Visual Communication

by Ivana Velkovska

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." - John Berger
"Words divide, pictures unite" - Otto Neurath

From the moment we wake up in the morning, until the moment we go to sleep, we are influenced ad infinitum by images. During a walk on a street, or while staying at home, our surrounding consists of all sort of images : starting from the wall space in our room, TV, video, film, photography, digital graphics, advertisements, newspaper, printings, paintings...even t-shirts, tattoos or packaging.

We are (more or less) aware of the aggressive presence of visuals and new messages born each day, eagerly wanting our attention. These messages mark us, in a positive or a negative way, and change us or stay in our conscience, even a little bit. Some experts even warn that this mediatised bombarding with images, make people see more visuals, but read less words, which can lead to illiteracy and lawlessness. The short definition of visual communication would be: transferring a message or an information not only by using text, but also visuals. The basics of visual communication is that the sender has something to say to the receiver: a message.
The message "travels" throughout a channel or a medium: poster, TV, Internet, newspaper...

The success of the receiving the message will depend on the budget and on what the sender knows about the receiver. In other words, there are no aesthetics criterion, no artistic preferences, nor some agreed-upon standards of how a good or bad (visual) communication should look like.

The terms of beautiful or ugly are excluded and considered to be irrelevant. For this communication to be carried out, the task of graphic designers is to construct the message by using :
1. Typography (designed letters, carefully chosen for the purpose of the message)
2. Graphics (creation of the image : photography, illustration, digital art or visual which is a mixture of plenty of techniques)
3. and Design, which is arranging the text and the image in order to be more attractive and remarkable) That would be a short definition of the visual communication process.

Paul Martin Lester in his book "Visual Communication: Images with messages" (2005), employs the idea of why some messages are easily remembered by individuals or cultures while other messages are easily forgotten? He also recalls of the fact that the most meaningful, powerful and culturally important messages are those where text and image are combined equally and respectfully. "The first step towards understanding visual communication is to educate yourself about the many ways that information is produced and consumed in a modern, media-rich society. Typographic, graphic, informational, cartoon, still, moving, television, computer, and World Wide Web images are analyzed within a framework of personal, historical, technical, ethical, cultural and critical perspectives in order to complete this first step." (Paul Martin Lester, Visual Communication : Images with messages")

However, as the technology advances, the presence of visual communication gets more and more visible, and the influence stronger, but, everyone has a choice of what to watch, read, consume and finally see.

References
- Lester, Paul Martin, 2005, Visual Communication : Images with messages http://books.google.com/books?id=6oibH9roTmkC
- Bergström, Bo, Essentials of Visual Communication, 2008, Laurence King Publishing, London

Museification and Disneyfication of cities

by Biljana Spirkoska

Zoning has proven to be an inadequate tool, by itself, for building livable communities. Zoning came at the price of a reduced civic life, sharpened social inequities and inflated housing prices, deepened division between races and between classes, and increased car dependency and related pollution. In response, the modernist principle of separation of functions - zoning has been abandoned and the periphery has assumed almost all the functions of the traditional center.

Quite opposite, contemporary downtowns are being subjected to a process of monoculturalisation. According to Eeckhout and Keunen, "the late-capitalist downtown is almost exclusively dedicated to three functions: consumption, finance and symbolic economy. This postindustrial symbolic economy comprises tourism, entertainment, culture, sports, the media and fashion industries, and an amalgamation of services logistically underpinning these activities." Further on, they explain that this monocultures can be found either in a form of "financial and office districts that bustle with life during the day and are spookily deserted at night", or "tourist zones that are populated at certain times of the day or in certain seasons only."

Given that tourism has become No. 1 World industry after the Second World War, mass tourism has developed into major source of income for the contemporary city centers. The "city trips" and "urban safaris" have become popular especially among middle-class and well-educated population groups which are fond by culture. Since culture attracts tourists, according to Sharon Zukin, it is "no longer a mere reflection, but a principal economic motor of the city’s material and social life". Given the circumstances, the worlds of finance, politics, and the arts have united into turning the arts and their major institutions like museums, opera houses, concert halls, and theaters, from not-for-profit to for-profit by privatizing them. Furthermore the economic importance of tourism has led to competitive self promotion of cities. As Eeckhout and Keunen point out, "in a globalizing economic system that is increasingly indifferent to questions of locale for the production of goods, cities have paradoxically had to start emphasizing their identities and differences again in competition for, on one hand tourists, and on the other, cultural and business elites. This competition of the cities to position themselves in the markets of mass tourism and the culture industries has foster a strong interest in the production of urban images.

More and more, cities are being presented or sold as collections of images."
In order tourists to understand what they are seeing they have been prepared through certain repertoires of qualified images from information brochures, from the advertizing, from guidebooks and from television reports. In other words, prior to the production of the real vision of the monument, that vision has been prefigured by experts in art history and in the creation of taste. This characteristic contemporary phenomenon, Jean-Louis Déotte defines as museification. According to him, museification of architecture, in monuments or in ruins, is subject to a process of exhibition that is destined to produce their "disappearance as objects in order to enter in glory a universe in which, thanks to the suspension of every particular quality, it will be possible to include them in the empyrean realm of trans-historical values."

In his book "Variations on a Theme Park", Michael Sorkin, draws parallels between the contemporary urban environments and the Theme Parks. He argues that the template of Disneyland, template of privatized, consumption oriented theme park intended to simulate a shared middle-class culture, in recent years is used as a model for actual urban transformations. In this transformations, the urban downtowns are presented as historical attraction and streamlined for consumption, and just as the suburbs of the 1920s are designed to address the needs of the middle-class, aestheticizing social differences, offering a reassuring environment without arms, alcohol, drunks, or homeless bums.

The Disneyfication of the contemporary city can be aligned also with the gentrification of historical and industrial areas. Typically these historical sites are transformed into a new type of urban shopping mall combining shops, restaurants, small-cart boutiques, and performance spaces. As M. Christine Boyer explains, in order to meet commercial-tourist aims in these pseudo-historical sites, "the histories of cities have been manipulated, recycled, simulated, and artificially resuscitated. The collective memory of cities has been exchanged for a fictive image transforming the city like the print of giant camera obscura."

In other words, the advance of the post-industrial society has changed along the course of the forces which configure the culture and the social life of our time. In response, a new type of society has evolved- the society of the spectacle and of the total commercialization of the object around us. The new No.1 industry is evolving and with it another way of seeing, which derives many consequences some of which mentioned in the text.

Reference:
― Ghent Urban Studies Team, 1999, The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam.
― Berlage Institute, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2002, New working and living conditions in cities: forum & workshop at the Venice Biennale, Actar, Barcelona.

Cities beyond Now

by Stefan Lazarevski

Unlike the American or Asian continent, Europe does not feature large cities (aside from London or Paris). Over the time, a series of small or medium-sized towns, each with their own history and important cultural or political establishments have proudly resisted the hegemony of the bigger cities (primarily capital cities). Even today, says Bernardo Secchi, “political and cultural importance of the European towns doesn’t strictly relate to physical or demographical size”. Globalization has acted therapeutically for some medium-sized European cities to establish themselves as global players, but, even so, they could not maintain such position on long terms relying on the traditional forms of overall development.

In order to remain competitive, many of the European cities understood and enforced the knowledge-economy concept of economic and social development. What is more, European Union in 2000 reached the so-called “Lisbon Policy Brief” which stated: “The development of a modern knowledge economy reflects a larger transition from an economy based on land, labor and capital to one in which the main components of production are information and knowledge. Because of that, the most effective modern economies will be those that produce the most information and knowledge – and make that information and knowledge easily accessible to the greatest number of individuals and enterprises”. One of the most important aspects of this document was recognition by the leading European countries that further progress does not rely, anymore, on competition with countries that offered low-skilled work at low wages, but rather production and implementation of knowledge within their own societies.

The trigger for transition from conventional to knowledge-economy based societies was different for different cities. For some it was economic crises, decline of economic bases or fleeing of the knowledge base, whereas for others improvement of level of competitiveness, rise of the economy or strengthening of the current network balance. In any case, Knowledge-Economy centers such as Helsinki, Dortmund, Rotterdam, Munich, Zaragoza or Manchester have proven, over the years that investments in stronger education, R&D areas, stable organizational structure, investments in clustering and diversification of the economy, can worthwhile step in building up stronger societies. What is more, they have shown proactive behavior in upgrading the knowledge foundations, strengthening the knowledge activities and applying sophisticated strategies to attract the knowledge capital of the region.

In terms of urban planning this meant strategic approach based on the knowledge foundations and knowledge activities. The pillar foundations: knowledge and economic base are essential in upgrading the urban diversity, social equity, accessibility and thus overall quality of life. Additionally, the cities need to undertake number of actions to become stronger in the knowledge economy. This is an on-going process which is based on four types of “knowledge activities”: creating new knowledge, applying new knowledge, attracting knowledge workers and developing new growth clusters.

Naturally, not all cities have similar prerogatives to initiate, much less to develop knowledge-economy based society. According to van Winden and van der Berg from the European Institute for Comparative Urban research and based on the size of the labor and cultural diversity there can be isolated: Metropolitan and non-Metropolitan cities. While the first group anticipates primarily big cities with solid knowledge foundations and stable position in number of global networks, non-Metropolitan cities are of smaller scale, they have weaker knowledge foundations, but have strong organizing capacities, low level of crime and congestion and strong local leadership. This category also differs within, and therefore stretches over to: star techno-towns, techno-towns in transition and university towns. However, there is a thin line that separates these cities especially if they are engaged in polycentric networks and alliances. It is generally accepted that non-metropolitan cities have more difficulties in applying knowledge economy. The common thing for all of them, however, is that they all are formulating comprehensive and explicit strategies to attract and retain KE activities by utilizing their own strengths and resources, founded on education, technology and research as well as designing sustainable housing policies and city marketing.

The cities today, aim to become international destination known for the high quality of life provided to its inhabitants and to be sustained by a vital public realm rich in cultural and social opportunities. Knowledge-economy concept, for many of them, has turned out to be the next step forward.

Reference:
― Van Winden, W. and van den Berg, L., 2004, Discussion paper - Cities in the knowledge Economy: New Governance challenges, European Institute for Comparative Urban Research
― Calthopre, Peter, 1993, The Next American Metropolis – Ecology, Community and the American Dream,Princeton Architectural Press, New York
― http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/11/36278531.pdf, 19.04.2009