ICONOGRAPHICAL STIMULI AS A CREATIVE APPROACH FOR SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS

Moscovici defined Social representations as systems of values, ideas and practices that serve to establish social order and facilitate communication. They arise in an effort to make the unfamiliar, familiar. Starting from the Structural Approach, and from a reflection on the role that imagery can provide to overcome the bottlenecks of an exclusive "verbal", we will show that the same word “image” means a wide variety of phenomena. The distinction between picture and image, in fact, will be the starting point of our reflection. In particular, we’ll focus on the role of the picture as an iconographic representation and a particular form of image. Moreover we will try to underline that a picture is a concrete object offered to our perception, which exists as such, regardless of our perceptual identity. On the basis of these considerations, the presentation will be focused on the construction of a new tool called “Iconographical Stimuli”, a useful technique of data collecting in the field of the social representation Theory. The aim of this technique is to explore a social representation object, using situated images in a process of communication.