Junjie Fan

A design exploration on visual and symbolic languages that aid critical thinking

Abstract

This foundation of this research question is how to induce users to engage in active critical thinking. Visual language is more easily accepted and understood by users, emojis as a part of visual language. In the case of dialogue, emojis are widely used to express human’s emotion, which greatly enriches the representation of plain text. Thousands of emojis are developed on social media every day, which makes emojis have a huge impact on daily life. As the design continued to deepen, I also found other problems, so that I had to change the direction of the design.

During this phase, I was focused on finding answers for why do people loosely define content shared on social media?. At the same time, I was exploring ways to solve these pain points.

In phase 2, I will explore effective visual languages for users to understand critical thinking better. I decided to use emojis as the first step. Meanwhile, I tried to explore different design limited by standard size of emojis.

After going through the phase2 test, I found many pain points of emojis, so I tried to design stickers and animations for the purpose of research questions. Finally I aslo found some problems, so I tried to connect the of emojis and stickers, to design a new Visual languages.

Artefacts

Select Bibliography

Connie M, 2009,Visual Language for Designers:Principles for Creating Graphics That People Understand. Rockport Publishers.
Farhoomand, A and Drury, D 2002, Managerial Information Overload. Communications of the ACM vol.45, no.10, pp.127-31.
McNiff, J and Whitehead, J 2011, All you need to know about action research, 2nd edition. SAGE Publications.