Adaptive Design for Visual Communicators:Reexamining Relationships and Making Theory Apply

Malloy 4 Design (PD), designers create interactive communications that have a pre-determined end or a goal, similar to a game. Users are not creating content but are engaging with it. True Co-Creative (TCC) design means the design itself is primarily the creation of the circumstances and biases surrounding a user who becomes a partner in the process of creation, free to create.

Adaptive communication sheds lights from psychologists, design research theorists, and educators to brighten the future path of design, a path that embraces a shift in attitude and a wider gamut of communication media. While each of these methods stems from existing practice, my attempt is to reframe and better define them specifically in relation to visual communication. A clearer discourse can emerge with concrete terminology. At the core of each method is how visual communication connects to motivations, needs, and relationships between designed artifacts, experiences, and users. Though some of the waters remain untested, designers are perhaps better equipped than they believe to jump into the new world of communication.

Adaptive communication calls out to our humanity, to our abilities to think, to our abilities to empathize and look beyond ourselves. Therefore, the methods I propose are largely natural to us, as designers, as marketers, as communicators, and most importantly, as human beings. Before we embark on our journey through adaptive communication, let us examine the roots of this thesis.