• DOI:10.1080/03637750701196383
• Corpus ID: 143543646

Communication as Design

@article{Aakhus2007CommunicationAD,
  title={Communication as Design},
  author={Mark Aakhus},
  journal={Communication Monographs},
  year={2007},
  volume={74},
  pages={112 - 117}
}

• Mark Aakhus
• Published 1 March 2007
• Art
• Communication Monographs

Design is an activity of transforming something given into something preferred through intervention and invention. An interest in design reflects a concern for creating useful things and the process of creating useful things. Design is a way to understand communication and an approach for investigating the social world from the standpoint of communication. This claim has implications for theorizing communication ‘‘problems.’’ A central puzzle that people face, from a design perspective, is how to make communication possible that was once difficult, impossible or unimagined. Communication design happens when there is an intervention into some ongoing activity through the invention of techniques, devices, and procedures that aim to redesign interactivity and thus shape the possibilities for communication. The relationship between interaction and communication, which is a central problem for communication theory, is a central problem for design. What becomes immediately apparent upon seeing communication in terms of design is the broad and deep interest in structuring, shaping, and conditioning discourse. This is evident in the varieties of designs for communication apparent in the institutions, practices, procedures, and technologies present in the built-up human world and the varieties of communication-design work performed in society apparent in the interventions people perform. Indeed, the built-up world is an ongoing engagement with the puzzle of making forms of communication possible. A crucial response to this interest is a design enterprise*that is, to open up the intentional design of communication as an object of inquiry for the purposes of advancing knowledge about communication (Aakhus & Jackson, 2005). A design enterprise treats communication as both an object and a process of design while reflectively engaging the dynamic tension between the fundamentally constitutive nature of communication and communication’s instrumental possibilities (e.g., Mokros & Aakhus, 2002).