A Conversation Brief
Initial Ideas
When we were told that our brief would be about conversation, I thought about how much the way we communicate has changed over the last few decades, especially since mobiles phones have become much more easily accessible. I then decided to focus my project on ‘modern day conversation’. Therefore, I created a mindmap to try and create ideas suitable for this brief.
Short History The concept of the SMS (Short Messaging Service) was created by Friedhelm Hillebrand, while he was working for Deutsche Telekom. Sitting at a typewriter at home, Hillebrand typed out random sentences and counted every letter, number, punctuation, and space. Almost every time, the messages amounted to 160 characters, thus being the basis for the limit one could type via text. SMS messaging was used for the first time on 3 December 1992, when Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group in the UK, used a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas� via the Vodafone network to the phone of Richard Jarvis who was at a party in Newbury, Berkshire which had been organised to celebrate the event. Modern SMS text messaging is understood to be messaging from one mobile phone to another mobile phone. Initial growth of text messaging was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 message per customer per month. Today, text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service, with 74% of all mobile phone users worldwide, or 2.4 billion out of 3.3 billion phone subscribers. In countries such as Finland, Sweden and Norway, over 85% of the population use SMS. The European average is about 80%,. The largest average usage of the service by mobile phone subscribers is in the Philippines, with an average of 27 texts sent per day by subscriber.
Infographic Research After reseraching into text messaging, I realised that there were lots of facts and figures involved in the whole process, so I thought about inforgraphics. I have always loved the look and layout of infographics, but never created any. The two main components of these, are the way they look, and the content. I decided to focus on content first and here are the most interesting facts I gathered whilst researching: Research shows that school students who text are better spellers than students who don’t text. The largest average usage of the service by mobile phone subscribers is in the Philippines, with an average of 27 texts sent per day by subscriber. The peak hours for text messaging are from 10:30-11:30 P.M. The worlds fastest texter can compose this: “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.” in 18.19 seconds! There were also lots of claims that texting has ruined how we communicate, meaning that we don’t need to leave the house to talk to our friends, our English is suffering because no one is having spoken conversations anymore, and that young people are becoming ruder and ‘fubbing’ others more often!
Developing My Idea Even though there were lots of interesting facts that I could pop straight into my infographic layout, I decided that I wanted to to and prove that other peoples claim about texting were wrong. So I began to conduct a survey, I chose 10 of my friends to answer my questions, which were: Do you prefer texting or calling? How many texts do you send in a day? What’s your main reason for texting? Social or work? How often do you use emojis? how many people have you text in the last month, and how many of those have you seen in person?
Survey Results The results of my survey have really helped with my aim to prove that peoples views of texting are wrong! After compiling the results, I had to create different styles of graphs and think about my layout. I thought about pie charts, bar graphs, pictographs, scatter graphs and also just plain text. I decided that a scatter graph would look too disorganised and messy, so I stuck to a column graph, a bar graph and a pie chart for my infographic piece.
50 + never
occasionally
30 - 40
8 7
sometimes
20 - 30
6 5
all the time
10 - 20
4 3 2
0 - 10
012345
1 0
work social
Layout Sketches
Final Layout
Here is my final background layout design for my infographic. I think it works well with the blocks of colour segregating each fact or graph.
I have chosen this pastel shade colour scheme because I didn’t want anything to detract from the graphs and information in this piece.
Final Piece
Firstly, I’ve done what I set out to do, by proving the critics of texting wrong, and showing how conversation is still alive in today’s society. My data shows that on average 86% of text conversations are by people who see each other in person as well. I surveyed many demographics in an attempt to get a more complete picture of the influence of text, asking 18 to 62 year olds their views. To conclude, I enjoyed researching this project, and creating a relevant infographic, that I had never attempted before.