Was ist Heimat? Wie kann man sich zuhause fühlen und woher weiß man, ob man hier richtig ist? Oder wo der Weg hingehen soll? Diese Frage will ich auf Reisen durch Europa mit einem Videotagebuch beantworten.
Nach der letzten Sprechstunde habe ich mich zunächst in Reiseliteratur vertieft; Troller, Kisch und Gellhorn gelesen. Das hat mir einen ersten Eindruck davon gegeben, wie Reisejournalismus und Reisedokumentation in der Literatur aussahen/aussehen. Ich werde zwar auch für die Masterarbeit schreiben, aber vor allem will ich meine Eindrücke mit der Kamera festhalten. Das „Pariser Journal“ von Georg Stefan Troller passt schon besser: Menschen vor der Kamera befragen und die Antworten aus ihnen „rauskitzeln“.
From 9-11 September 2020, the EuroSPI² Conference took place as a hybrid (half online) in Düsseldorf, Germany. The design of the EuroSPI² app is part of the digital marketing around the event, which is becoming increasingly important, especially during the current coronavirus crisis when most events are partly or fully held online. The app was created to help conference participants find their way around the conference venue and see where and when workshops and keynote presentations take place and which speakers are presenting in which workshops or holding keynote speeches. The app includes a small quiz and game with a scoreboard with questions about the history and traditions of the event itself and the event location. Users have reported that the app with its new features is a great addition to the event and it worked smoothly. We also got some valuable feedback we will use to improve the app for next year’s conference.
Due to the coronavirus crisis and the increase in online activity, the company ISCN has decided to additionally invest in LinkedIn ads, content marketing, a redesign of the event’s website for next year. I designed ads according to the corporate design and branding (see below) and launched an online advertising campaign. As mentioned before, the website of the event has to be redesigned to address the relevant target group and to attract new customers. Based on a target group analysis, we turned our attention to specific social media channels and finally decided to advertise on LinkedIn, as our target group can mainly be found there. After the first content was generated and everything was up and running, it was challenging to keep an overview of the various other channels that have also been set up besides LinkedIn. I soon learned about creating an editorial calendar, which helps you to plan what to post and when and where to post it. An editorial calendar is also used by businesses to control the publication of content across different media. In Addition, we created a document where we have all the previous content, so that we have an overview of what has been posted and what will be posted.
In October, after the event, we launched an online platform with courses based on research fields that the event focuses on. This ensures that people can interact with the brand throughout the year. We are also working to improve the app and after the next update users will be able to switch from online to onsite mode within the app without having to reinstall it and they can choose if they wish to receive messages within the app throughout the year leading up to the next event. The messaging system is also a way of staying in touch with our customers all year round.
This semester I’ve decided to reopen the topic I was dealing with in the first semester, because it still seems contemporary and relevant to explore to me. As an introduction, I would mention, that bad communication ends a lot of good things, but it also makes people’s life harder, when it comes to multilingual communication. Multilingual communication is communication beyond the borders of languages. It implies communication between members of different linguistic groups, often not talking any language except their mother language. Therefore I find this topic extremely important in the world we live in, with approximately 6,500-7000 languages being spoken at the moment, so I chose to base my research in this direction. In a world of increasing migration and technological progress, multilingual communication has become the rule rather than the exception. Therefore I will try to do as much research as I can on the topic of non-verbal communication, which could also be meaningful for my master thesis.
Designing visual means and non-verbal systems as an alternative to verbal communication was already a problem of some health facilities in countries in which many languages are spoken (like India), as well as the countries with a low-reading population. There were already several projects led by the dream of a world in which languages don’t separate people, trying to design a visual language that would use universal symbols understandable to everyone. One of these attempts was to create universal health-care symbols as part of the project “Hablamos Juntos”-“We Speak Together”. This was a USA project about designing a visual system to help the LEP population to go through health facilities without misunderstanding and stress, which also makes physicians’ job easier.
“Making signage easy to understand and eliminating language barriers is one simple way we can improve the health-care experience for everyone,” says Yolanda Partida, director of Hablamos Juntos, an organization established in 2001 to develop practical tools to overcome language barriers to health care. “There are limits to how many languages can be presented effectively on wayfinding signage,” explains Partida. “Universal symbols offer an alternative to bilingual or trilingual signage that can quickly become useless with unreadable font sizes.”
Communication problems continue to grow in every country with immigrant and migrant populations. The growing problem is not only noticeable in the healthcare system, but also in bureaucracy. In designing such a system, its implementation plays an important role as well. How to adjust the symbols to already existing ones, which criterium is more important when it comes to shaping: clarity or creativity? Each of these factors should be considered when thinking about these problems, which opens a sequence of questions, that will be questioned in my next blog entries.
