VI. Design

The New London Group’s manifesto at the beginning of the new millennium brought design to the forefront of digital composing studies as a means of “transform[ing] knowledge by producing new constructions and representations of reality” through multiple semiotic channels (22). Their definition emphasizes the high-stakes nature of design (both as organizational structure and process [20]) in creating knowledge. Whether a webtext, a book, or a set of stairs, an object’s design is never neutral but rather always rhetorical, created with a particular goal in mind that has a very real impact on bodies, experiences, and other objects (Latour, Norman). Likewise, design technologies are never neutral but rather have the power to suggest or inhibit particular kinds of composing and knowledge representation (Feenberg, Heidegger, Selfe and Selfe). If a scholarly webtext’s argument is inseparable from its design (Ball 2004), tracing the evolution of this design through complex encounters with composing technologies (Hawk, Palmeri et al.) by mapping moments of invention (DeVoss et al.) is a useful tool for understanding how this “new construction” came to be, as well as its potential consequences as one of many possible “representations of reality.”

This project’s approach to design is grounded in Ball’s (2004) claim that design is a crucial component of a webtext’s argument, rather than a supplementary aesthetic adornment. Ball defines design-based “argument” in webtext scholarship in terms of implicit juxtaposition, in contrast to the explicit articulation valued by traditional scholarship:

How audiences make meaning from animated graphics, for example, is different than how they make meaning from a sentence, paragraph, or full-length article. The formation of argument in new media texts, then, becomes not a linear construction linking one sentence-meaning to a consecutive other. It is, instead, a persuasion, of juxtaposition of modal elements from which readers infer meaning. For this reason, when I use argument to discuss an author’s or designer’s intention in a new media work, I am not suggesting that her or his argument is readable in the same ways as print constructions of an argument would be. Instead, I offer argument as a term for the persuasive meaning-making elements in new media texts (405).

Ball’s juxtaposition-based definition of “argument” here overlaps with Delagrange’s and Garrett et al.’s arrangement-based approaches to invention, in which ideas are generated and communicated through the total relationships between a set of multimodal components. Such an approach facilitates a different kind of academic “meeting of minds” (Buehl, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca) as a rhetorical strategy for scholarly communication. In communicating an argument via design, a webtext composer acts to persuade readers through the creation of a meaning-making environment which readers are invited to explore and discover, in collaboration with (rather than solely through) linear argumentation. Ball notes, however, that such implicitly designed arguments can lead to confusion or miscommunication for audiences “not used to recognizing [webtexts’] meaning-making strategies”, which “typically move freely between theory and practice through their interactive and animated designs” (410). One of my goals in this dissertation is to address these potential communication gaps by examining how webtexts’ meaning-making strategies emerge out of ongoing design invention processes, and by taking a closer look at the forces that influence these rhetorical design strategies as they develop.

This project is also informed by the New London Group’s approach to “Design” as part of an iterative cycle of actively engaging available semiotic resources in order to develop new meanings. As they understand it, “Designing transforms knowledge by producing new constructions and representations of reality. Through their co-engagement in Designing, people transform their relations with each other, and so transform themselves” (22). For the New London Group, design is an inventive, transformative process that creates new meaning through new relations. Whereas their emphasis is on design’s potential to create new social relations, I focus on composers’ processes for communicating new ideas via webtexts, and how these new ideas are shaped by ongoing negotiation with material and conceptual as well as social forces.

In search of a concise term for describing a webtext’s fundamental organizational design and its ability to communicate an argument, I turn to the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins’s approach to poetry—grounded in the concept of “inscape”—emphasizes design, formal structure, visual and material characteristics, and how these characteristics combine to perform the unique nature of a thing. According to Greenblatt, “[Hopkins] felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity” (2159). Hopkins closely connected the concept of inscape to aesthetic design and internal organization/unifying principles: “[A]s air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry” (Gardner xxii). As Gardner notes, “[Hopkins] is always intent on examining that unified complex of characteristics which constitute ‘the outward reflection of the inner nature of things’--its individual essence. He was always looking for the law or principle which gave to any object or grouping of objects its delicate and surprising uniqueness” (xx). The word “inscape” provides a concise term for evoking how a complex, multifaceted “distinctive design" dynamically performs a unique identity based on its fundamental structure.

For Hopkins as a Jesuit priest, the concept of inscape had strong religious significance; however, I suggest that as a term for discussing aesthetic principles of organization and impact, it is a useful concept for considering design in secular contexts as well. I’m borrowing Hopkins’s term “inscape” to talk about a webtext’s developing design, and the way that its particular combination of total pieces combine to perform a unique, implicit argument. Specifically, I look at how this inscape takes shape across drafts over a span of time and investigate the forces behind key shifts in a webtext’s components and structure.

What is especially useful about "inscape" as a term for examining webtexts is that it allows for a language that talks about the agency of a design, or the way that those organizing principles act upon a viewer from all media/sense channels (not just language): according to Hopkins, inscape exerts an “impulse … which acts on the senses and, through them, actualizes the inscape in the mind of the beholder (or rather ‘perceiver’, for inscape may be perceived through all the senses at once). This impulse affords “a sudden perception of that deeper pattern, order, and unity which gives meaning to external forms” (Gardner xxi). These terms help to describe both the dynamic way in which all pieces in a webtext are organized according to an underlying, unifying principle (inscape) that in some way has an impact on or consequences for a reader as a knowledge-making artifact.

My focus is on the experiences of human designers—webtext composers—negotiating among these forces in order to develop a webtext’s total inscape. In this project, I examine material forces that act on a webtext’s developing design in ways that have a capacity to change the argument or otherwise shift the implicit argument from how it was initially imagined. I follow scholars such as Latour and Gries in designating this term as “agency.” I do not equate nonhuman and human agency from an ethical standpoint; however, from a composing standpoint, it is useful to examine what forces exert the most significant influence on a webtext’s emerging inscape, whether these forces are human or not. Additionally, in situating this study in an autoethnographic perspective, it is helpful to examine forces with which a human designer must negotiate, that facilitate or curtail their capacity to act (and thus to craft an argument) in unanticipated ways that have implications for the webtext project’s total configured components. Specifically, I focus on how people, tools, and metaphors act as influences on webtext design, which are the focus of discussion for Chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively.

Design plays an important role in the way I communicate my argument in this project. As Ball notes, there is a “necessary aesthetic component” (2004, 404) to webtext-making in foregrounding the design as part of the argument, which is likewise noted by Whitson and Salter in reflecting on digital comics scholarship that theorizes via performance. This aesthetic component will play a significant role in my project in both studies of webtext creation and in the crafting of my own dissertation as a webtext. Furthermore, an emphasis on aesthetics and craft dovetails well with many conversations around autoethnography as method, which tends to include many narrative or performative elements (Boyle and Parry, de la Garza, Ellis, Lawless,) in enacting critical scholarly arguments. It is my hope that my choice of autoethnography as one of my research methods will complement the experimental potential implicit in webtexts’ design and help to open up a creative—but still rigorously critical—approach to presenting my own project. I address the role of design in relation to the overall webtext dissertation in the “About the Project” section, and in relation to my qualitative analytical approach in greater detail in Chapter 3.