The one word I heard the most in the entire video is VISION. Indeed, on the road of human evolution, the appearance of eyes is a major event. It has fundamentally changed the relationship between living things and the world. In this society, people’s eyes are receiving visual impact all the time. Maybe we don’t know the main idea it wants to express very clearly, but our eyes can’t do without it anymore. Maybe this is the magic of VISUAL IDEA, which is also a field that Tracy Ma focuses on.
I think that in communication design, it is not difficult to have a good idea. The difficult thing is how to communicate the idea to the outside world through recognizable visual symbol words, which is how to use VISUAL LANGUAGE to convey information as Tracy Ma said. And have a good communication with readers. In a broad sense, we call text, graphics, images, and colors as visual language. These three are indispensable. For example, some people have a more developed right brain. Then they may be visual thinkers. These people are better at using the brain. The creative part handles some graphics and color information. And vice versa.
Having said that, I thought of the concept of ‘visual hammer’. Compared with ‘language nails’, ‘visual hammers’ are more powerful. An American psychologist’s survey pointed out that in all the information transmission effects : Up to 93% of interpersonal communication is conducted through non-verbal communication, and only 7% of communication is conducted through language. In other words, visual non-verbal information accounted for more than half. Of course, I mentioned this not to say that language is not important, but that visual elements are easier to convey information, because vision has emotional power and can make people remember longer.
For design practitioners, effective transmission of concepts and whether it has practical utility is very important, but in the current explosion of information, it is easy to cause transmission failure. The key is to accurately grasp the visual language.
The case of Avatar Robot Cafe reflects one point’ Design is for people’, and design is ultimately to serve people’s needs. A design work can resonate with most people, and this is the success of this design. The works of Japanese product designer Naoto Fukasawa have moved people like this again and again, and he perfectly interprets the concept of ‘DESIGNING FOR PEOPLE‘.
The following two pictures are the works of Naoto Fukasawa
Reference：
TRACY MA talk with NEW YORK TIMES VISUAL EDITOR
Nicer Tuesdays. November 9th 2020