Image, Word, Action: The Power of Human Communication

This panel brings together a graphic designer, a professor of human communication, and a visionary leader in the National Weather Service to discuss how the channels and media of human communication function to create meaning, understanding, and purpose. Visual perception and human understanding meet in the practice of graphic design, and although no formula for the one most effective way to graphically represent ideas and information exists, a deeper and more nuanced understanding of graphic design can help broadcasters and other meteorologists to create more effective visualizations that will better enable viewers to grasp key messages. In a similar way, understanding how language and interaction work to build shared meaning and social reality will assist science based communicators to more productively and successfully create language-based messages. But the coordination of messaging, the consensus building around the interpretation of conflicting and voluminous data, the collaboration across individuals, intro-organizational groups/offices, agencies, and partners requires that communication be mastered at not only the level of practical application but also at a strategic level, and this is not only a function of leadership, but is perhaps better understood as comprising leadership.