There is No Such Thing as Information Design
- One of the ways we increase the returns we obtain from understanding the
world is by adapting our vocabulary to reflect our increasing knowledge. Humanity
never would have progressed beyond building the most primitive of mechanical
engines if careful thinkers had not learned to distinguish between energy,
force, work, and power. These words are still used loosely in everyday speech,
but professional mechanical designers and physicists use them carefully and
with well-defined meanings. Professionals in the field of information-related
design will have to learn to be equally careful. We must not allow sloppy
thinking to muddy the deep waters we find here at the meeting of art, psychology,
and electronic technology. Things are difficult enough as it is.
-
- I am often embarrassed when supposedly technically savvy authors abuse terms
such as information, digital, and binary, seemingly unaware
of their precise meanings and implications. If our field is to advance, we
must, without displacing creativity and aesthetics, make sure our terminology
is clear.
-
- As a curmudgeon, I am delighted to point out that the popular term, Information
Design, is a misnomer. Information cannot be designed; what can be designed
are the modes of transfer and the representations of information. This is
inherent in the nature of information, and it is important for designers to
keep the concepts of information and meaning distinct.
-
- Information is an abstraction from any meaning a message might have and
from any particular form a message might take. In the 1940s, the founder of
information theory, Claude Shannon, moved information from the realm of philosophers
to that of physicists, showing that the term could be given a clear definition.
Not only could we define it, but, he demonstrated, we could also quantify
it and treat information as a part of physics, something that I found amazing
and eye opening when I first read his works. One of the ideas that Shannon
established is that any information can be represented by a sequence of the
elementary particles of information, which we now call bits. The unit
of information is a two-way choice; we can model a bit mentally as yes or
no, green or red, on or off, zero or one, and so on. Bits was coined
by the mathematician John W. Tukey as a contraction of BInary digiTS,
that is, zeros and ones, the most commonly used mental model of the smallest
unit of information. (Shannon and Weaver 1963: 9)
-
- We can always represent information as a sequence of bits, or, equivalently,
as a sequence of characters in a text or a string of numbers in base ten (or
any other base). These mechanical rearrangements do not change the information
in any way. There is nothing special, with regard to the content, about the
binary (base two) representation of information, though some people treat
numbers in base two as something almost mystical.
-
- Similarly, there is nothing special about the digital representation of
information. If I take some information and translate it into a non-digital
(i.e. analog) form, say as voltages on a conductor or the frequencies of a
radio signal, that information remains unchanged. We can convert the information
back and forth between analog and digital representations at will. In fact,
every time we use a modem to send email over a telephone line we convert digital
information into analog form; yet nothing happens to the information from
losing its digital cachet. The information is the same however it is represented,
and the identical message eventually appears on the recipient's display with
no evidence of its having been in analog form.
-
- You should therefore disregard any use of the term digital when that
term is used to imply that the digital nature of some information affects
its content or impact. The form of information storage or transmittal-whether
digital or analog, binary bits or decimal digits, or in some other guise-is
irrelevant to the issue of conveying meaning to people.
-
- You might ask: if any information can be represented as a finite sequence
of symbols, can we represent other aspects of the world, such as a 1-centimeter
cube of pure gold or an infinitely long non-repeating decimal like the square
root of two, as information? We can. I just did. That information can take
the form of a bunch of numbers-or even the form of words on a page-does not
limit the content the information might convey.
-
- Even though information is an abstraction that is independent of form and
therefore information cannot be designed, the way in which we represent information
to others is of crucial importance in communicating the meaning of the information.
The representation of the information is the plastic medium with which we
work. It would have been more appropriate to call this field Designing
Information Representation.
-
- So, how do we represent particular information so that it has a desired
effect on the recipient? That it is possible to define the issue (and the
field) in this way depends on the fact that we can represent the same information
in different ways, and that some representations are more effective than others.
In addition, the particular effect we want to achieve can vary a great deal.
-
- This is where we-graphic designers, computer-interface specialists, artists,
musicians, sound technologists, lighting directors, cognitive psychologists,
type designers, ergonomicists, and even mathematicians and physicists-come
in. It is our job as designers to create effective representations of information
for human consumption.
-
- Learning how to represent information effectively requires us to travel
along two complementary paths. One is the apprenticeship route, along which
we learn from the example of current and past practitioners. The other path
is the theoretical route, since understanding some theory-and how to apply
it-can shortcut much trial and error. I use theory in the sense that
scientists usually do, to mean an established body of knowledge, rather than
in the everyday sense of a tentative idea.
-
- Most of us learn how to represent information by observing the work of experts
and working side by side with them. This the apprenticeship path. To leverage
further our designing efforts we can build on the foundations of information
theory and cognitive psychology that underlie the theoretical path. The right
place to start on the second path is with an examination of the audience for
our information; people.
-
-
-
- Ergonomics and Cognetics
-
- In spite of technological advances, people's access to external information
has not expanded beyond their optical, auditory, haptic, olfactory, vestibular,
and (that favorite of infants) gustatory senses. Therefore, the first responsibility
of the designer is to know the limitations and capabilities of the human senses;
a body of knowledge usually considered part of ergonomics and human factors.
A practitioner should know or have immediately to hand, for example, the angular
resolution of the human eye and how large lettering must be for various color
combinations, light levels, distances, and contrast ratios. We need to know,
to list some examples, how fast can the eye move from point to point, how
long does it take to find a target visually, under what conditions can we
hear and understand speech (e.g. in terms of signal to noise ratio), what
range of frequencies are easiest to hear, which typefaces are more readable,
how much or how little pressure can we feel on our fingertips and elsewhere
on our bodies, and how much force a human hand can exert. In addition, we
must know how all this data is affected by human variables such as age and
health.
-
- At times, common sense and common practice are sufficient guides to this
knowledge. But be careful: Time and again, hallowed practices have turned
out to be less than optimal, and designers ignorant of the teachings of ergonomics
have often failed to create products that work within the physical and mental
limitations of human users. Don Norman's delightful book, The Design of
Everyday Things, is full of examples of designer disasters.
-
- As a designer, you may be called upon to create a computer kiosk or a web
interface. To do so efficiently and effectively is difficult if you are not
familiar with the pertinent results from cognitive psychology, such as the
classic book The Psychology of Human–Computer Interaction by Card,
Moran, and Newell (1983). Hundreds of millions of computers have unpleasant
interfaces (Microsoft's Windows comes to mind) because they require abilities
humans simply do not possess, proving that their interface designers were
ignorant of fundamental facts about the human mind. The sheer volume of jokes
about computers reflects our near-universal dissatisfaction with their interfaces.
Of course, it is not only cognitive psychology that is useful. When our information
representations have emotional content, it is useful to have studied what
little is known about human emotions from an engineering point of view. For
example, there is no direct correlation between color and emotional content;
the meaning of color is culturally mediated. Red is not universally a sign
of danger; in some oriental cultures it is white, not black that is associated
with death; and so on. The naïve designer who relies on his intuition
(i.e. his cultural biases) in these regards is likely to find his creations
failing unexpectedly when they have to work with a variety of users.
-
- I am not suggesting that designers should study the neurophysiology of the
brain. While such studies can lead to useful knowledge about how people absorb
and react to representations of information, how the brain functions internally
is not directly relevant to our field. We can treat the brain as a black box
and safely ignore all the twaddle about the parts of the brain and what they
do. Even where this physiological information is technically correct (which
is not always the case), it is of no direct use to us; our only interest as
information presenters in the human brain is how it reacts wholistically,
that is, how people respond or behave.
-
- The currently fashionable right brain–left brain distinctions are particularly
silly. Does it matter to us, as designers, that certain abilities are located
at such and such a location? Would it make any difference if the right brain–left
brain abilities were localized in the top and bottom of the brain rather than
the right and left halves? I think not. Useful information takes an operational
form.
-
-
-
- Art or Science?
-
- Every major field of human endeavor is a mix of art and science. Theoretical
physicists and professional mathematicians speak of the aesthetics of their
work, and are driven by concerns about elegance and beauty. Is a painter any
less an artist for knowing perspective, understanding Josef Albers elegant
experiments and demonstrations about color, or being aware of chemical incompatibilities
between various kinds of paint?
-
- Designing the presentation of information, by the same token, partakes of
the nature of both art and science. Edward Tufte's books reflect such a blend
of knowledge. In one of them, he outlines his five principles for designing
graphics (1983: 105):
- o Above all else show the data
- o Maximize the data-ink ratio
- o Erase non-data ink
- o Erase redundant data ink
- o Revise and edit
- The first four are (mostly) science-based. However, the last, "revise
and edit" tells us not only to check repeatedly that the first four conditions
are met, but also to apply our aesthetic judgment to the final work. Describing
electronic displays in terms of numbers of pixels no more makes our work technical
than the fact that the frequencies of consecutive notes of the tempered chromatic
scale have a ratio of the twelfth root of two makes musical composition a
hard science.
-
-
-
- Summary
-
- Some practitioners in the field illogically called "Information Design"
try to drape themselves with the mantle of technological modernity, recklessly
pinning the drapery together with abused jargon and misunderstood concepts.
The gaps that are left prove more revealing than they know. This does not
mean that their work as designers is bad, it just means that we cannot learn
much from what they say about their work.
-
- I predict that just as astronomy moved from the ancient tales (lovely, but
totally fictitious) of how the constellations were formed to the modern physical
models of the universe (breath-takingly beautiful, and even more awe-inspiring),
the most valuable improvements in the effectiveness of representations of
information will come from scientific analyses of human performance. I do
not imply any abandonment of art and the artistic impulse. I used to spend
hours tediously learning the formal motions used in conducting the various
musical meters so that those actions would become automatic; now, when I conduct
an ensemble, I do not spend any mental energy on technique, but can focus
entirely on communicating the music through the baton. For the same reason,
a designer who works with information should have a firm grasp of human factors.
Once mastered, that knowledge can be swept into the unconscious, where it
can guide you unobtrusively, leaving you free to concentrate on the emotive
and aesthetic sides of your work.
-
- The designer must, to use Wittgenstein's words, "throw away the ladder
after he has climbed up it" (1961:151). It has been the role of my essay
to point out that it can be dangerous to dispose of the ladder any sooner.
-
-
-
- References
-
- Card, Stuart; Moran, Thomas; and Newell, Allen. The Psychology of Human-Computer
Interaction. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983
-
- Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books,
1988
-
- Shannon, Claude and Weaver, Warren. The Mathematical Theory of Communication.
Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1963.
-
- Tufte, Edward. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire,
CT: Graphics Press, 1983
-
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1961
|
