School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemUniversal visual communication: developing a multidisciplinary paradigm for visual communication in a globally changing world( 2011)The universal visual communication paradigm (UVCP) proposed in this thesis responds to the conceptual and empirical gap in studying the universal aspects of visual communication within the context of the globally changing visual culture of the twenty-first century. The creative contribution of this study comprises the development of the holistic and multidisciplinary UVCP concept, which also involves an original definition of global visual culture and the design of novel visual methods. The UVCP is supported by empirical findings from a cross-cultural comparative study based on fieldwork ethnography, as well as surveys and experiments designed for the purposes of this research and conducted with 130 participants from major urban areas in Argentina, Australia, China, Germany and Poland. Unlike previous constructs, the UVCP recognises the importance of addressing the universals of both the neurophysiological (vision) and socio-cultural (visuality) aspects of visual communication in a comprehensive and multidisciplinary manner. Visual communication is of critical importance for both human nature and culture and particularly for personal and mass interactions in a visually intense world culture. However, the idea of universal ways of seeing and communicating visually is controversial and little explored, especially across socio-cultural studies and the humanities. The objects of study are not clearly defined, while methodologies pay next to no attention to the exclusively visual aspects of communication as experienced by individuals across cultures. Against this backdrop, the UVCP deals holistically with the universal aspects of vision and visuality and addresses the relationship between them in today‟s globally changing visual environment. Additionally, the original definition of global visual culture proposed here – namely, the visualscape – extends beyond the mainstream historical-symbolic approach to culture to involve the structural-functional and evolutionary perspectives. Within this framework, the idea of visualscape is combined with globalisation theories to offer an adequate research context and pool of study objects. Methodologically, this study develops a set of innovative visual research tools that minimise verbal expression and interpretation and instead explore the explicitly visual aspects of communication, as experienced by research participants at the perceptual and active-creative levels of interaction. The combination of innovative methods (e.g. visual associations, drawing-based experiments and affective perception of visuals) is put to the test in a cross-cultural comparative study which supports the UVCP empirically while opening up new avenues for further research. In this sense, the new UVCP developed in this thesis has the potential to explore other universal aspects of human communication in the context of a globalising world culture.