Reading #3 & 4: Audience as Co-designer & Cultural Probes

Participation is the key to success for any design project. This includes communication within the design team as well as communication with the target audience. Knowing the target audience well has been the mantra of all the advertisers, but recently more changes have been made to this theory, i.e. involving the people for whom the design is aimed at. In this new process, the target audience becomes a part of the design team, but the designer is in control of concept and final form. Hence, audience are facilitators and not dictators, while working in collaboration with the design team.   

This kind of involvement is very fruitful incase of cross culture, cross generation, or when the designer isn't part of the target market. It results in a better match to audiences point of view, which is reflected through their(audience's) identity- effective incultural codes, symbolism, and other narrative strategies. Also, a democratic process like this encourages people to make design a more success. For instance, in a new of Microsoft ads. where the camera follows a woman on a quest to find a laptop with "speed, comfortable keyboard and a 17-inch screen" for $1,000 or less. This "I am a PC" ad campaign for Microsoft have been really successful and have made people realize where the money is well spent. Unlike their previous ads. where they used celebrities,this campaign used the audience participation to raise questions and hit the soft point, which they had been struggling at for a long time.

   Hence, a clear communication happens when the encoder and decoder share same culture, generation or a part of the audience. And the traditional methods of data collection through observation, interviews, surveys aren't just adequate enough for any design project to be effective completely.