Schemas

Things are getting busy at the School of Communication Arts 2.0 - in fact I've only got round to doing this blog after a busy day at school and an evening spent writing and recording a voiceover on the history of telecommunications advertising (a very potted one, mind you).

The morning session from Chris Hill was fascinating throughout, but one part stuck out, which chimed in with the book we're currently reading: Made To Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath. They've been talking about "schemas" - which are (and let's head over to Wikipedia now) "structures that organize our knowledge and assumptions about something and are used for interpreting and processing information".

In other words, when I say "X Factor", you might think "a singing competition on the television that loads of people watch and while entertaining is not perhaps the purest example of musical and artistic expression". You probably think a lot more. Just 2 words instantly bring up a whole range of facts, ideas, names, images, songs and more in your mind - and that makes them an incredibly powerful tool for expressing a complex idea in an easily digestible and easily remembered way.

So today, we had the old AA slogan, "to our members we're the 4th emergency service". And that's all you need - with that you know that you phone them to get help, they come to you, probably in a van, as fast as they can, and they'll fix whatever it is that's wrong. All that is expressed in 2 words - "emergency service".

Words, eh? Bloody hell.