I’ve alluded to framing in two previous posts:
- The Mother Nature Network and their idea of the “Lazy Environmentalist”
- Eleanor Rosch’s contribution to conceptual categorization
Framing is a potent tool used by marketers, linguists, business strategists, and designers. What is it?
A frame is simply the body of concepts, stories, scenarios and values related to a term, phrase or idea.
Pretty simple. When a person is exposed to an atom of meaning (through listening or reading) a body of concepts is brought to mind, consciously or unconsciously. Words and ideas do not exist in isolation but are conceptually connected to other words and ideas, a connectivity that arises from our experiences with the world.
Consider the following terms and how they differ
“Camera”
What comes to mind is a device that captures images. It may be a film or digital camera, it’s probably black or silver, maybe it flashes. Are these the only concepts that come to mind immediately? Think about cameras for a few more seconds. Are there situations where you’ve used a camera –parties, walks, and travel–that come to mind? You might also be thinking about the roles involved in photo-taking: subjects, a photographer, a setting. Are there certain values that come to mind: aesthetics, fine art, voyeurism? The concept camera involves more than just the tangible properties of a physical object. There are a host of other ideas related to cameras, such as typical scenarios and value systems that they invoke.
“LISA SNAPPED SEVERAL SHOTS AT THE PARTY”
We know this sentence is about cameras and taking photos without explicitly stating either. How does that work? Words related to an idea evoke the idea itself. In this case ‘party’, ’shots’, ’snapping’ are all concepts that bring to mind the concept of photo-taking.
“SHAKE IT LIKE A POLAROID PICTURE”
How different is this phrase than the above examples? There’s nothing in the literal meaning of the words to indicate it should be different, yet it is. When you hear this phrase, do you want to dance?
okay so how’s framing involved in this
Our brains engage in a process of reinforcing or re-defining frames. When we speak, hear, or read a pair of concepts, our brains link them together. Through repeated exposure to a pair of concepts, we include new ideas in a frame. When ideas are no longer exposed as a conceptual pairing, our brains exclude them from a frame. This is of course a simplification, some frames can be created non-verbally and there is some evidence that there are innate frames as well.
However, these linguistic examples show us that framing is quite permeable and expansive. The third example shows us that particular frames have the ability to gain dominance through re-use in media and popular culture. If you’ve listened to the radio or watched TV regularly in the last decade, the final phrase exists as a part of your conceptual structure for dancing, where it didn’t exist in the early 1990s.
The third example also illustrates that words are not un-emotional, they evoke values through their frames. How do you feel about the phrase? Does it make you cringe at this point in your life?
Framing is an act of creating a mental perimeter around our audience’s understanding of the terms we use, and it is a powerful tool to recognize and to use.
Being cognizant of linguistic framing has many applications in creating relevant and powerful messages and products. This could be very useful for User Experience Designers. But before I talk about applying these principles, I will discuss ways we can recognize when framing is being applied to influence the audience’s behavior. More on this next time.
In Part 2, I’ll be talking about
being active in the way you consume media
recognizing good and bad examples of framing, and
avoiding the manipulation it sometimes implies.