Understand Understanding
Xingman Cheng
We live in an era of mass information. Our daily lives are surrounded by designs that communicate messages. Some designs are straightforward hence easy to apprehend, while some are ambiguous and puzzling that require more thinking to unfold. Nevertheless, there is one premise that they all share: In order to be widely displayed, these designs as message conveyors, must possess the certainty that they can be translated by the majority audience. But where does this certainty come from? Why are we capable of decoding a design and understanding its woven message? In order to find out the answer, I composed an interactive exhibition that explores the formulation of our thoughts, the logic behind them, and how is the logic practiced in our process of understanding. The exhibition showcases a short film which breaks down our understanding through three aspects: perception, word and symbol, and context. It discusses our thinking logic through a lens of skepticism, and enlightens the viewer to revisit the presumptions in their thinking process. As a designer, I believe it is important for us to understand how messages are communicated through media under various circumstances. We should understand our ways of understanding, so we can start to reconsider and question the ways we communicate information. It is our obligation to stay sane in this babel of mass information and arouse innovations to challenge the static thinking ways through unconventional designs in the near future.