Information
Design
The most
important aspect of any piece of communication is its organisation.
Without organisation any component bit of information is simply that
-- it has little or no intrinsic meaning. Think for a moment of a book
-- as you break it down into increasingly small stand-alone bits --
chapter, paragraph, sentence, word, letter -- more and more of the meaning
disappears. We might be able to surmise a great deal about a novel and
its characters by reading one chapter, but hardly anything by reading
one paragraph. A sentence can only present us with the barest facts,
whilst a word can at best summon a general definition.
Mostly
we don't think about how we structure the contents of our communications
-- our information. Most of those structure are second nature, they
are so well known that it seems impossible that they are not natural
and inevitable. We don't think about the grammar of our first language
or the word order of our speech. It wasn't really until needs grew to
structure large amounts of information for easy retrieval that people
began seriously to consider the ways in which they structured information.
Pre-literate
societies utilised a range of means to encode and transmit information
across the generations. Means to help fix the information in individual
memory was extensively deployed -- these included fitting the information
in regular rythmical and rhyming structures (e.g poetry and song), and
attaching specific information to striking mental images (e.g myths
and legends). The Ancient Greeks, who considered oratory to be one of
an individual's greatest accomplishments, formalised these mnemonic
schemes into the Art of Memory (Ars memoria) and structured their
expression through the practice of Rhetoric.
The Middle
Ages and the Renaissance saw an outburst of schemes for structuring
and retrieving information; grand schemes were proposed which organised
all of reality into great chains of being or ordered by analogy to the
human body.
Moveable-type
printing, which allowed the first great information storage technology,
quickly spawned conventions for the ordering of materials in books,
allowing readers to more easily navigate their contents. Page numbers,
tables of content, indexes, etc are now so accepted that no one thinks
to question whether the numerical data in the index refers to number
of mentions or page numbers. The context determines the meaning.
New technologies
bred new ways of storing and retrieving information -- some using physical
structures, like a card indexing system. Others, constrained by the
limitations of their medium, developed more metaphorical structures.
Film, for example, can only be accessed in a linear manner, through
time, but the content uses a number of information organisational mechanisms
including metaphor, metonymy, chiasmus, displacement, symmetry and allegory
to encode and communicate information.
Our century
has seen a massive reformulation in regards to information and its organisation.
The discovery of DNA transformed our understanding of the building blocks
of life. Cybernetics and Communications theory have transformed our
understanding our understandings even further. Organisation of information
is the underlying principle of reality -- to constitute reality and
our understanding of it.
But it
wasn't until the big time arrival of the computer and the new challenges
that it offered that the process of organising information became elevated
to the status of a creative art. The computer, with its convergent possibilities,
able to mimic the functions of all other representational and communications
media seemed to offer a new possibility -- interactivity. The ability
of the user to effect the outcome. Even the word for people who interacted
with computer-based media, 'users', is significant. Other media have
viewers, readers, listeners, audience -- all intrinsically cast as passive
recipients of authorial control. User, however, presupposes an active
involvement with the media -- somebody who can do something with it.
Of course,
writers such as Barthes have demonstrated that positions vis-a-vis,
for example a novel, those of the writer and the reader, are both active
-- both bringing their own version of a work into being, neither capable
of pinning it down and permanently fixing its boundaries.
Interactivity,
however, has brought new problems -- not least how to even conceptualise
it outside of the models we already have -- hence industry fondness
for ideas like Net TV and on-line catalogues. And it is these new problems,
stemming from the need to organise and make retrievable and meaningful,
vast stores of separate bits of information which has led to the creation
of the information artist or architect.
Richard
Saul Wurman, in introducing his book Information Architects, wrote
"I
mean (information) architect in as in the creating of systematic,
structural and orderly principles in order to make things work: the
thoughtful making of either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs
because it is clear."
Clement
Mok sees information design as the defining feature which makes interactive
works coherent and usable. He blames much of the failure of interactive
works on their lack of ability to clearly communicate with people what
they are going to get and how they will get it. Whilst a book, for example,
has many non-representational indicators of what kind of book it is
(weight, paper quality, print style etc), interactives must solely rely
on the presentation of their contents to communicate with people. He
writes,
"An
information designer bridges the gap between a user's cognitive model
and an engineers database structures by creating an interface that
deploys familiar organisational models, corralling data into groups
and perceptible hierarchies."
Wurman
has indicated that he had found only five ways to meaningfully organise
information. These are known by the menomic 'LATCH' standing for
-
L)
by location,
- A)
by alphabet,
- T)
organised by time (museum shows, for eg),
- C)
by category (e.g like department stores),
-
H)
by hierarchy (e.g from the largest to smallest).
Mok begs
to differ, offering instead seven universal data structures --
- linear,
- hierarchical,
- web
or rhizomatic,
- parallel
- matrix,
- overlay
-
spatial zoom.
Both of
these conceptualisations provide methods for helping users navigate
through the information available within a work -- acting as a conceptual
roadmap -- showing us where things are and indicating what kind of things
they might be. They provide the context from which we can understand
the material which is presented to us.
And mostly
they work very well -- particularly for large quantities of archived
material.
What it
doesn't work so well for is providing the more nuanced experiences --
interactions (where content is ordered over time), -- which many theorists
posit as the 'thing' which differentiates multimedia from other creative
media. In the early 90s, following publication of the ground-breaking
book 'The Art of Human-çomputer Interaction' which she edited,
Brenda Laurel published 'Computers as Theatre'. Her contention was that
interface design had become too caught up in representing 'things' and
did not pay enough attention to designing (inter)action. She proposed
theatre as a model for designing interfaces, highlighting the need for
computer programs and their interfaces to be designed as one coherent
whole rather than the usual situation of the interface design happening
after the core functionalities and concepts of the programme had already
been designed and implemented. By looking to successful concepts and
strategies from the performing arts and, in particular, to the analysis
of the structural elements of representation provided by Aristotle's
'Poetics', Laurel reinvigorated the industry's approach to interface
design.
Here the
guiding experience has been that human beings derive meaning from contiguity
-- temporal or spatial proximity -- as much as from overt content/information.
In
a famous 1919 experiment, Lev Kuleshov edited footage of an actor's
face before three other images; a bowl of hot soup, a woman lying dead
in a coffin, and a little girl playing with a toy bear. Each sequence
was shown to a separate audience, and each audience saw three very different
emotions -- hunger, horror, parental love -- expressed by identical
images of the actor. Kuleshov had demonstrated that editing, the concatenation
of separate shots, was more powerful than the content. Eisenstein went
on to further explicate that narrative is created not by the content
of the individual shots in a film but by their interaction.
Art and
creativity works with layering, ambiguity and other structural methods
to provide depth and complexity of representation often within deceptively
simple contexts -- art could perhaps be thought of as a compression
algorithm for the storage and presentation of complex and subtle cultural
and conceptual information. The famous information theorist Edward Tufte
has written
"What
is sought in the designs for the display of information is a clear
portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather
the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and
the difficult -- that is, the revelation of the complex."
Many people
have proposed that storytelling provides that elegantly simple interface
to complex content, that narrative indeed is innate to humans -- some
even propose that we are hardwired for it. The Russian morphologist,
Vladamir Propp proposed that all stories could be broken down into a
small number of constantly recycled components or morphemes which could
be endlessly swopped about as long as they remained in their correct
place within the narrative flow. But is essence, Propp saw all folkstories,
which he saw as the ancestors of all narrative forms, as being about
crossing territory -- about leaving home, the road movie. Joseph Campbell,
and more recently interactive multimedia industry heavy weight, Christopher
Volgler, synthesising in Jungian theory about archetypes, elaborate
the narrative structure into that of the hero's quest. Whilst these
formulations may seem simplistic a little analysis will reveal their
essential truth.
Art, however
isn't just about getting your protagonist from A to B -- whether that
is in space or in her head -- it's about how you get her there. Likewise,
multimedia is not simply about getting a user to do or learn something
-- it's about creating an experience.
American
art and architecture theorist Donald Kunze has proposed a structural
formula for the production of works of art which may be of use. He proposes
that the central problem of creating works of art is to get your audience
to where you want them to be whether they are aware of this journey
or not -- what he calls the 'arrival problem'. In art forms that don't
involve literal audiences, this arrival problem is the sense of satisfaction
and wholeness that comes when you feel that you got the point, or have
seen all there is to see. Closure provides the audience the satisfaction
it needs through providing a perceivable structure within which to interpret
and appreciate the content.
Kunze
proposes seven central universal strategies in making and structuring
art works.