She Ji is a peer-reviewed, trans-disciplinary design journal with a focus on economics and innova... more She Ji is a peer-reviewed, trans-disciplinary design journal with a focus on economics and innovation, design process and design thinking. The journal invites papers that enrich the understanding and practice that enable design innovation in industry, business, non-profit services, and government through economic and social value creation. These papers may explore how design thinking can inform wider social, managerial, and intellectual discourses with an added focus on strategy and management. She Ji also publishes articles in research methods and methodology, philosophy, and philosophy of science to support the core journal area.
She Ji is fully open access. Tongji University and Tongji University Press support She Ji as a contribution to the design field and a public service to design research. Authors are not liable for any publication charges and all published articles are accessible free of charge from the journal web site at URL:
Numerous studies support the thesis that icons frequently fail to communicate because designers h... more Numerous studies support the thesis that icons frequently fail to communicate because designers have not appreciated that icons combine multiple symbols which interact to evoke meaning. Because symbols interact, a designer must know which symbols to combine and how to draw each symbol so that icons communicate clearly. This article brings together numerous research studies that explored new methods for designing icons based on the interaction of symbols.
Academic disciplines are a help and a hindrance. While they advance knowledge by focusing discipl... more Academic disciplines are a help and a hindrance. While they advance knowledge by focusing disciplinarians on a coherent set of related issues, those same boundaries that define and focus, also delimit and inhibit expansion of universal knowledge for the broad benefit of humanity. Such are Communication Design and Visual Anthropology.
Background and objective Medication use often causes errors that are dangerous to the health of p... more Background and objective Medication use often causes errors that are dangerous to the health of patients. Previous studies indicate that the use of pharmaceutical pictograms can effectively reduce medication errors. The purpose of this study was to determine the comprehensibility, representativeness, and recall rate of nine medication safety pictograms in a sample of nursing students in Poland in order to validate these images. Methods A pictogram validation study was conducted in two phases among nursing students at the Hipolit Cegielski State University of Applied Sciences, Gniezno, Poland. All experimental protocols were approved by the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Ethics Board (REB Protocol No: 19/122X). All methods were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. In phase 1, the participants' first exposure to the pictograms, the students were asked to guess the meaning of the pictograms without any additional information in or...
This paper describes a Visual Language System (VLsys), consisting of icons and glyphs, to represe... more This paper describes a Visual Language System (VLsys), consisting of icons and glyphs, to represent concepts in medicine. Medical scientists are being overwhelmed with data. Preliminary studies suggest a VLsys can improve both speed and accuracy of recognition of concepts and their relationships (Zender & Crutcher, 2007a), thus enhancing for users the conversion of raw data into information and knowledge. While the content context is visualization of medical concepts within the domain of epilepsy, the broader transformative context is development of an innovative visual language methodology for representing scientific concepts that exhibits the potential for intelligent machine-guided development.
With the expansion of specialization has come a contraction of innovation needed to meet systemic... more With the expansion of specialization has come a contraction of innovation needed to meet systemic problems. To rectify this, calls are coming for greater levels of collaboration across disciplines from research funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH). This paper describes the collaboration of graduate design students at the University of Cincinnati (UC) with researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) to improve doctor-parent interaction surrounding Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The combined CCHMC/UC team collaboratively designed communication materials to ensure 1) information provision on all treatment options and 2) elicitation of parent preferences among the treatment modalities. Preliminary testing of the materials has been encouraging. This paper reports on the collaborative design process of those materials.
Although the foundation for any discipline is how its practitioners know, design is still uncerta... more Although the foundation for any discipline is how its practitioners know, design is still uncertain about its epistemology. Design is not alone in this. Science and theology have debated epistemological questions within and between themselves for decades. Within that debate emerged common ground in critical realism, a philosophy that combines cognizance of external reality with assent to the power that personal perspectives exert over our perceptions (Barbour, 1974; Polkinghorne, 1998). Michael Polanyi's epistemology of personal knowledge is based on critical realism (Polanyi, 1958). This paper proposes that epistemology grounded in personal knowledge might serve as a model for a design epistemology called Reason + Revelation, that can integrate design as craft with design as science, illuminate how designers combine intuition and analysis, inform how design education can move from tacit to explicit knowledge, and suggest a distinctive design research methodology that blends qua...
Did that design work? It's an evaluation question yet there appears to be little evaluative g... more Did that design work? It's an evaluation question yet there appears to be little evaluative graphic design research to answer it. None of the 40 research methods covered in Brenda Laurel's book Design Research Methods and Perspectives described evaluative methods (Laurel, 2003). Yet designers should know, and clients will eventually demand to know, did that design work? This paper reports on methods used for two related evaluative design research studies conducted at the University of Cincinnati. While the results of the studies were often definitive, the research methods were not. In response to issues uncovered during the execution of the research protocols, an additional study was conducted to explore not the subject of the original research, but the research methods used for it. The methodology of those studies is discussed here as a means of advancing evaluative research methods for graphic design, and improving the quality of design work.
Abstract: The accelerating rate of data generation and resulting publications are taxing the abil... more Abstract: The accelerating rate of data generation and resulting publications are taxing the ability of scientific investigators to stay current with the emerging literature. This problem, acute in science, is not uncommon in other areas. New approaches to managing this ...
ABSTRACTBackground: A panel of medication management experts previouslyidentified 9 key medicatio... more ABSTRACTBackground: A panel of medication management experts previouslyidentified 9 key medication safety issues and high-alert drug classes asrepresenting the most pressing medication-handling issues in health care.Objective: To develop medication safety pictograms depicting medicationsafety issues and high-alert drug classes that represent medication-handlingrisks for health care personnel.Methods: An iterative design process, including activities such as semioticanalysis, design/redesign, and evaluation, was used to develop medicationsafety pictograms. Nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and students listedand drew graphic elements to depict each of the 9 key medication safetyissues. Graduate students in graphic design developed the preliminarypictograms for the study. A Delphi survey was then conducted withexperts recruited from the International Pharmaceutical Federation toreach consensus on the pictograms and provide feedback to the graphicdesigners. Health care providers from ar...
ABSTRACT Written language is limited in effectiveness to those who can read. Verbal language is e... more ABSTRACT Written language is limited in effectiveness to those who can read. Verbal language is effective only for those who understand the particular language being spoken. But everyone, except those with obvious visual impairment, can effectively perceive images without regard for literacy or language. For decades these realities have suggested the promise of a universal visual language but with little real result. The occasional Olympic event sign or restroom door sign are state of the art for global non-verbal communication. While icon design has evolved little since the 1970's, the world has moved on. Increasing economic globalization and the expansion of global communication networks have made it easier to deliver messages and more important to do so, while science has advanced understanding of perception and cognition establishing principles only speculated about in the 1970's. The dream of using images to greatly facilitate global communication persists. Unfortunately, image based communication is not currently well enough informed by principles of effectiveness to attempt such a project. To address this problem a team of researchers assembled at the University of Cincinnati to explore the development of advanced techniques for global non-verbal or image based communication. The team explored novel approaches and identified several principles designed to expand icon based communication so that it can communicate more complex messages and more abstract concepts with greater specificity than previously. bow What does the word "bow"mean? Several things, but the most accurate answer is it depends on the context. To illustrate: shoe | bow ship | bow arrow | bow rain | bow take a | bow bow | down IN EACH OF THE ABOVE PAIRS SOMETHING SPARKS a different meaning for the single typographic sign: "bow." That something is simply another sign, a context. In some pairs the context sparks a meaning that is only subtly different, no doubt in homage to the vagaries of linguistic etymology, but in other instances the context spotlights a meaning that is a different part of speech altogether, a verb instead of a noun for example. In each case context is what illumines the meaning (Wittgenstein. 1961 [1921]). This is as true for sentences and stories as it is for words (Wright, 1992). Unfortunately, written language though rich in context is limited in effectiveness to those who can read. Even verbal language is effective only for those who understand the particular language being spoken. But everyone, except those with obvious visual impairment, can understand images without regard for literacy or language. Donis A. Dondis even goes so far as to claim "Among illiterate constituencies, visual communi cation's effectiveness is undisputed"(Dondis, 1973). From street signs to Olympic venues, images communicate where words fail. What exactly does the icon of a man mean? Again, it appears to depend in part on the context: street sign I human icon park sign I human icon airport door sign I human icon (left to right Figure 1 below) The visual changes in the human icons are minimal and fairly subtle yet, in their context, viewers from all over the world have 'read' these icons as meaning specific and very different things: a crosswalk, a hiking trail, a restroom. In a park context adding two additional strokes to the man icon suggests a backpack and walking stick. The park context combined with two immediate iconic clues redefine the 'crosswalk' icon to a hiking trail icon. Like words, the overall context of the human icon changes its meaning. This is an impressive transformation accomplished with an economy of means. However, as successful as these icons are in their contexts, they are not as comprehensive or as definitive as words. The system from which the hiking icon came has no icon for 'pleasant hiking trail' or 'difficult hiking trail' or even 'dangerous hiking trail. …
International Association of Societies of Design …, 2007
Despite the fact that visual form is a precondition for visual communication, designers do not ha... more Despite the fact that visual form is a precondition for visual communication, designers do not have established principles for the use of visual form in communication. If basic research is defined as investigation into the fundamental aspects of phenomena, ...
Abstract. Internet literature queries return a long lists of citations, ordered according to thei... more Abstract. Internet literature queries return a long lists of citations, ordered according to their relevance or date. Query results may also be represented using Visual Language that takes as input a small set of semantically related concepts present in the citations. First experiments with such visualization have been done using PubMed neuronal plasticity citations with manually created semantic graphs. Here neurocognitive inspirations are used to create similar semantic graphs in an automated fashion. This way a long list of citations is changed to small semantic graphs that allow semi-automated query refinement and literature based discovery. 1
She Ji is a peer-reviewed, trans-disciplinary design journal with a focus on economics and innova... more She Ji is a peer-reviewed, trans-disciplinary design journal with a focus on economics and innovation, design process and design thinking. The journal invites papers that enrich the understanding and practice that enable design innovation in industry, business, non-profit services, and government through economic and social value creation. These papers may explore how design thinking can inform wider social, managerial, and intellectual discourses with an added focus on strategy and management. She Ji also publishes articles in research methods and methodology, philosophy, and philosophy of science to support the core journal area.
She Ji is fully open access. Tongji University and Tongji University Press support She Ji as a contribution to the design field and a public service to design research. Authors are not liable for any publication charges and all published articles are accessible free of charge from the journal web site at URL:
Numerous studies support the thesis that icons frequently fail to communicate because designers h... more Numerous studies support the thesis that icons frequently fail to communicate because designers have not appreciated that icons combine multiple symbols which interact to evoke meaning. Because symbols interact, a designer must know which symbols to combine and how to draw each symbol so that icons communicate clearly. This article brings together numerous research studies that explored new methods for designing icons based on the interaction of symbols.
Academic disciplines are a help and a hindrance. While they advance knowledge by focusing discipl... more Academic disciplines are a help and a hindrance. While they advance knowledge by focusing disciplinarians on a coherent set of related issues, those same boundaries that define and focus, also delimit and inhibit expansion of universal knowledge for the broad benefit of humanity. Such are Communication Design and Visual Anthropology.
Background and objective Medication use often causes errors that are dangerous to the health of p... more Background and objective Medication use often causes errors that are dangerous to the health of patients. Previous studies indicate that the use of pharmaceutical pictograms can effectively reduce medication errors. The purpose of this study was to determine the comprehensibility, representativeness, and recall rate of nine medication safety pictograms in a sample of nursing students in Poland in order to validate these images. Methods A pictogram validation study was conducted in two phases among nursing students at the Hipolit Cegielski State University of Applied Sciences, Gniezno, Poland. All experimental protocols were approved by the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Ethics Board (REB Protocol No: 19/122X). All methods were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. In phase 1, the participants' first exposure to the pictograms, the students were asked to guess the meaning of the pictograms without any additional information in or...
This paper describes a Visual Language System (VLsys), consisting of icons and glyphs, to represe... more This paper describes a Visual Language System (VLsys), consisting of icons and glyphs, to represent concepts in medicine. Medical scientists are being overwhelmed with data. Preliminary studies suggest a VLsys can improve both speed and accuracy of recognition of concepts and their relationships (Zender & Crutcher, 2007a), thus enhancing for users the conversion of raw data into information and knowledge. While the content context is visualization of medical concepts within the domain of epilepsy, the broader transformative context is development of an innovative visual language methodology for representing scientific concepts that exhibits the potential for intelligent machine-guided development.
With the expansion of specialization has come a contraction of innovation needed to meet systemic... more With the expansion of specialization has come a contraction of innovation needed to meet systemic problems. To rectify this, calls are coming for greater levels of collaboration across disciplines from research funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH). This paper describes the collaboration of graduate design students at the University of Cincinnati (UC) with researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) to improve doctor-parent interaction surrounding Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The combined CCHMC/UC team collaboratively designed communication materials to ensure 1) information provision on all treatment options and 2) elicitation of parent preferences among the treatment modalities. Preliminary testing of the materials has been encouraging. This paper reports on the collaborative design process of those materials.
Although the foundation for any discipline is how its practitioners know, design is still uncerta... more Although the foundation for any discipline is how its practitioners know, design is still uncertain about its epistemology. Design is not alone in this. Science and theology have debated epistemological questions within and between themselves for decades. Within that debate emerged common ground in critical realism, a philosophy that combines cognizance of external reality with assent to the power that personal perspectives exert over our perceptions (Barbour, 1974; Polkinghorne, 1998). Michael Polanyi's epistemology of personal knowledge is based on critical realism (Polanyi, 1958). This paper proposes that epistemology grounded in personal knowledge might serve as a model for a design epistemology called Reason + Revelation, that can integrate design as craft with design as science, illuminate how designers combine intuition and analysis, inform how design education can move from tacit to explicit knowledge, and suggest a distinctive design research methodology that blends qua...
Did that design work? It's an evaluation question yet there appears to be little evaluative g... more Did that design work? It's an evaluation question yet there appears to be little evaluative graphic design research to answer it. None of the 40 research methods covered in Brenda Laurel's book Design Research Methods and Perspectives described evaluative methods (Laurel, 2003). Yet designers should know, and clients will eventually demand to know, did that design work? This paper reports on methods used for two related evaluative design research studies conducted at the University of Cincinnati. While the results of the studies were often definitive, the research methods were not. In response to issues uncovered during the execution of the research protocols, an additional study was conducted to explore not the subject of the original research, but the research methods used for it. The methodology of those studies is discussed here as a means of advancing evaluative research methods for graphic design, and improving the quality of design work.
Abstract: The accelerating rate of data generation and resulting publications are taxing the abil... more Abstract: The accelerating rate of data generation and resulting publications are taxing the ability of scientific investigators to stay current with the emerging literature. This problem, acute in science, is not uncommon in other areas. New approaches to managing this ...
ABSTRACTBackground: A panel of medication management experts previouslyidentified 9 key medicatio... more ABSTRACTBackground: A panel of medication management experts previouslyidentified 9 key medication safety issues and high-alert drug classes asrepresenting the most pressing medication-handling issues in health care.Objective: To develop medication safety pictograms depicting medicationsafety issues and high-alert drug classes that represent medication-handlingrisks for health care personnel.Methods: An iterative design process, including activities such as semioticanalysis, design/redesign, and evaluation, was used to develop medicationsafety pictograms. Nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and students listedand drew graphic elements to depict each of the 9 key medication safetyissues. Graduate students in graphic design developed the preliminarypictograms for the study. A Delphi survey was then conducted withexperts recruited from the International Pharmaceutical Federation toreach consensus on the pictograms and provide feedback to the graphicdesigners. Health care providers from ar...
ABSTRACT Written language is limited in effectiveness to those who can read. Verbal language is e... more ABSTRACT Written language is limited in effectiveness to those who can read. Verbal language is effective only for those who understand the particular language being spoken. But everyone, except those with obvious visual impairment, can effectively perceive images without regard for literacy or language. For decades these realities have suggested the promise of a universal visual language but with little real result. The occasional Olympic event sign or restroom door sign are state of the art for global non-verbal communication. While icon design has evolved little since the 1970's, the world has moved on. Increasing economic globalization and the expansion of global communication networks have made it easier to deliver messages and more important to do so, while science has advanced understanding of perception and cognition establishing principles only speculated about in the 1970's. The dream of using images to greatly facilitate global communication persists. Unfortunately, image based communication is not currently well enough informed by principles of effectiveness to attempt such a project. To address this problem a team of researchers assembled at the University of Cincinnati to explore the development of advanced techniques for global non-verbal or image based communication. The team explored novel approaches and identified several principles designed to expand icon based communication so that it can communicate more complex messages and more abstract concepts with greater specificity than previously. bow What does the word "bow"mean? Several things, but the most accurate answer is it depends on the context. To illustrate: shoe | bow ship | bow arrow | bow rain | bow take a | bow bow | down IN EACH OF THE ABOVE PAIRS SOMETHING SPARKS a different meaning for the single typographic sign: "bow." That something is simply another sign, a context. In some pairs the context sparks a meaning that is only subtly different, no doubt in homage to the vagaries of linguistic etymology, but in other instances the context spotlights a meaning that is a different part of speech altogether, a verb instead of a noun for example. In each case context is what illumines the meaning (Wittgenstein. 1961 [1921]). This is as true for sentences and stories as it is for words (Wright, 1992). Unfortunately, written language though rich in context is limited in effectiveness to those who can read. Even verbal language is effective only for those who understand the particular language being spoken. But everyone, except those with obvious visual impairment, can understand images without regard for literacy or language. Donis A. Dondis even goes so far as to claim "Among illiterate constituencies, visual communi cation's effectiveness is undisputed"(Dondis, 1973). From street signs to Olympic venues, images communicate where words fail. What exactly does the icon of a man mean? Again, it appears to depend in part on the context: street sign I human icon park sign I human icon airport door sign I human icon (left to right Figure 1 below) The visual changes in the human icons are minimal and fairly subtle yet, in their context, viewers from all over the world have 'read' these icons as meaning specific and very different things: a crosswalk, a hiking trail, a restroom. In a park context adding two additional strokes to the man icon suggests a backpack and walking stick. The park context combined with two immediate iconic clues redefine the 'crosswalk' icon to a hiking trail icon. Like words, the overall context of the human icon changes its meaning. This is an impressive transformation accomplished with an economy of means. However, as successful as these icons are in their contexts, they are not as comprehensive or as definitive as words. The system from which the hiking icon came has no icon for 'pleasant hiking trail' or 'difficult hiking trail' or even 'dangerous hiking trail. …
International Association of Societies of Design …, 2007
Despite the fact that visual form is a precondition for visual communication, designers do not ha... more Despite the fact that visual form is a precondition for visual communication, designers do not have established principles for the use of visual form in communication. If basic research is defined as investigation into the fundamental aspects of phenomena, ...
Abstract. Internet literature queries return a long lists of citations, ordered according to thei... more Abstract. Internet literature queries return a long lists of citations, ordered according to their relevance or date. Query results may also be represented using Visual Language that takes as input a small set of semantically related concepts present in the citations. First experiments with such visualization have been done using PubMed neuronal plasticity citations with manually created semantic graphs. Here neurocognitive inspirations are used to create similar semantic graphs in an automated fashion. This way a long list of citations is changed to small semantic graphs that allow semi-automated query refinement and literature based discovery. 1
Uploads
Teaching Documents by Paul Zender
She Ji is fully open access. Tongji University and Tongji University Press support She Ji as a contribution to the design field and a public service to design research. Authors are not liable for any publication charges and all published articles are accessible free of charge from the journal web site at URL:
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Papers by Paul Zender
She Ji is fully open access. Tongji University and Tongji University Press support She Ji as a contribution to the design field and a public service to design research. Authors are not liable for any publication charges and all published articles are accessible free of charge from the journal web site at URL:
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/