A Arte da Persuação

Gui Bonsiepe reflecte sobre o conceito de retórica – a chamada arte da persuasão, que influencia sentimentos e atitudes, ao dar às palavras novos significados. O uso da retórica na comunicação permite que o discurso seja mais interessante, eficiente e influenciador. 

Segue-se alguns excertos do texto de Bonsiepe: 

“Rhetoric is one of the scarcely researched areas of design, although the designer is confronted with rhetorical phenomena in his daily work…

Rhetoric can be called a set of seductive heuristics, used to influence feelings and moods in the person to whom the message is addressed…

Feelings are phenomena of short duration, which interrupt the flow of everyday actions… moods, on the other hand, are generally of longer duration. They are concerned with an approach to future possibilities of action… specialists in advertising and corporate identity direct their rhetorical techniques to creating certain attitudes in the public or breaking them down, depending on the policy and strategy the company is using to present itself…

[designer] he influences the feelings, moods and attitudes of the user by employing visual means assigned to formal and semantic categories to convey messages…

In Antiquity rhetoric was practiced as an art of speaking mainly in three areas: politics, law and religious discourse… As K. Burke said, rhetoric is the right place for “… insult and offence, for quarrelsomeness and conflict, for cunning and lies, particularly for underlying cunning and deliberate lies”…

Rhetoric is generally defined as the art of persuasion, or the study of the means of persuasion that are available for a given situation the purpose of rhetoric is the efficient use of language in order to shape attitudes in others and influence their behavior… Persuasion presupposes the possibility of choosing. Again we can quote Burke, who says rhetoric is directed to a person who is free: “… when people are forced to do something rhetoric is superfluous”…

“… a new approach to rhetoric that would take into account modern semiotics. Since the combination of text and picture available in modern communications was technically impossible in antiquity, it was never a concern in classical rhetoric. ”…

The flood of verbal and visual messages produced and distributed in industrial societies creates what Richard S. Warman has termed ‘information anxiety’. A situation with a low density with such conditions, one could ascribe a new, cognitive function to rhetoric, where rhetorical means are used to clarify contexts and reduce cognitive entropy…

“… the art of saying something in a new way”  and as “… giving words a new meaning or a new use, in order to make speech more pleasing, more lively and more penetrating.”…

In the traditional view a rhetorical figure of speech is one that differs from normal usage to make the communication more effective. Figure of speech can be divided into two classes…

Word figures: related to the meaning of a word, on the position of the words in the sentence…

Thought figures; related to the formation and arrangement of the information.”

Some things change...

“Some Things Change…”, de Chris Pullman é um conjunto de “enumerações” referentes a várias mudanças, evoluções e constantes no campo de design. Num sistema de Antes e Agora, o autor desenvolve toda a sua reflecção sobre design de comunicação em torno do objecto que passa a experiência, espacial e temporal.

Deixo os tópicos que considero mais importantes.

Object - Experience

Once what you were making was an object.

Now it is more often an experience.

Composition - Choreography

Once the desiner’s art was composition.

Now it is choreography. In a fluid, four-dimensional world, the problem is not so much to get the fixed thing right as to find an elegant sequence of evolving relationships. This involves understanding how the conventions of typography and the dynamics between words and imagens change with the introduction of time, motion, and sound.

Craft based -Technology based

Once the profession was genetically linked to the ancient crafts of hand typesetting, bookbinding, drawing, and cuttins.

Now it no longer is so physical, mediated by technology that can make it feel almost virtual. The basic tools are suddenly so different that, as Mcluhan predicted, the things we can make, or even dream up, will be different.

Isolated, solo - Collobarative, tem

Once you could do just about everything yourself. Paul Rand ran a one-and-a-half-person shop for most of his professional life.

Now the paradox is that while the personal computer and plunging software costs have revitalized the tradition of the one-man band (a publishing house or a postproduction studio on your desktop), the trend is toward collaborative, multidisciplinary teams of people pushing toward a common goal. It’s not just your opinion anymore. Collaborating call for a different set of gees, a different kind of ego, a tolerance for complexity and consensus.

Piecework - Strategic thinking

Once most of us did piecework, making a new thing to fit within a small universe of other things.

Now, while piecework won’t disappear, the new focus is on strategy: design as strategic planning, design as a business resource. This implies a different level of thinking and participation, even a different vocabulary.

Design is different from art

I have always felt that being a designer and being an artist are quite distinct activities, attracting people with different goals and preferences. Where a person end up on this continuum is more a matter of chromosomes than anything else. Someone who becomes a successful painter or sculptor or performance artist is likely to be a person who derives their energy and intellectual satisfaction from solving problems that come from inside themselves. In contrast, someone who ends up as a successful designer is probably a person whose energy and intellectual satisfaction comes from solving someone else’s problems. Each of us inevitably brings to the task of designing a unique load of experience and bias, which can and should express itself in our work. But the current attention paid to the importance of “authorship” in design shouldn’t mask the underlying distinction between personal expression and the puzzle of figuring out a problem posed by others.

The visual power of design derives from the idea of contrast

If you ask why something woks and you push back far enough, eventually everything seems to be based on contrast: the ability to distinguish one thing from another. Composition, sequencing, even legibility all rely on devices that affect the contrast between things. Contrast seems to control many of the phenomenon essential to visual communication: grouping things into families, creating theme and variation, establishing hierarchies, and providing interest.

Nothing happens out of context

Few things we make have no precedent. It is important to understand how one thing fits into the larger family of things to which it belongs. You can’t enjoy the variation if you don’t know the theme.