It’s the Archetypes, Dummy

Or maybe when talking about personality and design it is begin, well, at the beginning, or start with human archetypes.  I recently received that comment back from an excellent theorist on design, Trevor van Gorp. He has a blog/website called affective design focused on emotions and design.  I had only fuzzy memories of archetypes so I decided I better do some superficial refresher course/research. You start with Jung and dabble with elemental groupings and mix in some Joseph Campbell. Realizing, I’d probably end up with another degree if digested all the info out there on archetypes, I cheated and found someone who had already summarized it for me.

I am sure there are many options for summarizations out there but I found one by Carol S. Pearson (a summarization of her summarization is here http://www.herowithin.com/arch101.html) .

Anyway, she breaks it down into twelve main archetypes like the hero, the jester, the sage and so on. She gives a brief description of each like for Hero (When everything seems lost, the Warrior/Hero rides over the hill and saves the day. Tough and courageous, this archetype helps us set and achieve goals, overcome obstacles, and persist in difficult times, although it also tends to see others as enemies and to think in either/or terms)

Yes, I know. What is the point here? Well, the idea is that we can use these archetypes in design to pull out certain primal responses from the viewers. Say, if I want a piece to bring out feelings associated with the Hero archetype I would embed in my design elements that would evoke those emotions. Now this would be different than creating a piece that symbolizes that archetype, which may as the discussion lingers prove to be a moot point but at the moment not looking to create iconography around archetypes since these readily exist in art.

 The idea here would be to take each archetype and come up with a  list of design elements or motifs that would put one emotionally in touch with the particular archetype. If you could have that at your disposal you could assess the purpose and environment in which your design must live and tailor design aspects based on what archetypes are at play.

I suspect that this is not a new idea and that this is often subconsciously at play when we design anyway.  But nothing like creating more theories to try to explain and control emotional response.  Ahh Jung, if you could see me now.

This entry was posted on 16. July 2008 at 09:09 and is filed under Designs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.