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Wednesday, September 3, 2003

Mathematics of Communication

Seminar today was all about deconstructing and analyzing William Weaver's article, "The Mathematics of Communication." This dense essay, written in 1944, offers several meaty ideas about communication:

  • Information is not facts; it's data that is chosen from among many possible messages.
  • The more choices we have for communicating, the more chances we have for miscommunication and confusion. But, the more choices we have, the more information we can convey.
  • Stereotypes and convention (metaphor) help to create redundancy, and redundancy makes sure the message is received. The English language is 50 percent redunant.
  • Noise can cause misinterpretation and ambiguity. (But sometimes, as a designer, you want that.)
  • Entropy is to be avoided.

One side conversation: Design, unlike Art, degrades over time. Designers serve people at a specific time and in a specific place, and the farther removed we are from that, the less likely a design artifact will have any meaning.

posted at 07:56 PM in design theory | comments (2) | trackback (0)

 

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