What Is Information Design?
by John Barclay-Morton.
As we begin to examine the field of Information Design, an unexpected question arises: What is information design, anyway? Now, one would expect that this topic would be thoroughly circumscribed in its application and intent; however, this is not the case: information design is a nascent field, and one that is in fact growing rapidly, as it tries to find itself and resolve just exactly what is being addressed under the name of “information design.”
Kim Baer, in the “Information Design Workbook”, defines information design as “…the translating (of) complex, unorganized, or unstructured data into valuable, meaningful information” (Baer, pg. 12). This definition seems to touch upon several common themes notable in the field of information design: that of large and chaotic data sets; that of meaningful simplification; and, also of some mechanism for translation that holds between the two. Indeed, the idea of “meaning” as essential to information design seems to be a commonality shared across many approaches to defining the field; with Robert Jacobson stating in “Information Design”:
“The best information design acknowledges and uses the interactive nature of communication to convey meaning and heighten understanding among all parties involved in the activity or event.
“These statements may seem like truisms. But only a decade ago concepts like edification, commutativity, and interactivity were found exclusively in scholarly tomes parked on dusty shelves marked “Philosophy,” “Psychology,” and “Communication Studies.” Now they are being talked about on the Internet!” {Jacobson, pg. 2).
Personally, as someone with a background in post-structural philosophy, I must stress that my own shelf of philosophy texts is most decidedly NOT covered in dust; and because of this, I am going to take exception to the approaches being advanced for defining information design. I do not contest the idea of edification, as the process of personal enlightenment; nor do I take exception with commutativity, as the process of mutual change. No, what I am taking exception to is the employment of the concept of “meaning” here; and I am grounding my criticisms of this firmly within post-structural analysis.
By way of a some background to my position, I will note that post-structuralism as a philosophic movement arose in Continental Europe (and is therefore often grouped into a general school of “Continental Philosophy”) as a response to the horrors of World War Two. Post-structural philosophy is consistent in one thing, if nothing else: undertaking an unwavering criticism of ideology in all of its manifestations. Through this, it is possible to establish some continuity with the development of information design; for as is noted in the introduction to Information Design, “Why Information Design Matters”:
“Throughout history, people have systematically designed and delivered information in an effort to share their perceptions of the world and persuade others to reach the same conclusions. The Nazi version of history that propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels twisted around the minds of the German people, as well as the television cartoon version of the Gulf war bear grim witness to the possibilities for coercing perception.” (Jacobson, pg. 1).
In critiquing ideology, one of the basic tenets of post-structuralism is the abandonment of linguistic “meaning” — which will always at the very least preference some specific language at the expense of all others. So, although information design might be presented within a context where “The information designer initially works with fields of meaning, not with the materials used to transmit meaning” (Jacobson, pg. 5), it must be noted that this approach immediately leads to some very distinct definitional issues:
“Because the success of information design is so context-dependent, there is almost no way to predict scientifically for any particular setting what will work and what will not. Each design rises or falls according to factors that are difficult to replicate: the setting in which the transfer of knowledge occurs, the individuals involved, the medium or media employed, the original and ultimate purposes of producers and consumers.” (Jacobson, pg. 5).
Taking a notably different approach, post-structuralism relegated determinations of “meaning” to the philosophic trash heap — in favor of a more empirically determinable concept, that of functionality. Rather than asking what something “means”, post-structural analysis attempts to determine how it functions — linguistically, or otherwise. This might seem at first to be a trivial distinction, but the consequences are immediate and decisive: attempts to ascertain “meaning” inevitably lead toward the establishment of transcendentally universal rules and laws of usage; but analyses dedicated toward determining functionality always lead toward specific, empirical instances of actual use.
The dichotomy between systemized “meaning” and specified “function” is exactly what is being encountered when any attempt to determine the nature of Information Design comes up empty handed; and that result is predictable: it quickly becomes apparent that there is no universal, all-embracing meaning to the term “information design” — there are only specific empirical instances of applied functionality that exhibit viable principles of information design. As Isabel Meirelles notes in “Design for Information”:
“Representing multidimensional information structures in a two-dimensional visual display is not trivial. The design process requires both analytical and visual/spatial methods of reasoning. Graphic design in general, and information design in particular, depend on cognitive processes and visual perception for both its creation (encoding) and its use (decoding). If the decoding process fails, the visualization fails.” (Meirelles, pg. 9).
Functionality is keynote in Information Design, and without it the process fails; but, what kind of functionality are we looking for? Robert Jacobson gives us a bit of a hint when he notes:
“It's a common design cliché that “less is more,” but good information design isn't a matter of more or less. Rather, it results from harnessing the determination to engender a better understanding to the appropriate skills for doing so.” (Jacobson, pg. 8).
The second sentence in that quote is rather opaque (although it doesn’t even begin to approach the opacity found in some of the world’s great philosophic texts); but in parsing out what is being pointed at (in a roundabout way), one might reasonably settle on that being “functionality”. The first sentence, however, is actually quite useful; because in discounting one option as that which is not the case, it leaves open the only other option for what the case must be:
"The important thing here is that the decomposition of the composite reveals to us two types of multiplicity. One is represented by space (or rather, if all the nuances are taken into account, by the impure combination of homogenous time): It is a multiplicity of exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of quantitative differentiation, of difference in degree; it is a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and actual. The other type of multiplicity appears in pure duration: It is an internal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination, or of difference in kind; it is a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers."
"In fact for Bergson it is not a question of opposing the Multiple to the One but, on the contrary, of distinguishing two types of multiplicity.”
"Now, this problem goes back to a scholar of genius, G.B.R. Riemann, a physicist and mathematician. Riemann defined as "multiplicities" those things that could be determined in terms of their dimensions or their independent variables. He distinguished discrete multiplicities and continuous multiplicities. The former contain the principle of their own metrics (the measure of one of their parts being given by the number of elements they contain). The latter found a metrical principle in something else, even if only in phenomena unfolding in them or in the forces acting in them."
"Continuous multiplicities seemed to him to belong essentially to the sphere of duration. In this way, for Bergson, duration was not simply the indivisible, nor was it the non-measurable. Rather, it was that which divided only by changing in kind, that each was susceptible to measurement only by varying its metrical principles at each stage of the division." (Deleuze, pgs. 38–40).
So: if good information design is not defined in terms of “a more and a less” then it is instead distinguished through differences in kind. Good information design revolves around finding approaches that show how things are different from each other, and in ways other than scales of magnitude or ranges of extent: good information design functions to distinguish between things, as, of a different nature — rather than simply being of a different amount. If we were just dealing with degree, amount, or magnitude, we would still be working exclusively with data rather than information.
If information design is necessarily bound up in the contingency of empirical experience, and the temporal distinctions that demarcate each and every distinct event as such, then how best to proceed when engaging with this nascent field? Well, for myself, I will again assert something I discovered at the beginning of this course: my pen is a camera. Whatever does that mean, though? Perhaps some guidance might be uncovered through the words of Roland Barthes, as found in his text “Camera Lucida: reflections on photography”:
“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.” (Barthes, pg. 15).
We are in a very different age than the one in which Roland Barthes wrote; but perhaps from this quote we can glean some modest insight regarding what Information Design might be about: through information design, we might encounter in the abstract some manner of timepiece which allows us to see something of the living, in capturing that which makes events distinct from each other.
That is what I am going to be looking for in this course, knowing that this will not be constructed of wood and precisely geared mechanisms — but that it will nonetheless be characterized by functionality, and that it might even in the final analysis be considered (as Kim Baer might say) ’a mechanism for translating data into information’.
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Works Cited:
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: reflections on photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, 1981.
Baur, Kim. Information Design Workbook. Beverly: Rockport Publishers, 2009.
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans.Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
Jacobson, Robert. Information Design. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 2000.
Meirelles, Isabel. Design for Information. Beverly: Rockport Publishers, 2013.
