive exhibits, plus a plethora of internet applications and the exploding world of websites. Nearly all conventional forms of design, including editorial design, corporate publications design, advertising, packaging, exhibits, signage, products and interiors, are infused with electronic media and intelligent digital characteristics that interact with their users and audiences.

Most of the pioneering graphic designers that specialize in this area today have had to acquire this knowledge informally, largely through trial and error, in the context of professional design practice. There is yet a real educational vacuum in this emerging field-- few offices have design staff actually trained in universities for this new discipline, and only a few true design programs exist to date. Too much of this area is covered by default by people untrained in visual communications methods and formgiving. Electronics technologists make many of the design decisions in the digital world, as well as the thinly trained output of the host of lower level schools, many at the community college level, that are rushing to offer roughly formulated programs on internet design. Most of these programs are essentially superficial software instruction and are far too short and shallow to meet the challenges of this field. To become a professional discipline, this new field needs fully formulated curricula on the university level. A solid design education in the design of new media may take more than four years; graduate level study may be necessary to achieve any depth and expertise.

This vast field desperately needs to define its process and professional content-- a philosophy and curriculum, and an identity. It even needs a name. The terms "new media" and "multimedia" are problematic, their vagueness and ambiguity contributing to the misconception that anyone familiar with the software tools is qualified to practice in it. "Computer graphics" and "website design" describe the product rather than the conceptual process of designing.

So what is the name to be? Multimedia design? New media design? Digital graphic design? Computer-delivered visual communications? Screen-based communications? Electronic communications design?

Words come loaded with the baggage of associations, and most seem inadequate or inappropriate to describe this new process. Somehow the product, or at least the output medium, is easier to describe. But as professionals, we need an identity for the conceptual process and professional service. "Graphic", as in graphic design, hardly seems applicable, referring as it does to the venerable tradition of paper-based multiple markmaking. Fine art printmakers and the printing industry also claim ownership of the term "graphics". The adjective "visual", as in visual communications, seems inappropriate now that sound has been added to our communications tools. "Design" remains at the core of our process, with its reference to conceptual analysis, planning and strategy. Because "communications" is our goal, I find myself using the term 'communications design' more frequently than 'graphic design' in these days of rapidly changing practice. Perhaps "digital communications design" best describes our new realm.

But is it graphic design? Louise Sandhaus of California Institute of the Arts poses this rhetorical question. Is new media design a subset of graphic design? Or a sibling of graphic design under the larger umbrella of communications design? Or is this field destined to evolve into a mature and separate design discipline, as autonomous as interior design, industrial design, or illustration? Another Cal Arts graphic design educator, Edward Fella, has argued that conventional graphic design and the emerging field of digital communications design are as different as photography and film. University design programs and our professional design organizations are currently debating these possibilities.

When compared to visual communications subsets like typography or editorial design, digital communications design has a larger magnitude of difference. While this new area draws on many traditional graphic design skills and methodologies, it also dives into a whole new universe which is largely conceptual, and less tangible. It employs a new medium, electronic information processing, and new output, which is often interactive and dynamic. This is a new world of experience for our audiences-- a conceptual space, a digital environment peopled with virtual personas and communities in continuous flux.

As a result, digital communications design is far more conceptual than traditional graphic design and requires a much more deeper understanding of the communications process. This is not just making nifty images on a computer. To create comprehensible virtual communication spaces for our audiences, designers must grasp profoundly more complex fundamentals of how human beings receive information, conceptualize information space, navigate and orient themselves, understand, respond, make choices, change behavior and express themselves. Not only is communications theory and methodology applicable, including semiotics, but also cognitive and perceptual psychology and strategies from the social sciences and cultural anthropology. Some designers must be literate in computing science. Neighboring disciplines, such as urban design, film, music composition, drama and storytelling are useful to designers through analogy. All these sources are rapidly recombining into whole new theories and methods in this wide open environment. The real challenge is to explore, develop and codify a new language of interaction design that ranges from the very technical and structural to the sensual and cultural interface of virtual communication spaces. What serves as an interface in print design-- a table of contents, page turning, and index-- has become incredibly more complicated in the digital domain.

Interactivity compels the greatest magnitude of change to graphic design process. Interactive nonlinear communications create conceptual spaces are far more complex than the two-dimensional spaces traditional graphic designers are so expert at shaping and our audiences are experienced in understanding. Interactivity requires new kinds of wayfinding through the information, experience or the task at hand, and the skillful pacing of time. When compared to non-interactive design projects, formgiving comes at the very end of greatly extended conceptualizing stages. The complexity of interactive communications projects frequently can only be handled by teams of specialists offering a wide range of expertise from communications design and neighboring disciplines.

Much of this sounds extremely scientific, which it is. The knowledge ante has been upped several magnitudes. Those that came to design for its individualistic artistic expression will need to assimilate a new culture, and either acquire extensive new expertise-- theoretical and technical-- or learn to partner with those that do.

On the other hand, digital communications design must find a careful balance of the conceptual and the aesthetic as it evolves. Design is a narrow bridge between the worlds of science and art, the analytical/ rational/ cerebral and the intuitive/ subjective/ sensory. It is critical that we not abandon the sensual and emotional side of this equation, including the expressive contributions of graphic design imagery and typography. The designer's imperative is to mediate between human beings and technology, to warm up, humanize, animate and materialize digital communications for the user. In doing so, function will be served and communications enhanced.

Since the advent of television and computers, the audience's relationship to the electronic screen has been predominantly "frontal" and passive. To activate and animate screen communications, we need to develop a visual/ verbal/ audio/ motion/ interaction language, a new vocabulary of both conceptual and visual strategies. Just as the first movies used theater as a model before evolving a film language, new media must move beyond the metaphors of print and other familiar media to form an eloquent language of interaction.

Steven Johnson of Feed, an electronic magazine, sees this happening already and predicts that the Web experience is on the brink of becoming an art form and needs a nuanced vocabulary. He critiques current efforts to develop a language of interaction as narrowly utilitarian. Johnson contends that as designers' expertise matures-- and that of our audiences-- more poetry and mystery can be added to the equation. More experienced users can tolerate and even demand a broader interaction where even chance, randomness and unpredictability are considered virtues.

What are the forms – visual, verbal, acoustic, spatial, temporal, structural-- to build rich, compelling and memorable experiences? We await the strategies to be codified into signposts for designers on the electronic superhighway. Barbara Kuhr, design director of Hotwired, asks, "When will we design cars?" She points out that in the early years of motorized transportation, there was a wide variety of "horseless carriages", defined more by their antecedent than by the new paradigm of "cars" that eventually emerged and persists today. She anticipates the codification of some design paradigms to guide both designers and their audiences in the digital domain.

But perhaps digital design and the language of interaction will not be like cars, or film either, both of which have remained fairly constant once their paradigms were defined years ago. Film is a linear medium and cars are physical hardware that move real bodies of flesh and blood. Electronic technologies are dematerialized and in constant flux and evolution. Could it be possible that the nature of digital communications will remain a moving target? A language of interaction will be like a vernacular spoken language-- more like English than Latin-- that is in a constant state of mutation. Maybe there never will be fixed "rules", but rather constant evolution in a medium well suited for designers who are energized by experimentation. This is an exciting prospect, appropriate to designers’ special abilities to respond rapidly to change and solve problems on the fly. On the other hand, it could be very uncomfortable for designers who prefer "rules" and educational programs that need curricular structure.

Interactive digital technology is forcing another major paradigm shift that humbles as well as frees the traditional graphic designer. The digital delivery of interactive communications design media allows our audiences to "finish" our work. Communications design "pieces" will increasingly be delivered to audiences as potential experiences to be initiated by each receiver and "read" in a unique way based on each receiver's preferences, interests, values, needs and even moods. Websites, CD-ROMs, interactive TV and advertising, and tailorable software are examples. Designers find they cannot control many variables of how a home page downloads, not only because of the vagaries of differing electronic formats, but even more due to the preferences of our audiences who are increasingly opinionated and educated in the subtleties of form in typography, imagery and sound. Interactive media encourages audience members to create and add content.

This environment requires a much different visual design strategy than that of the traditional perfectionist designer. What are the implications for graphic designers trained in the modernist traditions of clarity, formal refinement and professional control? We can no longer think of our work as the production of as precious perfect artifacts, discrete objects, fixed in their materiality. The designer is no longer the sole author, realizing one's own singular vision. This forces a reordering of our design intentions. The designer is an initiator, but not a finisher, more like a composer, choreographer or set designer for each audience member's improvisational dance in a digital communications environment.

In fact, the potential for audience-customized communications is a powerful communications tool. Interactive electronic communications can be configured by each user to deliver they need when they need it, tailorable to their changing skills, characteristics and context over time. New interactive technologies make it possible to individualize all kinds of products and services.

The unfinished quality of on-line electronic media also offers valuable opportunities as well as challenges. For instance, the imperative to continuously update and upgrade a website to encourage repeat visits has all kinds of organizational implications, like long term budgeting and staffing, and maintenance of design integrity. But it also allows the designer to dynamically evaluate the success of an on-line piece through feedback on the number and duration of audience hits. We can now measure what is interesting and who is interested. Continuous cycles of iteration, testing and redesign are possible and practical. A piece is always a prototype, open to refinement and enhancement.

Design for experience and personalized interpretation is an opportunity to engage the audience's interpretive powers, to counter the passive couch potato syndrome. Interpretive design can challenge the viewer to participate, to react, to think, and affect the outcome. Audience choicemaking and active feedback promise a deeper level of interactive communications.

Digital designers must understand how people construct meaning when they encounter information, objects or situations. Postmodern literary criticism and art theory offer promising strategies for the new interactive communications channels environment rich in dialog, discourse, debate, transaction, and negotiation. These deconstructive theories of discourse explore the potential for dialog between sender, message and receiver, and shift the major responsibility for meaning from the sender and message to the receiver. Meaning is constructed through the active participation of each reader/viewer who interprets multivalent nonlinear messages. Timothy Druckery, in a Siggraph essay, calls for theories of interactivity to be joined to theories of discourse.

We are coming to see digital technology as a sort of artifact, in spite of its immateriality. We already collect music CDs, and now CD-ROMs. Soon, family photo albums will be in digital format. Many graphic designers have digital image banks and sound collections stored in their computers. And so do our audiences, many of whom continuously sample elements that appeal to them and then recombine into their own Web compositions. Twelve year olds and grandmothers now know the difference between Times Roman and Univers. Audiences are becoming fans, connoisseurs and critics of digital communications design.

Many designers are worried about this amateur involvement in design. Professionals fear that their special expertise will lose value in a world where anyone with a computer and easy-entry software can make design and publish it through accessible desktop internet tools. On the other hand, as our audiences become more visually educated and discerning with a constant appetite for the new, clients will seek an even higher level of professional design vision to keep their communications compelling and competitive in an ever-expanding communications environment. Audiences demand the richness and performance of design expertise that elevates messages from informational data to truly resonant communications. Agile communications designers can only benefit from this challenging new world.

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© 1998 High Ground Design. Reprinted from www.2011_highgrounddesign.com