Audience Studies in Design: Why Does it Matter?

“Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it: To Whom It May Concern. — Ken Haemer, eLearningART.com

Why is this important in my work? I have spent a long career in the design and development of marketing communications content and imagery. Audience interpretation has always been a central component to the work. Therefore, this method of audiencing is critical in my research work for its value in understanding the viewers; where they are, how they think, feel, and respond to imagery as visual culture. Additionally, I may also include making images as research data as an additional method to my project proposal. Researching and identifying audience attitudes and beliefs systems allows for effective development with respect to future location, ideation and content messaging that is most effective when producing work. As I see it, the method of audiencing, as Rose explains, is akin to a user centered approach in design when producing visual content. However, a critical component will be employing empathy; tailoring content to provide appropriate and effective material to a build a responsible connection to visual culture.

Audience studies have long been associated primarily with television and look to understand audience siting, engagement, belief systems and responses. These studies can explore the audiences of television but can also be applied to a wide range of visual culture; I offer this additional analogy: the audience research methods as described by Gillian Rose in audience studies seem to closely resemble the concept of user centered design within design thinking practices. Here, I examine in detail chapter ten of Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies: To Audience Studies and Beyond, its methodologies, the writers on audience study and this research method as potential for use in my future work.

Prior to the current ideals of audience research studies, it was generally understood the work (image, content, tv, film, etc.), first and foremost, informed the viewer. The work was considered to primarily be a linear messaging system— from sender to viewer. Stuart Hall was mentioned by Rose in this vein regarding linear messaging as from an institutionalized structure, such as corporations, and their respective “preferred meaning” in images as delivered to the audience. Rose also notes Sonia Livingstone believes this linear approach continues to dominate this field of study. But, as Rose denotes, we know it also important to understand how an audience can inform the work, change the work, and sometimes even exploit the work from their respective positions.

According to Rose, audience methodologies became most prevalent in the 1980’s when television began to expand broadcasting channels through cable companies; households suddenly had a multitude of channel options paired with emerging technology and tastes. Rose credits Stuart Hall with an updated ethnographic model with two processes: encoding and decoding. According to Hall, encoding is considered mass-media driven and partially defines the linear approach of sender to receiver, resulting with the support of cultural norms. Hall asserts encoding is essentially a widely accepted state of semiotic structure and isn’t generally challenged. Decoding, however, is quite the opposite; audiences are thought to react to various images and content by either aligning or challenging content or some variation of both alignment and challenge. Hegemony is further described as the actual power being maintained by these cultural norms happening during the explosion of media.

Today, because the options for viewing television and imagery are continually expanding, ethnographic approaches continue to dominate audience studies. This is done through observation, interviewing and research field notes detailing what an audience does with images and content as visual culture. Rose suggests this expansion of choices in mass media creates a need for a breakdown of viewer groups. Rose defines these categories as, of course, traditional audience (viewers), fans and users. Fans, as Rose quotes (Jenkins, 1992, p.23), “…spectators who transform the experience of watching television into a rich and complex participatory culture.” (Rose, 2016, p.260). Fans spread the images beyond the scope of viewing by emulating characters, collecting memorabilia, and often forging their own stories of characters expanding the content across multiple platforms. Fans often discuss characters and content at length as a means of extending their beliefs to peers. Users, alternately, are defined by Rose as participants in the image and content itself. For example, in television shows such as Dancing With the Stars or The Voice, audiences are enticed to participate in real time by texting or phoning in a vote for a favorite team. Additionally, some television shows like The Bachelor invites viewers to comment online through Twitter or Instagram during airtime. However, to be noted, with respect to decoding, fans and users should not be considered any more or less resistant than traditional users as the power remains with mass-media. For example, an anti-fan or an internet troll is still being counted in statistical driven analytics and often invite the same level of attention as an aligned viewer.

As discussed in chapter ten, audience studies exist to explore what and how an audience interprets while watching. To analyze this information, three types of methods can be used. The first being a one-on-one interview, second, group interview and thirdly, the family interview which is generally conducted in the home. While these are not exhaustive, Rose introduces both David Morley and Ann Gray as researchers in the field of audience study and its interpretation. Both primarily use group interviews as a basis, but in different ways. Morley was keen on using pre-selected groups together, while Gray felt groups in this situation may incorporate group dynamics potentially evoking non-authentic responses, therefore she chose pre-existing groups by demographic and asked for written responses. Both methods survey a large sampling of unique audiences and take considerable time to elicit sound findings. When planning a study, Rose lists James Lull’s four things to take into consideration when beginning a study which include, access to an audience, non-obtrusive observation and how to collect and analyze data. We are also reminded through the work of Valerie Walkerdine, the researcher can have a bias or impact on the researched. And Marie Gillespie considers more closely the site of audiencing, as it is changing dramatically; it has expanded to more public locations and this is a considerable factor for interpretation.

Finally, Rose covers the topic of Techno-Anthropology, which is broadly defined as the ethnographic study of technologies as objects; television as multi-modal, having materiality. Television can be watched, touched, moved, and decorated making the object constrained by context. For this reason, it is critical to take into consideration a technology and its visuality, context, location, diversity and define what might be happening simultaneously— as in non-media centric media study. Rose advises the reader/researcher to interpret these effects using discourse analysis and debunking assumptions about the image, content and user.

Over the course of chapter 10, Gillian Rose mainly discusses television, specifically, with the audience as the primary focus for this method of research. However, I would suggest the idea of audiencing as a method of research could broadly cover virtually any representation of visual culture as defined by Rose in chapter one.

“Culture is a complex concept… Those meanings may be explicit or implicit, conscious, or unconscious, they may be felt as truth or fantasy, science or common sense; and they may be conveyed through everyday speech, elaborate rhetoric, high art, TV soap operas, dreams, movies or muzak; and different groups in a society will make sense of the world in different ways.” (Rose, 2016, p.2)

Additionally, I find Rose’s work keenly tied to the concept of user centered and user experience practice in the role of design and the respective design fields; and in some respects, further merging and blurring the lines of high art and design in visual culture today. While the advantages to using this methodology are discovering the complexities of engagement by audience members, Rose also discusses its drawbacks which largely rests in the complication of breadth and time constraints to do adequate research. There are further drawbacks than Rose has proposed.

Cambridge Analytica— a now defunct political marketing organization based in Europe— acquired access to private audience data from Facebook; the Cambridge Analytica team analyzed Facebook user information such as social identity, beliefs systems and political alignments to develop political advertising content targeting specific audiences for the Trump campaign. This kind of questionable audiencing methodology has been directly tied to the outcome of the US presidential election of 2016, Brexit, and a host of other political campaigns globally.

While it could be said this audience methodology was conducted prior to the development of political content advertising by Cambridge Analytica, it is the Facebook user responses to previously posted political images and respective user comments and beliefs systems about this imagery that became the driving force behind the Trump campaign strategy. It can be said then, the results of Cambridge Analytica’s audience research led to a strong impact on election results, leading us to consider this methodology as a kind of communication warfare. Which begs the question: How do we ensure audience methodology is used responsibly? Or how can we regulate its use in a responsibly way? I feel, in this case, empathy for the audience is essentially the missing component in audience methodology and divergent in nature from user centered approaches as used in design.