IIID Conversation with David Sless: Between ritual and reality, 5 December 2024, 09:00 UTC

Karel van der Waarde talks to David Sless about the book “A New Semiotics – An Introductory Guide for Students” (co-authored by Ruth Shrensky).

Illustrations by Alex Tyers

For many centuries (since at least Aristotle) the notion about communication has not fundamentally changed: it’s still locked in the old myths of animism, where words and symbols do things to people. I sometimes feel like a meteorologist in a community of rainmakers, who are good at their rituals, but a little weak on rainmaking.
Reality has always been palpably dangerous and uncertain.

Rituals may be awesome and reassuring, but they don’t make the world safer. Today information design is playing an ever-increasing role in trying to make real life safer and easier for people. But we need to distinguish between the rituals that only reassure and the designed information that really helps. By looking closely at the methods information designers use and the outcomes they deliver, it is technically possible to tell the difference between, on the one hand, the kind of designed information that remains well-meaning ritual, and on the other hand, develops information to help people.

At the heart of this is the relationship between designers and their clients.

How do we deal with this?

Back in 1985, funded by major institutions, Communication Research Institute pioneered an Information design research program, helping over three hundred public and commercial organisations to improve their communication with citizens, clients, and consumers., leading to improvements in productivity, public relations, and ROI, while reducing complaints.

But now with radical changes in organisations the methods and knowledge has been lost, replaced by digital token gestures, ritual displays passing for information.

For the future we need both rainmakers and meteorologists; token gestures have their use, but we also need the best information design available for public communication by institutions and organisations. Our collaborative Publishing Program is designed to help.

For the past 50 years, David Sless, the Director of Communication Research Institute (CRI), often in collaboration with government, industry, and his colleagues at the CRI, has pioneered methods for designing public documents—such as forms, notices, bills, labels, instructions, and websites—that improve communication between organizations and the public. A leader in information design, Sless has achieved notable successes, including a redesign of telecommunications bills that resulted in record customer satisfaction and establishing global benchmarks for product instruction design in medicine labels. He co-developed Australia’s Industry Code of Practice for non-prescription medicine labeling, creating some of the world’s most user-friendly labels.

Alongside this work, Sless, with Dr. Ruth Shrensky, has contributed to semiotics and communication theory, proposing a simplified approach to human communication that marks a significant paradigm shift, influencing the future education of the field.

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