Assignment 2: What Images mean..

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.