The Realms of Participation in Visual Identity Design

Many contemporary brands have been embracing the dynamic spirit that currently defines society by assuming more flexible processes, increased levels of interaction with the public, mostly sustained by social media, and an orientation towards customer/user experience and storytelling. Such characteristics should be conveyed by the brand’s visual identities, often redesigned in order to accommodate this new communicative need, frequently adopting a dynamic and prone to mutation design approach, where numerous brand narratives can emerge, many of them crafted by the audiences. The main goal of this conceptual article is to identify the different levels of audience’s participation in the design of brands’ visual narratives, in the context of dynamic mutant brands. Grounded on speculative design and visual content analysis, in this research seven brand identities were mapped within two dimensions (Narrative Design Strategy and Audience’s Interaction), leading to the identification of four different realms of participation. It provides both practitioners (brand managers/designers) and academics with not only a framework for the anticipatory definition and evaluation of the degree of participation but also a bi-dimensional model with the four realms of participation in the narrative design of dynamic/mutant visual identities, to support the planning of the level of contribution the audiences can have in a brand’s storytelling.