Design of Understanding

St Bride Library / 28th January

The conference on Friday was really interesting. I'll post some responses to some of the talks.

David McCandless

The Conference started with David McCandless, author of the book Information is Beautiful. He started talking about his career: how he started as a programmer and journalist and ended as a graphic designer. David McCandless believes in the power of diagrams to facilitate thinking and understanding and he realised that when he was trying to write an article about a complex matter. So he just experimented to visualize it. And it worked – he didn’t need words anymore.

After he had an ideia for a book that would focus the visualization of information. Just in the very end, it would be called Information is Beautiful. All the process, since the idea to the publication, took him about two years. He described its development in six stages: idea, doubt, concept, data collection, design, publication.

I couldn’t help comparing it with our research, project. Same period of time, and we can more or less identify the same stages. So yes, I believe we are in the very middle of the doubt, and we will be, for some more time I imagine. It’s interesting how the doubt phase was almost as big as the design phase.

During the concept phase, he generated lots of ideas (about 300), of information that could be interesting to visualize. Instead of using inspiration, curiosity, passion and wonder, he sees boredom, ignorance, bewilderment and frustation as opportunities to create:

1 How can I make this interesting?

2 How can I find this out?

3 How can I understand this?

4 How can I make this work better?

Throught the design stage, everything starts with a spread sheet and lots of sketching. It’s a good exercise to use both sides of the brain. He stressed the importance of sketching before in paper, it’s possible to understand if it works or not. Just after in Illustrator and then “lots of time” to reduce, make it better, optimize it.

Finally he ended with some failure examples, as well as his personal view of what works: a visualization should be self-suficient. It should combine integrity, form, function and interest. It should optimize information, not simplifying it. This last suggestion reminded me a quote from Donald Norman’s last book Living with Complexity: “... good design can help tame complexity, not by making things less complex, but by managing the complexity.”

Michael Blastland

This energic lecture was the one that really made a new point for information design: “How can we design uncertainty?”

Here is a good question. Or a good oportunity, as Michael Blastland suggested.

Michael Blastland is journalist that unveils statistical data, questions it. He’s not a designer so he looks to designer’s work in a different perspective, seeing its problems and possibilities.

Data is not concrete, there’s a huge amount of uncertainty and vagueness. Numbers go up and down much more than we think, and mainly in smaller places (smaller amount of people involved – more variation).

He stressed about the importance for the designer of knowing what he is working with: “If we don’t understand data, how do we want to visualize it?”. Because this can cause a problem of misleading. It already caused. Lots of projections and decisions were based in static visualizations that aren’t real.

Statistics is often defined as the science of uncertainty, so we should concentrate in visualizations that consider the possibilties as probabilities. There are few examples that are already doing this, like in wheather forecast. But it’s not enough, we have to explore it. How? With colours? Space? Shapes? Movement? This is up to us now.