Information/Instructional Design

Information Design is the organisation and presentation of data that allows the reader to understand a given message and process it as information. Information Design helps us to make sense of the vast amount of data which bombards us everyday. It helps us discover meanings and relationships between items or helps us focus on a specific viewpoint and just generally makes it easier and quicker for people to process the information that is being presented.

"...visual method of explaining information and data to help the user achieve a particular objective." (Carliner, 2002)

One of the interesting aspects observed during this course, is the different opinions on how many different ways there are to organize information. Richard Saul Wurman in his book, Information Anxiety, users the acronym LATCH to describe 5 different ways in which data can be organized. Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierachy. Nathan Shedroff in A Unified Field Theory of Design, adds Continuum, Number and Randomness. He removes Hierachy and it seems to be replaced by Continuum. This leaves the reader a little confused on actually how many methods there are and indeed if there are others that perhaps have been left undefined.

But on a closer examination they are really both similar only on a few technical areas. Shedroff lists Numbers as separate from alphabet because numbers are "much more universal because they combine in different forms due to mathematical relationships." Nathan Shedroff highlights the Dewey Decimal System, used in libraries as an example because the books are assigned a number but they do not represent any magnitude value.

Richard Saul Wurman may have included numbers as a part of alphabet and not seen them as separate categories because they both follow a sequence of symbols that represent no order of value. The Dewey Decimal System example, through personal observation does also, on occasion, incorporate alphabet letters in addition to numbers when one is trying to find a book. Perhaps the category could be called Symbols (alphabet, numbers or any series of symbols understood by a given culture.) On the other hand you might feel they should be separate categories, it seems to be a matter of opinion and conjecture.

The other major difference was the inclusion of Randomness as a category by Shedroff.

"There may be other times when random organizations present a better experience than an orderly one..."

It seems to be extremely rare (unsure if personally have witnessed this category) to see this kind of organization of data because if Information Design is about bringing meaning to a given set of data, then what meaning can one derive except for the fact that there is no meaning, there are no meaningful relationships, it is all random? Is that a meaning in itself? Is it really just representing chaos because there is no order?

If anyone is reading this blog, it would be great to view your thoughts on this matter.