Tailoring Designs for Your Audience in a Multicultural Era
Katherine McCoy
Technology and social changes make this the era of the audience. These two major forces challenge communications designers to expand our design methods. In design school, we are trained to conceptualize and organize clear interpretations of our client’s messages. As we mature, most designers cultivate a unique way of expressing themselves, a personal design style. But these key design skills—the sender’s eloquent expression and clear message-making— cover only the first two components of the basic design equation of sender-message-receiver. The third component—the receiver, or audience—is more important now than at any time in our profession’s history.
To paraphrase a recent political campaign slogan, “It’s the audience, stupid.” But throughout the twentieth century, designers designed for an undifferentiated audience. The Bauhaus envisioned universal design solutions for universal cross-cultural audiences. The Museum of Modern Art named Bauhaus modernism the “International Style” in 1932, and Herbert Bayer hoped his “Universal” typeface would satisfy all our typographic needs. Is there a universal audience out there that decodes and responds to all messages in a uniform manner? Does “one size fit all”? Major social and technological changes make the answer a resounding no.
Since the late 1960s, a new social context has evolved, breaking up the global society that defined the world after World War II. A renewed celebration of ethnic diversity counterbalances the long American tradition of assimilation. Combined with new waves of immigration, this means the United States now has many richly multicultural audiences. Added to this is the rise of subcultures and special interest communities knit together by shared values across geographic boundaries.
New technologies enable this social trend, countering the constraints of mass communications that dictated one (universal) message for everyone. The economics of technology in the 1950s gave us three television networks. Now we have vast choices of TV channels and programming. The Internet opens up immeasurable interactive media experiences tuned closely to each individual’s preferences. Narrow-casting is rapidly replacing broadcasting: Special interest programming and publishing allow finely tailored communications channels and distribution. “One size fits all” is rarely the best communication strategy in a multicultural world where technology gives our audiences choice. For effective communications, our design messages, expressions, and channels must be shaped in response to each project’s audience and its special attributes.
We must know our audience to create successful design solutions. Each member of a message’s audience operates on two levels. Each interprets a message as a member of a community and each audience member also responds as an individual. These parallel identities suggest two design strategies: tailored communications, in which a message is targeted compatibly to a community’s characteristics; and tailorable communications, in which a message can be customized by individuals to fit their unique needs and preferences.
Tailored Communications
Traditional targeting has been practiced by advertising and marketing for years, sometimes well but often superficially. Demographics have described audiences by geographical location, age, and income. However, audience communities are changing, and we often identify more with distant and dispersed subcultures than with our neighbors.
We all are members of at least one, and often several, interpretive communities, formed by shared characteristics. These characteristics color how we receive and interpret messages, and act as filters for all communication. An audience community shares similar values and beliefs; similar goals and commitments; a similar sense of identity and belonging; and shared symbols. And each community typically has shared communication styles, habits of processing communication, and preferred media and distribution channels. For example, ergonomic characteristics can be important factors in age-related communities.
These shared values and experiences promote a shared set of symbols that audience members decode similarly. Words are symbols that carry meaning only for those within that language’s community. The same applies to visual symbols. For instance, a simple drawing of a fish symbolizes a food source to many, while it has come to be a unifying religious symbol for Christian fundamentalists. Since World War II, a swastika has evoked horrific associations of genocide to the Western world, but has been a powerful spiritual symbol for a wide number of indigenous cultures for centuries. Individuals learn the meaning of verbal and visual symbols through participation in their interpretive communities and reach a cultural agreement on their meaning. The meaning each of us attaches to a symbol—how we decode it—is dependent on the lens of our community reference point.
Interpretive communities also share communication styles. An understanding of our audience’s communication style for each design project is key to designing communications that connect. Here are some components that shape an interpretive community’s ability to interpret a message successfully and sympathetically.
Each community has a verbal language of fluency, or a mother tongue. It is obvious that one should not design a communication in Spanish when the target audience speaks and reads only German. But there are nuances and subsets of language beyond this.
The “voice” of a language can differ widely between audience communities, shaped by accents, pronunciations, speed, and volume. Think of the cockney accent versus the “Queen’s English” or a Texan drawl. The body is also part of language, including variances in proximity, stance, and hand gestures—Italian expressiveness, “in your face” aggressiveness, or British reserve.
Sometimes language varies in vocabulary and syntax due to region, class, age, or gender, such as the special version of Japanese spoken by women or children. Slang varies from subculture to subculture—think of the different vocabularies of Americans and Britons or Valley girls and Brooklynites. Professional jargon among knowledge workers and MBAs can also be a distinct style of communication.
Conceptual approaches differ between language groups, including indirect references and contextual inference (frequently preferred by the Japanese or British), getting straight to the point (American corporate style), and incredibly precise vocabulary (German).
Different subcultures often prefer different rhetorical styles, such as quantifiable versus qualitative information, appeals to emotion versus logic, poetry versus prose, and metaphor versus fact.
Finally, the literacy characteristics of an audience community affects the ability to decode written language, including educational levels, breadth of vocabulary, and reading skills and habits. Another form of literacy is crucial as well—technological expertise, including the ability to negotiate the Internet and to confidently operate a computer or DVD player. This form of literacy impacts the audience’s ability to receive communications in many media channels.
Every audience community has preferred media and distribution channels; some watch television very little, but read newspapers avidly; others surf the Web but never read a magazine; some rarely see a billboard but read subway boards or bus cards daily. Designers must ask through what media and in what environment does a target audience receive its information? What communication technologies are readily available, accessible, and affordable?
Important ergonomic characteristics can include diminished eyesight and hearing, and attention span and memory limitations in both the young and old.
All this adds up to shared communication “attitude,” style, and habits. Although many of these have to do with spoken language, most have written language parallels, and visual parallels as well. An amazingly wide and fertile territory awaits exploration by designers, in which we can identify interpretive communities’ familiar and preferred visual communications styles as well as their verbal styles. Local vernacular and visual communications frequently employ rich visual languages. Cultural anthropologists and sociologists offer useful techniques and potential collaboration for design teams.