Text and Metadesign in the Digital Age (Text as Art, Part 2) by Brittany Heiner

[Edited 11/11/12 and 11/16/12]

Text acting as art brings a distinctive and different level to art than art with graphical subject matter by adding a new dimension of meaning and context via the words that are used in the artwork. The digital age brings another factor to the possibility of text as art: that of viewer interactivity. When the viewer is able to input variables into the design piece, it becomes a symbiotic project containing the original creator’s concept and the viewer’s content.

In Apartment, an interactive piece from the previous essay, the viewer’s participation is required in order to populate the piece with content.[i] The piece is a blank space at the outset, and only takes form and meaning as the viewer adds input. With carefully thought-out input from the viewer—as evidenced by the sample apartments—the piece takes on not only specific meaning but also particular aesthetic elements; the word stream coalesces into consistent patterns of movement as opposed to the chaotic bumping around of words inside each room. This reliance on interactivity brings to mind the concept of metadesign.

In art terms, metadesign has several different meanings, mainly focused on the design systems, including tools, involved in the design process. In her essay “Metadesign as an Emergent Design Culture,” Elisa Giaccardi relates several schools of thought as to metadesign systems; Derrick De Kerckhove’s theory of metadesign, according to Giaccardi, consists of “the design of tools, parameters and operating conditions that allow an infinite flexibility in tailoring the industrial product and enable the end-user to take charge of the final design by choosing among many different options.” [ii]  In other words, metadesign can be a system where the designer puts the design tools into the hands of the viewer. Apartment therefore could be considered a type of metadesign in that it is the viewer who chooses the shape of the piece, according to the tools the creator supplies. The creator of the work provides the framework and tools for customization, and the viewer, using those tools and his own content, creates a unique piece with layers of meaning. Furthermore, the addition of the user's input brings with it a rich personal context full of educational, experiential, and social variables, all adding to and filtering the resultant meaning of the piece. [iii]

While Apartment exhibits metadesign in the digital aspect of its interactivity, the information it conveys via the placement of words is semantic; the arrangement of the words in each room is meant to symbolize the psychology behind them. This interpretation of inputted data into a visual design is something unique to the digital age, because the computer is the tool that does the interpreting. There have been many other applications of this informative design idea, where the computer program interprets viewer-inputted words into a design that communicates meaning about the words.

One example of this application is the Thinkmap Visual Dictionary program. In the Visual Dictionary, a user can look up a word and retrieve a web of related words and concepts, arranged according to definition and similarity.[iv] 

 

Though less of a customizable experience, the format of the program enables the user to experience his search content in a visual way that allows him to make connections between concepts in a faster way than reading words in a traditional thesaurus or dictionary experience. Though the user does not control the shape of the word web, he can move and expand elements of it in order to follow through on his word search. 

 

 Another use of text design augmented by the digital age is a tool called a word cloud. Also known as a tag cloud or a weighted list, the word cloud is a visual statistical tool frequently used by blogs to convey the comparative frequency of tags used on blog posts. The more times a tag is used, the more weight it has in the list, usually shown by font size. This gives the readers a sense for the content of the blog. It is usually a sidebar element, and often just a few lines of text in varying size, as with this example from CNN’s “Beliefs” blog page.[v] 

 A further application of the word cloud as a metadesign example is the Wordle.  A Java applet created by Jonathan Feinberg[vi], Wordle takes user-inputted content words and arranges them in a number of design configuration options, including layout, orientation, color, font, and language. Like the word cloud, words with a higher frequency of use are given a larger size. After one of the 2012 US Presidential debates, an anonymous user submitted Wordles of each candidate’s debate transcripts to the Wordle public gallery, seen below.[vii] [viii] 

 

This incarnation of digital metadesign provides viewers a valuable synthesis of a large amount of information; the word cloud medium allows viewers to quickly see the most important, or at least the most frequent, topics in a given body of text. According to Corby, visual representations of data help "to capitalize on humans' natural ability to spot patterns and relationships in visual fields (cognition)..." and "[enable] an intuitive identification of structures, which would not be available if presented in purely numeric form." [ix] He also states that access to informational tools--such as the application of this example, I would venture--helps to overcome barriers of social privilege and enables people to unify in the empowerment of awareness. [x] In other words, the display of information into understandable format, such as this type of visualization, transcends a person's education and allows him to make more informed decisions about matters that affect him and society around him.

As for aesthetics, a similar program called Tagxedo allows users to impose other shapes into their word cloud, resulting in even further customization. [xi]

 

 The more customization tools the user is given by the user, the more symbiotic a design becomes. The study of this co-creation seems to be a goal of metadesign, with the designer providing the idea and the framework for executing it, and the end-user deciding the end result.[xii]

 

With all that the digital age has brought to society, ease of information and interactivity are perhaps some of the greatest benefits. The internet opens up a world of possibility of designer-viewer collaborative metadesigned work. These metadesign pieces, combined with the layers of information made possible through text as the medium of the design, we are able to share thoughts and ideas on more levels, in new ways, and with greater ease than ever before.

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[i] Martin Wattenberg, “Martin Wattenberg: Apartment,” Martin Wattenberg: Data Visualization: Art, Media, Science, http://www.bewitched.com/apartment.html (accessed October 8, 2012).

[ii] Elisa Giaccardi, “Metadesign as an Emergent Design Culture,” Leonardo 38, no. 4 (2005): 343. 

[iii] Tom Corby, "Landscapes of Feeling, Arenas of Action: Information Visualization as Art Practice," Leonardo 41, no. 5 (2008): 462.

[iv] “Visual Thesaurus: Text,” Visual Thesaurus, http://www.visualthesaurus.com/app/view (accessed October 29, 2012).

[v] “CNN Belief Blog,” CNN, http://religion.blogs.cnn.com (accessed November 5, 2012).

[vi] Jonathan Feinberg, “Wordle - Credits,” Wordle, http://www.wordle.net/credits (accessed November 5, 2012).

[vii] “Wordle - Foxnews.com Transcript of Romney,” Wordle, http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5811695/FoxNews.com_Transcript_of_Romney (accessed November 5, 2012).

[viii] “Wordle - Foxnews.com Obama,” Wordle, http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5811770/FoxNews.com_Obama_Transcript (accessed November 5, 2012).

[ix] Hardy Leung, “October 30 - Star Wars Meet Mickey Mouse: Disney Acquires Lucasfilm for $4b - Daily Tagxedo,” Tagxedo, http://daily.tagxedo.com/october-30-star-wars-meet-mickey-mouse-disney (accessed November 5, 2012).

[x] Corby, 462.

[xi] Corby, 464-465.

[xii] Giaccardi, “Metadesign as an Emergent Design Culture,” 345.