To start of this assignment we were told to read ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ by Roland Barthes. Once reading the essay I quickly agreed with what Jonathan had said on the design studies blog about it not being easy to read, I found it very difficult to understand what it was that he was trying to get across. I got into my group which consisted of two other people, we discussed what we thought about the piece of writing and how a lot of it we didn’t understand. As a group we decided to look at Jonathan’s discussion/summary on it, this made our understanding of polysemy (it is a theory that suggests things/images have more than one meaning) a lot better especially with the examples he used. They were much easier understood in comparison to the examples Barthe used about advertising.
I now understand that there are three different types of messages that can be obtained when looking at an image, they are the linguistic, the coded iconic and the non-encoded iconic message. The non-encoded iconic message is the first message that comes to mind when you look at an image, coded iconic message is got from looked deeper into the image than at a first glance and the linguistic message is achieved through knowledge of the image.
2b
The next part of the assignment was to test the theory. So as a group we chose three pictures randomly to give out to different people, they had to put them into an order and see if they could come up with a story from the pictures. These are the three images below:
2c
The task was to identify what was happening in each picture then to bring them all together in any order to get a story from them. So we set up a sheet consisting of space for the person to fill in there name, gender, age, occupation, what was going on in each picture and then the story that they came up with.
We collectively asked nine people in totally, three family and friends each. There were six stories that were very similar to each other as they said about looking into the distance and listening to the waterfall and grass. Below is a couple of the stories that were collected.
“Children at zoo, go to see the giraffes and it starts to chase them over the grassy area. Children were scared when they came to the edge of the cliff where there was a beautiful waterfall in sight at the bottom. The children had no choice but to jump..”
“The giraffe is sad and confused, he goes to the cliff that he sees in a distance and jumps off it, but he ends up in the field with the blowing flowers and grass and is happy.”
“The giraffe went for a swim in the bottom of the waterfall and then went into the field and picked some flowers.”
After the ninth person we decided to stop as we kept finding that a number of the stories all seemed to relate back to each other, we thought this was a good time to move on to the next part of the experiment. We picked the story below as it was the one that had similar points in it that were in a lot of others stories.
“The giraffe is looking and listening, he sees green grass blowing in the wind. He can hear the rushing of the waterfalls, rushing down the mountain side, he pricks up his ears, it is quite loud, but he is happy that he can see so far because he’s so tall.”
2d
To test this theory further we added another image to the three that we already had, it is shown below:
We chose binoculars because there was a point in the story of the giraffe being able to see far in the distance. So adding in this image we hoped this would help tell the story more. We asked three different people to see if they could come up with the same or similar story. Below are two of the stories that people came up with.
“A gentleman decides one spring day to go sightseeing and stumbles across a lost giraffe who appears to be searching for food by the same cliff.”
“Walking along the cliff edge with the waves crashing below, looking inland with binoculars I see a giraffe chewing some flowers in the distance.”
At this point in the experiment we didn’t feel that it had worked out as well as Barthes suggested polysemy would. In each of the stories we got, the person seemed to add in another person into the story rather than it being the giraffe that the story was about. But at the same time the context of the story was similar to the story we wanted people to get. If the fourth image was not added to the other three, we felt that the stories would be more similar to the first. At this point we were in two minds of whether this theory actually work or not.
2e
We took the fourth image away, and just left the original three. We added the word ‘Listen’ to the picture of the giraffe, we added this because with the fourth image, people didn’t seem to mention anything about listening to the waterfall or the grass in the fields which was part of the story that we wanted to get. We then asked three people to see if they could come up with the story with the help of the text. This was the story that was the most similar,
“The flowers which are in the Swiss Alps also have a waterfall which is similar to the Niagara Falls. The giraffe has been looking and listening out for his friends to come back from the waterfall.”
We felt that this worked much better than having an extra image. We all agreed that the polysemy theory of adding in text “fixes” the meaning of the story and forces the persons story to go down the same path as other rather than having an extra image which we didn’t feel worked as good.
Our discipline
After we finished the experiment we start down and talked about how it relates into our discipline of Interior Design. Instead of it being a specific image or object for me I think its more about the way you design something such as the space, the lighting, the colours and a number of other things that make people interrupt a meaning behind the space.
Analysis and Deduction
For the first assignment of semester two, we had to collect images of either yourself at various ages or images of your bedroom. We then were given a partner who we didn’t no and was from a different discipline to swap our images with. The task was to analysis these images to see if we could work out what that person was like.
Whilst I was at home for Christmas I looked for pictures of me growing up but unfortunately I didn’t think that the pictures I had found were natural enough for this analysis so I decided that I would take pictures of my bedroom in Dundee instead.
For the second part of this assignment I swapped my images with Hannah Doig from Graphics. We then had to analysis and write down our reactions to the images that we had been given. Here is a list of things that I thought about whilst looking at the pictures - my first reaction.
- Lives in a university bedroom/halls
- Is a bit messy - boxes filled with stuff - dirty plates/cups etc - lots of things sitting out
- DVD collection - variety of taste
- - very similar to my own taste has a lot of DVDs I also have
- - more into girlie humorous films sex and the city, clueless, Bruce Almighty
- - but then in contrast likes Harry potter, Sweeney Todd and seven pounds
- Magazines - into fashion - vogue
- - This could reflect her style of clothing. (no clothes in sight to comment on this)
- - Number of pieces of jewellery
- Likes patterns - bed cover - rug - piece of wallpaper - scarf’s
- Likes/enjoys a few alcoholic drinks vodka/ empty wine glass
- Likes a bargain (Snapfacts book discounts)
- Sentimental - personal items - happy birthday tag (maybe from someone special) - Cards
- Poster show a personal style and taste
- - influenced by a certain type of style that’s in all the poster
- - likes to keep cards ( could have a meaning behind them to why they are kept)
- Favourite colour - Green (although this could be the colour already on the walls/curtains)
- Seems like a feminine/girlie girl - nail polish - perfume - Pink glasses - Pink cushion on floor
Overall I think Hannah is a very girlie girl and a bit on the messy side although there are a number of things that have been organised (DVDs and posters) this could all be an organised mess. She likes to collect remunerable things and has a large variety of tastes in different things.
Discussion
As both Hannah and myself did not have time to meet up to discuss each others reactions we did it via email instead.
On getting a response back from Hannah, she told me that in fact I was mostly correct particularly the point I had made about her being messy. Well maybe messy would not be the correct word to use, maybe clutter as she described it. This could possibly be caused by the lack of storage available in her room which always seems to be a problem in student halls but at the same time I feel this could just be the type of person Hannah is.
Although I picked up on pink items which made me think that Hannah was a lot more girlie than I first imagined, I was then corrected that they were gifts giving to her on moving into halls. The other point that I said about her favourite colour possibly being green was also incorrect and was in fact one of my thoughts that it was the colour already on the walls when she moved in. So as I said at the start most of my reactions were accurate about Hannah, from her DVD collection to her being into fashion and overall being a girlie girl.
When I was waiting on my response from Hannah on what she thought of me and my room, it made me feel a bit nervous/anxious. It was strange to think of someone making an impression of you from just looking at your room and your possessions. Although it has been proven that you can learn a lot from this as Hannah and myself have got each other pretty spot on.
Here are a couple of images that I sent to Hannah are below.
Everything that Hannah said about me was correct which was very good but at the same time I find it strange that you can find out so much about someone from looking at there stuff. She picked up on the fact that I very organised and clean, that I like things being in the correct place and don’t like much mess sitting about which is such a contrast to Hannah‘s room. The main thing that she got correct was that I am very sentimental, I always have to have pictures of people and things that I have been given from that have a meaning behind them in my room.
I think that over all Hannah and I did a good job at finding out about each other although at the same time I feel it could have been better if we has met up to discuss our findings rather than over email. I felt that doing it over email restricted you in actually explaining what you meant in a way she could understand. If I was to do this type of research again I would definitely meet up with the person to discuss it more. Doing this research has being very different to anything I have ever done and I found it very interesting. Actually being the research subject for me, I found it a bit strange as I didn’t know what to expect from the outcome but I wouldn’t mind doing it again as I know what was happening.
