CHRISTINE MARTELL integrates the visual arts to help individuals and organizations learn, grow, and change. She designs and sells visual tools globally through her company VisualsSpeak. She has a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and MS from Portland State University. She lives and advocates for creative expression in Hillsboro Oregon using her robotic dinosaur, Artosaur. Learn more at visualsspeak.com and artosaur.com.
Imagery That
Travels Well
Making yourself understood across cultures with the help of visual language
Peter Stoyko
I’m a nomad. I travel the world working as a social scientist. Much of that work involves studying the subtleties of culture. I’m also an information designer. I translate research findings into explanatory graphics. I collaborate by drawing. I think visually. Over the years, I’ve discovered that showing is better than just telling regardless of where I am. Visual messages are more compelling and are less likely to get lost in translation. Yet imagery can just as easily cause confusion, unintended humor, and insult. I’ve had my share of embarrassments. So I decided to use my research skills to better understand how visuals work in different cultures. My goal has been to find better ways to communicate with diverse audiences.
This chapter shares a few of the lessons I’ve learned. The first lesson is an overriding one. It’s about ethics. A traveling researcher holds a privileged position. While I am in the field, the onus is on me to operate with care and respect. Culture runs deep with people: it’s the social core around which a person’s identity forms. My first duty is to do no harm. My second duty is to approach other cultures with mindfulness, critical self-awareness, and humility. That includes a heightened sensitivity to my own biases and blind spots. Sadly, history is full of blunderers and bigots who blithely trample through unfamiliar places with an ignorant smugness. Yet even well-traveled cosmopolitans with noble intentions regularly experience culture shock. That’s the emotional discomfort and rush to judgment that happen when we are outside our comfort zone of familiar norms and settings. Thus, what follows is as much about examining our own cultural assumptions as it is about discovering cultural points of interest.
Speaking of cultural assumptions, we take our own culture’s visual language for granted. We forgot that we had to learn the meanings of commonplace images, and so we treat those meanings as self-evident. Often, they aren’t. That blind spot can get us into trouble when communicating with others who have had very different upbringings. Let’s revisit a few episodes from the learning process.
Episode 1. Visual vernaculars
As children, we learned about imagery from picture books, comics, toys, and cartoons. Those experiences helped us associate ideas and objects with images of varying degrees of abstractness. How else would we know that an enclosed shape with edges made of connected semi-circles is a cloud? Real clouds don’t really look like that. Even the fluffy ones don’t. How would we know that the cloud shape with a trail of circles is a thought balloon, a (misnamed) metaphor based on the idea that a cloud can represent what a comic character is thinking? If that same cloud shape is attached to a stem, how would we know it represents a tree? We know because cultural products teach us. Now think about people from distant places. Would someone who has spent a lifetime amongst the desert palms recognize that shape as a tree? If there are no fluffy clouds in that desert, would they recognize the cloud? Perhaps. But the question you should be asking yourself is, “Where would they have learned those lessons?”
Peter Stoyko • Imagery That Travels Well
Our visual vocabularies grow as these arrangements of basic shapes take on meanings. Every time we engage with a new mode of visual expression, such as a comic book or a video game, we add to that vocabulary. Not only that, we also learn new vernaculars. When referring to ordinary conversation, a vernacular is a way of speaking. We talk differently depending on the social situation. We may use office jargon when talking formally with colleagues in the workplace. Later on, we may use street slang when bantering with friends at home. That jargon and slang, plus the phrasing that goes with them, are vernaculars. Unless you know the vernacular, you’ll struggle to understand what’s being said—it won’t seem all that coherent nor appropriate. A visual vernacular is similar. It’s a collection of shared meanings and interpretive conventions that helps us make sense of what we see in a given context. Every genre of video game and movie has a vernacular. Every artistic tradition does too. After enough exposure to each mode of visual expression, the related visual vernacular becomes second nature and interpretation doesn’t require conscious effort.
Let’s look at a concrete example. The following is the comic vernacular.
Peter Stoyko • Imagery That Travels Well
Comics would be confusing if you didn’t know these elements. What are those wavy lines above the cheese? Those lines represent smell, something invisible in real life. The lines are very wavy to symbolize that the smell lingers as it emanates upwards. They are heavy lines to symbolize that the smell is pungent. If that seems obvious to you, it’s because you’ve seen many examples of the form over the years from cartoons, picture books, and comics.
I itemize all the elements of different visual vernaculars for teaching purposes. These inventories or codexes can inspire students by showing what communicative options are available. Making the inventories helps me become more self-aware as a communicator by revealing all the meanings and conventions I take for granted. That process also allows me to detect vernacular differences across cultures. Comic traditions are fairly similar around the world. American comics, Japanese manga, Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, and editorial cartoons share a vernacular. Yet differences exist.
Historically, American comic book artists use motion lines to depict the blur of a foreground object moving across the comic frame. Manga artists, in contrast, use motion lines to depict the blurring of objects in the background, as if the comic frame is a camera that moves with the foreground object. Knowing these vernacular differences can ease communication across cultures. It’s like knowing the local words and sayings of your audience.
Episode 2. Visual tropes
As we grow up, we become accustomed to pictograms on signs, symbols on product labels, and icons on screens. Other vernaculars are added to our visual vocabularies. Yet we don’t have to learn each image one by one. Commonalities emerge. These commonalities allow us to take some interpretive shortcuts.
Take an example from signage. A circle suspended over a four-pronged shape is a head. Once we learn that, we recognize human figures called “bubbleheads” in different poses without having to relearn each figure from scratch. Bubbleheads are easy to grasp because they are based on the stick figures of kid’s drawings, figures which people have been drawing since the days of ancient cave paintings and sand sketches. Even if we change the shape of the bubblehead’s body by tapering the limbs, it’s still recognizable. Use negative space to differentiate near and far limbs, in the same way that a shadow is cast over receding objects: still recognizable.
Peter Stoyko • Imagery That Travels Well
That’s what it means to learn a trope, a non-literal signifier of something. When we learn visual tropes, we learn a set of interpretive rules—rules about how particular shapes can be arranged to form symbolic images. With bubbleheads, the circle suspended above a four-pronged shape is a trope that represents “head” and signals that a human figure is being represented. A detached head can’t literally float above a living body. A human head isn’t literally shaped like a ball. A person can’t run if an arm and a leg are literally severed. Those are stylistic embellishments we learn to interpret. We then apply those interpretive rules to other bubbleheads.
As another example, add a triangular shape to the torso of any bubblehead and we specify its gender as female. We learned that the tria
ngular torso represents a dress and dress-wearing is a norm for females. Does that gendering trope reflect a norm in your society? Would that same interpretation be made in societies where everyone wears a gown-like garment? Or in places where knee-length, A-frame dresses don’t exist?
You can see how tropes can be ethnocentric. That involves treating your own culture as universal and just assuming that everyone understands you. Tropes can also be anachronistic by locking in outdated norms and fashions into widely used imagery. They become part of the cultural memory, in other words. Yet these norms and fashions may never have caught on in distant places.
How reliant are we on visual tropes to communicate? That depends on how realistic the images are.1
Ideograms
Some images are purely symbolic (ideograms). Nothing about their shape suggests a meaning by mimicking something in the real world. We learn those symbols in a way that’s similar to learning conceptual words. Different cultures have different symbols but, like words, a few symbols may spread across cultures. Despite the abstractness, some common themes also emerge, such as a circle representing “wholeness,” “unity,” and “totality” in many folk-art traditions. Yet given the arbitrariness of ideograms, you will sometimes encounter conflicting meanings across cultures, such as the meaning of the check mark in Sweden and Finland (“incorrect” instead of “correct”).
Ideograms sit at one end of a continuum. At the other end are photo-realistic images. They look like objects in the real world. Not much effort is required for interpretation if you remember seeing a similar object before. That can be a big “if” when communicating across cultures. For example, would showing a photo of a snowman or an igloo to a tropical islander cause bafflement? An item may not exist in another culture, or it may take a radically different form. Either way, photo-realism may be the best way to teach others something new if the image is shown in context (or otherwise explained) and doesn’t contain distracting non-essential details (“visual noise”). When we say something “isn’t translatable,” we aren’t just saying the same word and concept don’t exist in another language; we are also saying the same exact thing doesn’t really exist in both cultures.2 So show a very typical version of that thing (in context) if possible. Better yet: show two or more versions, so that the person doesn’t mistake the specific example for the general concept.
Peter Stoyko • Imagery That Travels Well
Between pure symbols and photo-realistic images lay stylized illustrations such as pictograms. These are recognizable insofar as 1) we understand the visual tropes used to simplify and stylize them, and 2) they have a close enough resemblance to a known object that we can make a confident guess. That assumes the illustration has an iconic relation to its subject, meaning it is supposed to resemble something in the real world. Many pictograms have an indexical, or indirect, relation to their subject.3 For example, the image can be linked to an idea by association or by analogy. That adds interpretive complexity because the viewer has to make that extra link—a link which may be culturally specific.
Take the concept of “travel” for instance. The act of traveling can be shown directly (by example) with an illustration of an airplane circumnavigating the Earth. In terms of tropes, the illustration is made up of a vehicle silhouette (airplane) with a trail-line showing its elliptical path in three-dimensional space (circumnavigation) around a sphere with a map grid imprinted on its surface (globe). The concept can also be illustrated by association as a well-traveled suitcase. The idea of “well traveled” is indicated by the cliché of tourist stickers from various places spread randomly on the surface of the suitcase. Or “travel” could be indicated by a selection of travel documents. These objects are associated with travel because we take them on journeys. The concept can be illustrated by analogy too, such as an image of birds flying in a migration pattern. Some concepts can’t be represented directly, which is why these indirect methods are useful. The challenge, however, is that associations and analogies are merely suggestive, not obvious, and certainly not obvious to people everywhere. Northern cultures may equate migrating birds with seasonal vacation travel. Indeed, Canadians who travel south in the winter are called “snow birds.” But how obvious is the analogy to someone living near the equator? Or for whom seasonal travel is an alien concept? You may have to add additional cues to make the linkages more apparent.
Now think of everything that can go wrong when drawing pictograms that are simultaneously stylized, indexical, combined with symbols, and represent objects that are not recognized outside your culture. My favorite example comes from 1960s America.4 A human figure is shown overlapping an igloo. The igloo represents “refrigeration.” The combined image is intended to mean “refrigerated morgue.” What would Inuit people think of their traditional shelter being depicted as dead-body storage? Would they think “refrigeration,” given that an igloo is supposed to be a warm shelter? What would someone think if they don’t know anything about the Arctic? Would it even occur to them that a building is being depicted? And that the human figure is inside the building? And that the figure is a dead person?
Episode 3. Assigned meanings
We eventually come to understand some stylized illustrations at a glance. That includes pictograms on road signs and warning labels. These tend to be the “controlled” part of our visual vocabularies; controlled in the sense that the look and meanings have been standardized by an authority. Some stylized illustrations are international standards, such as airport wayfinding pictograms. Yet controlling the approximate look of an illustration and affixing an official label does not guarantee the same interpretation everywhere. Take the case of emojis, the standardized icons used in phone text-messages. Emojis can take on unintended meanings in certain places. If enough people reinterpret an image through conversation, then a local meaning can emerge.
Peter Stoyko • Imagery That Travels Well
With emojis, it’s often the context of the message that offers clues as to the intended meaning of the communicator, not just the officially stipulated label. Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground takes that idea to an extreme.5 The book is written entirely in graphic sentences to communicate with a global audience. Official meanings are often disregarded. The storyline offers contextual clues to aid interpretation.
The “reading” experience is more akin to decoding—the opposite of glanceable interpretation. Some imagery is not as universally recognizable as Bing presumes. Yet these visual sentences are easier to decode than an unfamiliar foreign language. That’s why a similar technique is used to make step-by-step instructions for international products. Not everything can be communicated in this way. Expressiveness is limited. Artistic flair would help but at the cost of ambiguity. Complex and abstract concepts could not be added without logograms, or images and image combinations that represent words. Chinese writing is made of logograms. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are logograms too. Needless to say, these scripts aren’t very intuitive.
Note that context can play a bigger role in some cultures. For example, Japanese and Korean are highly contextual languages. A “yes” can mean “no” depending on the context. People are expected to be aware of the underlying norms of the social situation. Likewise with visual communication. Experiments have shown that, when presented a visual scene, Japanese people tend to pay much more attention to the scene’s background imagery compared to Americans.6 That tendency is about detecting contextual appropriateness in a society with relatively conformist social pressures. The earlier example of Japanese manga using motion lines to depict background blur instead of foreground blur is not a coincidence. It’s a more fundamental difference in what gets noticed.
Sometimes, visual communicators in those societies rely more heavily on a widely understood social context when using imagery. When I lived in Tokyo, it took me a month to figure out the social context needed to interpret the followi
ng pictogram, found on the door of a barber shop in my neighborhood. The barber shop was located next to a commuter train station, a place where overworked and drunk salary-men would disembark during the evening commute to run errands before returning home. I wasn’t able to interpret the pictogram (“no drunks allowed”) until I saw that social problem play out in several instances. If the context wasn’t so obvious to locals, the illustrator might have added some context to the pictogram, such as showing a figure with an alcoholic beverage in hand.
That example brings us to the topic of “uncontrolled” images, those without an officially stipulated, widely recognized meaning. New symbols are invented all the time and are placed on such things as consumer packaging, control panels, and computer applications. That includes the illustrations that visual facilitators and sketchnote artists think up on the spot. Most aren’t self-explanatory and so require clarifying labels. Or a subtle distinction isn’t obvious. Or an object is recognizable but could be interpreted many ways other than the communicator’s intended meaning. For example, a picture of a burger and fries could represent “fast food,” “junk food,” “American cuisine,” or “dinner.” Viewers will draw their own conclusion unless the intended meaning is stipulated.
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