Information Design contains implicit values

Jen and Ken Visocky O’Grady, The Information Design Handbook (Cincinnati: HOW Books, 2008)

Chapter One, “The Need for Information Design”

8 / Demand for knowledge up
(knowledge the same as information? Hierarchy from data to info to knowledge?)

9 / Struggle to communicate

(Doesn’t everything communicate? we read it; i.e. kinds of communication)

10 / Technology: internet mentioned instantly: huge old computers

(Today’s centres just as large, but more; Google’s air conditioning)

11 / World of clients, share information (do we share with clients? business model only way?)

(Doesn't InfoDes point beyond business / profit / competitive model)

12 / More time at work

(Not how efficiency increases  our leisure? We must be more efficient, t4?)

13 / (Anyone actually have a family like that? Is the dominant form normal? Does this graphic add any information?)

14 / More messages, more ways; design always adapts to new tools, become consultants

(Technology inevitable? Always better? What demands, values, preferences being met by it?)

(Major development not messages but memory; third great leap: brain à book à digital;
see Paul Saffo, “Memory was once the exclusive domain of the intellect.” http://www.saffo.com/essays/aiga.php)

15 / Value of design, data needs clarity and sense; nice little info graphic on Powers of 1,000

(Value of design only realized when commercially viable? Can we do it because it should be?)

i.e.  Information and data never neutral, always based on assumptions and values

• Nigel Spivey, “The Birth of the Imagination,” Chapter 2 of How Art Made the World (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

What were the cave artists trying to tell us? What information can they give us?

Note the kinds of evidence used here to decide which theory is strongest.

We can read the images themselves because they are iconic representations, they resemble things in a way that our brains naturally process

So the question becomes, how and why did we begin to depict things, invent pictures? What are the different theories Spivey examines?

The Drakensberg example from Africa, of ‘Bushmen’ cliff paintings: what does this example tell us? What links this present day culture with ancient images?

Why does he suggest these images are likely the product of altered states of consciousness?

Farming begins Early Neolithic, 9000 BCE, sheep and goats, wheat and barley.

It is often argued that once there was sufficient food, art could arise. What does he suggest is the proper relationship between the rise of civilization and art?

Relate these competing explanations to Idealist vs. Materialist theories of history