Desaign as Choice C

ontext

In the multimodal landscape of communication,

choice
and therefore design become central issues.
 The page in Figure 3 is the realization of choices – of
stylistic choices in relation to writing, choices of font
(though for any one publishing house there might not
have been choice), the framings of the text through
syntax (marked by punctuation) and in text (marked by
paragraphing, for instance), and by layout in spacings, as
well as the frame around the ‘densely printed page’
(Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). However, these choices
had nearly faded into invisibility through the two aspects
of habituation and convention.
 By contrast, the page in Figure 5 shows a plethora of
choices made and realized through the modes of writing,
layout, color, and image.
Design is a prospective enterprise.

Figure 6 is the result of the request of the teacher of a class of six year-olds.in
writing and drawing is startling (all the images and stories showed this
contrast): salient object-entities in spatial relation in the visually represented
world, con-trasted with salient events/actions in temporal relations.
We might dismiss this as childish representation. Or we might say that these
six-year olds are using the two modes of writing and image in line with their
inher-ent affordances – the (transformed) recollection of the visually
encountered world through the spatially organized mode; and the
(transformed) recollection of the actionally experienced world through the
temporally organized mode.
In the next example two modes co-exist in one
integrated textual object,

At the end of four lessons on ‘plant cells’, the teacher

had asked the 14 year old students, working in groups
of four, to prepare a slide of the epidermis of an onion
to look at it through a microscope, and then “write
what you did” and “draw what you saw”.
 The teacher had given two additional instructions, but
Apart from the different responses to this instruction
there is the startling difference in what each ‘saw’ and
what each wrote.
 The result In Figure 7a, the student lodges the ‘truth’ of
the facts of the empirical world in the draw-ing, and the
‘truth’ of theory through the replicability of scientific
practice in the written text. In Figure 7b, the student
lodges the ‘truth’ of scientific theory in the drawing, and
the ‘truth’ of actual practice in the written. In each case,
event-like representation uses the mode of writing; and
the representation of object-enti-ties is lodged in
drawing.