Graphic Design and the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

About a year ago Robert Fischer and I got into a heated debate about the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis and whether or not it had merit.

For those of you who aren’t familiar the hypothesis: in short, it asserts a cultures vocabulary has a strong impact on how people within that culture perceive things in their life. Or more simply, as I remember Robert arguing it: if your culture doesn’t have a word for it, you can’t perceive it.

Both because I like playing the Devil’s advocate and because I am fundamentally a person whose experience of life tends to be more sensory than linguistic anyway, I argued that this hypothesis couldn’t be true. I know there have been times that I have struggled for appropriate words to describe a knowing or feeling I have, and whether or not I could come up with them at the moment it didn’t change the level of complexity I felt at the time.

I found myself revisiting my hasty conclusion within the last month or so while reflecting on my ever evolving vocabulary development in the areas of art, graphic design, and user experience. I’m not here to necessarily disagree with my initial feeling of discomfort with the idea that we as humans are limited by our language, but I do want to revisit it.

Most people who work as highly trained professionals in any field, be it medicine, the law, psychology etc. develop a language to assist in their work. Does this give them additional capacity to perceive things in their lives? I really don’t think so. These language tools seem to do a better job at communicating more meaning, more efficiently with a greater level of specificity than they increase the professionals understanding and experience of life itself. I’m not saying their training doesn’t add to their experience of life, I’m only saying that the words in and of themselves don’t. I do realize this is a dangerous assertion coming from someone who has only ever lived in my shoes. But in my liberal arts education (my degree was in legal studies and religion) I was introduced to the beginnings of a wide range of professional languages and based on my exposure this is my current belief.

I feel that Graphic Design/Art/Advertising is unique to my assertion for a few reasons.

• It doesn’t have a language which is intimidating to most people outside of the industry. Sure there are pockets, like words associated with typography, but in general most of the concepts are fairly basic when you break them down. Words like balance, contrast and consistency are easily understood by most adults and it’s not hard to imagine how they’re applied in art and design. (Please note the language associates with programming/scripting/mark-up languages is not included when I’m addressing this topic.)
• We all encounter art/design every day of our lives and respond to it emotionally with some level of consciousness and respond to it with action. We do this by purchasing or not purchasing items, forming impressions of companies or sometimes discussing with our peers.
• We, as viewers, are all permitted to have opinions on art/graphic design and they are all valid for us. The viewers, in fact, are the focus. Emotional responses are desired and provoked.

Applying these principles consciously to large scale projects in culmination and with finesse is what separates the artist or graphic designer from the lay person. This is what fundamentally separates the college student slinging broken pagemaker web sites for acne cream and the artists and advertising geniuses who end up writing books, representing cultural shifts and making the real money and being worth every penny. But in the end the goal is to communicate with every day people and we don’t generally need fancy terminology to do it.

I am writing this because I think I might be wrong to some extend about the linguistic relativity hypothesis. I have noticed that with practice the conscious dedication to revisiting a set of largely uncomplicated principals with the conscious eyes of an everyday critic and consumer combined with an obsession for listening to everyday conversations about advertising and art that my experience of everyday life is changing. It’s not about learning new words though. It’s about developing an ability to articulate how I feel as a viewer, and how that relates to how the creator of the piece probably intends me to feel and whether or not there is a disconnect between those two outcomes.

I sometimes feel like my eyes have been replaced. By working as graphic designer and by practicing as an oil painter things look and feel extraordinarily different to me now. I see light and color in a whole new way. Typeface is exciting or excruciating. Content is either enhanced or hidden. I’m a more conscious consumer, a better communicator and an intentional designer better able to communicate my ideas in ways easily understandable to almost anyone.

This is absolutely about language development and refinement. I realize this isn’t exactly what the linguistic hypothesis means and that’s why I still fundamentally disagree that giving me more words enhances experience. However, this new and conscious perspective has reminded of my initial discomfort with the idea that language enhances experience. My point is that although our initial reactions to these largely visual stimuli is emotional, practiced lunguistic reflection on those emotions can absolutely enhance our experience of the world. This puts my black and white judgement of the linguistic hypothesis into a grey area. And for me, that’s worth blogging about.