Understanding the Audience Better

1. Understanding the Audience Better A look at Multimedia through the audience's eyes By Alex Richardson (with contributions by Brendan Murphy)

2. Topics • What is multimedia ? • A look at Multimedia through history • The Theory of Multimedia Communication • How does an audience “think” ?

3. What is Multimedia ? • To different people, multimedia means different things. • In the basic of terms “Multimedia” is using multiple (multi) forms of media to communicate information. • Think of your own idea of Multimedia and see if it changes by the end of the presentation. • Now for some moments in Multimedia history.

4. Early examples of Multimedia • c. 15,000–13,000 BC—Prehistoric humans paint images on the walls of their caves (including a narrative composition) in the Grotte de Lascaux, France.

5. Multimedia in the 1800s • 1877—Thomas Alva Edison invents the Phonograph. He also cuts the first recording, a soulful rendition of “Mary had a Little Lamb.”

6. Multimedia in the early 1900s • 1915—D.W. Griffith releases The Birth of a Nation, the first modern film. Moving camera shots and close-ups are just two of the film’s many innovations.

7. Multimedia in the mid 1900s • 1938—Orson Welles scares the daylights out of America. His radio adaptation of H.G. Wells “The War of the Worlds” realistically simulates news coverage of an invasion by hostile Martians. Thousands fall for the hoax; panic ensues. The next day, Welles feigns surprise at the uproar. • 1945—In an article in The Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush proposes “memex,” a proto-hypertext/encyclopaedia system.

8. Multimedia in the mid 1900s • 1947—Edwin Land debuts the Polaroid instant camera. • 1956—The Picturephone is first tested at Bell Telephone Laboratories. • 1969—ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, is established by the U.S. Department of Defence. • 1971—Computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sends the first e-mail message. Tomlinson also designates @ as the locator symbol for electronic addresses.

9. Multimedia in the mid 1900s • 1972—The Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game system, is released. • 1972—Nolan Bushnell and Atari introduce Pong, the first coin-operated video game. • 1974—MITS releases the first successful personal computer. The Altair is named for a planet from the Star Trek television series. It uses Intel Corporation’s 8080 micro-processor, also developed in 1974.

10. Multimedia in the late 1900s • 1976—Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs form Apple. • 1977—The Apple II changes everything. It’s the first PC to use colour graphics. • 1983—The Compact Disc is introduced. • 1983—The Internet is created.

11. Multimedia in the late 1900s • 1985—The Commodore Amiga combines advanced graphics, sound and video capabilities to create the first true multimedia computer. • 1986—The Academic American Encyclopaedia becomes the first CD-ROM encyclopaedia. • 1988—Macromind (now Macromedia) releases Director, a multimedia authoring tool.

12. Multimedia in the late 1900s • 1991—The World Wide Web makes its debut on the Internet. • 1991—The MP3 digital audio compression format is invented at the Fraunhofer Institute, a German research lab. • 1992—Hypertext markup language (HTML), debuts, giving anyone with an interest the tools to build their own Web page. • 1993—Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, is released.

13. Multimedia in the late 1900s • 1995—Disney releases Toy Story, the first feature-length movie totally comprised by computer graphics. The 77-minute film takes four years to make, and 800,000 machine hours to render. • 1996—Affordable digital cameras (another spin-off from the U.S. space program) become widely available. • 1996— JenniCAM debuts. She and thousands of successors redefine the way people look at the Web...and each other.

14. What will Multimedia look like in the 21st Century ? • Who really knows? • So far this century which is only 9 and a bit months old has given us improvements/ adaptations of old ideas/technology. • DMCA has “killed” Napster due to the “big” recording companies influence. • 3D CGI is becoming standard movie substance – eg. Shrek and Final Fantasy

15. What makes Multimedia “tick” ? Why did these advancements happen ? • Foresight • Simply because people want to create • Public expectations • Economic and Market pressure • And Personal Expression (discussed)

16. Personal Expression • Expressing ideas or feelings though interpretable communication methods. • Sight (wall paintings -> Masterpieces) • Sound (“grunts” -> Theatrical renditions) • Smell (pheromones -> perfumes) • Taste (“licking things” -> culinary delights) • Touch (surface texture -> Braille) • The sixth sense of thought eventually

17. Personal Expression (cont.) • Each sense by itself can communicate meaning, but lacks that all important “second opinion” reinforcement. • By using multiple senses (media) to reinforce a meaning allows the audience’s mind to “cross-check” the validity of what it is trying to understand. • Now that some terminology has been introduced, time for some Multimedia 101 theory…..

18. What is Text ? • Two meanings for text • Traditional – letters and words that a person can read • Multimedia – collection of signs and symbols that create meaning for a person based on their understanding and past experiences. • The second meaning is simply a more thorough explanation of the first.

19. What is a Sign or Symbol ? • A “sign” is what you can see on a street corner. A sign is some sort of visual object that it meant to provide information to someone who needs that information.

20. STOP S What was that Sign/Symbol ? Notice how each small change can start to make the signs intended meaning clearer (hopefully).

21. Some STOP sign thoughts • Now what if the word “STOP” was in another language. Would you still understand what the sign meant? • This is where the idea of context starts to play a role. • Context is the location of where an object appears (or its usage) in regards to surrounding objects.

22. Context and Textuality • How and where a sign is used can have a great effect on intended meaning. • A sign used in one situation may have a different meaning for a sign that appears in another situation. • The ability for a sign to have multiple meanings is called Textuality. This represents the range of possibilities for when a sign does not have a clear meaning.

23. Experience • Remember when multimedia “text” was defined to be related to an audience’s understanding.The audience is always considered as far as multimedia is concerned. • In the STOP sign example, the reader needed to have some understanding of what the combinations of shape, colours and words meant. • This means that a persons experience may also have an effect on their understanding (kind of obvious).

24. Experience and Textuality • The most obvious factor in experience level is age. Normally the older a person is, the more they have experienced. • The other major factor is education. • Not every country may use a Red Octagon as their main sign to represent stop. This means that there is not a “universal” rule that one can learn for it. It is up to the reader to be educated with the information they need to understand for what they “read”.

25. Yet more Examples • Everyone should of received a piece of paper with a symbol on it (+). The idea was to write the very first thing that entered your mind when you saw the + symbol. Psychologists use this technique with words and images to get “reactions” rather than “thoughts”.

26. That + symbol

27. + Symbol Discussion • Hopefully it has come a bit (ideally a lot) clearer what effect the “real world” and its contents have on the way people think. • Now for another more complex example to illustrate systems of meaning.

28. Yet another symbol/sign • Look at the following sequence of symbols. What is wrong here or more correctly – What is unusual ?

29. A variation on those symbols • Here is another version of those symbols. Has its readability been affected by its appearance ?

30. Another variation • Look at this version of the symbols. Has the group of symbols been made more informative by adding a drop shadow effect.

31. A small change can mean a lot • Now look at the symbols. What has changed? Has your understanding of what these symbols mean changed as well?

32. Focusing on signs within signs • Those last two symbol groups only had one small visual change between them. • That visual change though carried a lot of meaning and made the readers understanding change as well • is different from . These signifiers have different meanings as they signify different states.

33. Country Flags The Australian Flag

34. The Aussie Flag • Think about the three (3) main symbols that I pointed to on the flag. Can you identify what each one means? For the ones that you can identify – what made that identification possible? • Now for the Fiji flag.

35. The Fiji Flag

36. What did we find ? • Obviously, education about your flag and country in school makes it easier to understand the flags meaning. The experience you are given about your flag does not always apply to other flags though. That means that it is very hard for a flag to have specific meanings once it is displayed outside of the specific target audience.

37. Systems of Meaning • Put simply, systems of meaning is the process that a thought goes through to turn data into useful information. • Different people will have different experiences which means a different system of meaning. • This is how you get the idea of textuality where a multimedia “text” can mean different things because people see or have different systems of meaning.

38. What is the audience thinking ? • No-one knows besides that person. Each individual has to be considered as being unique as well as part of a group. • They have their own thoughts which may be similar (or different) from other people. • Having a unique design for each individual is not feasible with larger audiences. • Therefore, you need to understand the audience as a group and discover the characteristics of that group.

39. Which means…. • You should attempt to make your multimedia design accessible to as large a group of readers (ie. audience) as possible. • Attempt to define an audience as a group of readers whose meaning systems have some common ground - that is, pick a specific audience defined by a certain set of qualities, and try to make your multimedia product reach them as specifically as possible.

40. But is that realistic ? • Are these two approaches compatible? • Does reaching for a "general" audience mean that you reach no particular audience very effectively? • Is there any such thing as a "general public“ ?

41. What now ? • The point of this presentation was to raise awareness on some of the thought and theory that goes into multimedia (from a Communication perspective). • These types of issues can also be studied from a HCI perspective, but not right now  • After all, there is only so much one can do in 75 minutes.

42. Summary • One of the most important principles of good design is to be able to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. It is important that you use signs that will be positive for your desired audience. • Signs do not just have meaning by themselves, they can also work together with other signs to provide reinforcement of a meaning or a different meaning.

43. Summary • Remember, it is not only the words, pictures, audio and other media pieces that you use that function as signs, but such things as colour schemes, type and size of typeface and the like. • It is very easy to make choices for a signs characteristics that have contradictory meanings. Eg Calm

44. Summary • You also need to take into account the sort of reading practices your audience might already have. That is, what kinds of texts might they read and how might they make sense of them. • “You can’t teach a old dog new tricks”. Instead of changing the audiences thinking to suit you, change yourself to suit them (if feasible).

45. The End • Well…. That’s it folks • If you have questions, now would be the time to ask. • Thanks for listening