Journal 3

For my project, I chose a blueprint, a wedding dress design sketch, and a love poem. My word is design. The blueprint is important because it demands something from an audience. No matter what, someone can look at a blueprint and examine it for what it is, a detailed floor plan of an architectural structure, but until the audience actually does anything with it, its true purpose, to become a full, freely standing structure, will not be fulfilled. This is like Bitzer’s idea that everything is made in order to be taken in by an audience. The exigence of a designer wedding dress design sketch is from the rhetorical ecology. This is because of the tradition of a white wedding dress mixed with the pressure from bridal shows like, Say Yes to the Dress and reality TV and the demand of a white wedding dress from brides around the country. Finally, a love poem is designed by structure, but it also has an exigence relative to Bitzer. The poet wrote this poem in order to release some of the feelings of what it is like to be married and to be in love. The audience, who uses it and absorbs it in their own way, then takes it in.

I feel like my artifacts and the artifacts we have read about are all similar in the fact that they prompt an audience reaction. Regardless of Bitzer or Edbauer’s  theories, both end with the audience doing something with the material. I think that circulation is incredibly important in Edbauer’s article specifically because of the idea that a rhetorical ecology relies on the influence of multiple principles, some of these being different people. The audience carries on the idea of the work, and then their word or the tradition they have created becomes one of the elements within her rhetorical ecology for future exigencies. Wysocki’s article is interesting because it really does talk about how one design can affect someone. Words written in a different font can have a different effect, depending on the font used. In my opinion, that is incredibly interesting to study. Gladwell’s role of affordances is interesting because when talking about paper, in particular, it describes how something is easily maneuverable. If something is trapped on a computer screen, there is not as much room for flexibility as far as organization and ease of visualization.