communication = design

Data are facts: Information is the meaning that human beings assign to these facts. Individual elements of data, by themselves, have little meaning; it's only when these facts are in some way put together or processed that the meaning begins to become clear.
Davis and McCormack, The Information Age, 1979

Design is about solving problems. It is about making cultural objects, be they packaged food products or websites, accessible and meaningful for their intended recipients.

Design is not primarily about improving appearance -- although good design WILL generally be attractive because ugliness is a strong disincentive to consume and process the object.

Every form of human communication is designed; that is, it is organised into a meaningful format that allows it to be transmitted by its originator and understood by its intended recipient.

Without organisation any component bit of information simply has little or no intrinsic meaning. It's just data.

Organisation depends on shared conventions. Each older medium has a repertoire of organisational conventions that are so well understood they are functionally transparent to the users. As we have seen, equivalent conventions have yet to be established for digital media and those conventions that are currently deployed are largely borrowed from earlier media.

However, this traffic is not ALL one way; we are already seeing older media co-opt the new aesthetics, meanings and methods of new media. Television, for example, has borrowed the use of several simultaneous information windows from computing, whilst cinema has embraced very rapid editing rhythms first used in music video and enabled by digital editing technologies.

Whilst existing theories of communication, (e.g. Cybernetics, Semiotics, Information Theory), shed valuable light on aspects of digital communication, they contain few overt guidelines for web authors.

Three concepts, however, have fundamental importance for web authors:

• Noise >>
• Redundancy >>
• Feedback >>

More about

>> Information Theory
>> Cybernetics
>> Semiotics

Design is a problem-solving discipline. It considers [not only] the appearance of the designed product, but also the underlying structure of the solution and its anticipated reception by users. Because design is focused on solving problems, a design theory must provide more than a series of guidelines about discrete characteristics of the solution, it must focus designers on identifying the problem, [provide] a framework for identifying and considering the inter-related issues that must be addressed in a solution, and help designers develop their instincts about for choosing "right" solutions.

Saul Carliner, 'Physical, Cognitive, and Affective: A Three-Part Framework for Information Design' 1999

The world can be seen as only connections, nothing else... A piece of information is really only defined by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything.
Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web