Message Design as Intent

I guess the most important aspect of message design is the purpose for which you are designing the message. The key questions are: 1) what are you really hoping to accomplish and 2) what is the optimal way to get the desired results. This essay addresses the first question, which really has to do with intent. What kind of intentions can people have with messages?

The traditional distinction in message intents is between informational messages and messages that are designed to persuade. If you look at common public speaking textbooks such as Lucas' The Art of Public Speaking, this distinction is quite common. And yet, this distinction has often seemed arbitrary to me. I don't think there is a message that isn't inherently persuasive. But, maybe that depends on the definition of persuasion.

So what is persuasion? I think persuasion is any positive or negative change in attitude, feeling, belief, knowledge, understanding, and/or behavior (see The Persuasion Handbook: Developments in Theory and Practice). The key word here is "change". While changes occur naturally as a part of aging, as a part of history, and as experience increases, persuasion from a message design sense is changes resulting from exposure to a message or a set of messages. In other words, from exposure to a specific message or set of messages, there is some observable change in attitude, opinion, or behavior that is different (faster, deeper, more resistant to change...) from naturally occurring change.

If people are given information (which is selected, organized, and disseminated with some purpose in mind), then there is a chance that changes will occur in that person's attitudes, beliefs, opinions, feelings, or behavior. Thus, information is just as persuasive as an other message type, and informing someone of something is a persuasive act. Traditionally, the distinction made between informative and persuasive messages is that the intent of informative messages is to be "objective" and the point of persuasive messages is to take a stance. Informative messages are: objective, fair, balanced, multi-sided, lacking in emotional appeals, and so on. Persuasive messages are: biased, one sided, use emotional appeals, and so on. This distinction seems arbitrary to me and more indicative of a stylistic difference than an intrinsic message type difference.

Informative messages have somewhat "hidden" agendas. Information is selected from a nearly infinite range of possible information. Since this selection process is generally hidden under the guise of "objectivity", very little rationale is provided for why or how this information has been selected. The assumption is that the information is somehow relevant (see Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory or Relevance: Communication and Cognition) to the audience. Yet, who is making this initial decision about the relevance of an informative message on behalf of the audience?

Yet, it is undeniable that information has the potential to positive or negatively affect people's attitudes, feeling, opinions, beliefs, and/or behavior. The assumption that information that is biased, one sided, and loaded with emotional appeals is more persuasive than information that is objective, fair, and balanced seems unfounded.

Basically message design as intent means that we as message designers need to spell out what our goals and objectives are first, and then design messages that will most likely meet those goals and objectives. We need to measure the effects of our message designs and search for effective design principles both universal and context specific. And, we need to make these processes public through publishing the results of our research.