Abstract:

This study has as a main question witch is the role of the image in the knowledge construction. Assuming that the visual literacy is increasingly present in our daily life we should not forget that oral, written and by signs communications occurred with the aim of developing a language to reach a certain type of communication. Since the designer is a producer of visual culture, a deep discussion of the effects that new technologies on image and language is a significant issue in this research. Therefore, it's necessary to think about the resources that can improve information and communication in educational settings. Kerry Freedman notes that the things the students learn and how they learn, breaks the traditional boundaries in the postmodern world. Actually students can get more details of the images than of the texts, because of this, the art's education and also the education in design, among others, has a growing responsibility. While the boundaries between education, culture and entertainment has increased over the time, students learn more and more from the visual forms. In this context we must study the challenges and the limits of form, the object and the school subjects. Gunther Kress talks about language, images and written's issues considering the social and cultural approach in the near future. He also argues that the transition to the screen as the main way of communication will produce big changes in power relations and not simply in the communication area. According to the author, the new technologies of information and communication's democratic potential have far-reaching political, economic, cultural, conceptual, cognitive and epistemological that are unimaginable. To Michael Twyman language is a vehicle for communication and for planning and organizing information should be considered the user's needs, its repertoire, experience and culture. The author suggests that any study of graphic language should be developed within an operational structure, and identifies some variables, which are: a) purpose b) content's information, c) the substance of information, d) organization of the different ways of organizing elements of graphic language within, e) how it's made, f) means of production, g) availability of investment, h) age, ability, training, interest, condition of use in relation to the context and conditions of reading. Based on these considerations, we consider the design as an agent to bring innovation and difference, transforming and facilitating the subject's interaction with objects, through studies on methods and tools needed to deal with the process of developing projects for the visual learning objects. We will present in this paper an example part of a project of Design in Education, called Multi-Tracks which is a game to help the acquisition of a second language by deaf children. This game was developed by the influence of methods and techniques of Design. The whole project of the Game Multi-Tracks went through a long investigation about the visual language to be used in the components of the game, scenario, cards, etc. Moreover, to illustrate this paper about the acting of Design in situations of teaching and learning, we will present the process of illustrations of Brazilian Signal Language from the project of the Game Multi-Tracks, which resulted in the development of a new graphical language to represent this language.

Keywords:

Image, Language, Education.