OUGD501 Design Context: Communictaion Theory Task

OUGD501
DESIGN CONTEXT
COMMUNICATION THEORY TASK

Task

Find a piece of design and write a contextual and social analysis on it, based on the Shannon and Weaver model.

ALZHEIMERS RESEARCH:

 

Art director Domenico Liberti develops a moving and powerful advertising campaign for Alzheimer's Research.

This ad campaign's primary purpose is to raise awareness for Alzheimers, It is aimed at elderly people and their families as these are the people that the disease affects the most. For this campaign to raise awareness of the disease, Liberti avoided long winded explanantions of symptoms and what it leads to, opting for a hard-hitting visual approach instead. Through the use of generic family photos, Liberti's message about the effects of this disease hit home in a much more personal way. He employs a redundant form of communication by removing the faces of family members, no words are needed to explain the message he's conveying. There's something incredibly disturbing about the faceless images, which is kind of the point and why the concept is so effective.

SHANNON AND WEAVER MODEL

 

The Shannon and Weaver communication model can be applied to this campaign. The information source is Alzheimer's awareness as they are the client and set the brief, the transmitter is the art director who took the information and created a concept to help portray the message, The channel is the final design, in this case the print based images in the format of posters, billboards and magazine advertisements. The receiver is the audience, in this case the general public viewing the the ad in one of its channel forms. The destination is the audience receiving the message and the raised awareness on Alzheimer's disease. This ad is very effective as it plays with peoples emotion and pulls on their heart strings, the personal approach of the ad helps people emphasize and hits out to a wide target audience.The noise of this campaign is reduced by the use of the word 'Alzheimer' it helps create the optimum redundancy and avoids an emphatic tone by not over complicating the design. Instead, playing with peoples own emotions rather than filling them with information that they can find out for themselves by researching.