James Souttar (August 8, 1996)
Case Roole wrote:
Nobody replied to my query about the historical relationship between the use of 'information' in 'information design' and Claude Shannon's (somewhat esoteric) use of the term in his 'Mathematical Theory of Communication'.
However, re-reading Robin Kinross' 'Modern Typography' I came across reference to a project carried out by Gui Bonsiepe and students (published in 1968) which sought to apply Shannon and Weaver's formulae to graphic communication. Although Robin stops short of actually deriving 'information design' from this usage, it does seem highly likely.
I have to admit that this came as something of a surprise. Having been associated with the information design community for some years, I can't recall hearing anyone mentioning this. I have a *real problem* with Shannon's purely mechanical model being applied to human communication - and the highly questionable conclusions that this leads to. Consequently it was bit like discovering that a group of friends were really Moonies all along - and had been soft pedalling the doubtful agenda of Rev Moon under the guise of a more innocent activity! (But I'm sure many 'information designers' will be as surprised as I was ;-)
In the 'The Cult of Information', Theodore Roszak attempts to pin down exactly what people mean when they talk about information, and offers a particularly swingeing critique of our current obsession with it (if 'communication' is a success word, 'information' appears to be nothing short of a universal panacea). He also makes a powerful case for the distinction of 'ideas' from 'information' - pointing out that if our society is drowning in the latter, it's pretty damn short of the former. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It certainly helped me to understand why I always had a vague sense of unease when I heard people talking up 'the information revolution/society/economy'.
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Robin Kinross (August 10, 1996)
James Souttar has raised the idea of a history of 'information design', and pointed to Shannon & Weaver's 'mathematical theory of communication' (title of their book, 1949). He also referred to Gui Bonsiepe's article of 1968, 'A method of quantifying order in typographical design'. While not pretending to any kind of history of information design, I could add a few remarks about this:
1. Maybe Shannon & Weaver's theories were, as James says, very mechanistic. But now they have to be understood historically: situated in their time & place - the USA, and specifically the Bell Telephone Lab, around 1950. This isn't to say that judgement and evaluation of ideas is impossible. I suppose that this purely(?) mathematical view wouldn't do very well in the contest of reason.
2. When Gui Bonsiepe was exploring such ideas at the Hochscule fur Gestaltung Ulm, in the 1960s, I think that such mathematical ideas about communication still had some charge, some energy. Again, you have to understand it historically - the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s. For some entertaining history, look at Edgar Reitz's TV epic 'Die Zweite Heimat', which portrayed something of the mood of those times in West Germany: when electronics (in music, for example) were showing the way ahead; when systems-thinking was the most exciting thing.
3. I suspect that one route by which lay people, including designers, got to know about the mathematical theory of communication, and 'information', was Colin Cherry's book 'On human communication' (MIT Press, 1957). For example, Ken Garland's 'Graphics handbook' (1966) leans on Cherry.
4. Bonsiepe's article was published in 'Ulm', the journal of the HfG, in 1968: the year the school closed, amid the political turmoil of that year. Evidently, information theory and political radicalism could go together. In the same year, the 'Journal of Typographic Research' in the USA also published Bonsiepe's article.
5. 'Information Design Journal' was started at (or, at least, with the blessing of) the Open University (UK) in 1979. The first principal editor, and the main source of energy behind IDJ for a long time, was Rob Waller, then at the OU's Institute of Educational Technology (nice mechanistic title!). As I remember it, one of the strong motives behind starting IDJ was to provide the kind of forum that had been lost after 'Visible Language' - the new title, from 1971, of 'Journal of Typographic Research' - had gone overboard for the irrationalist poststructuralist craze, just then beginning to hit US academia. We felt that what had been a good journal (JTR, and at least some of the early VL) was now more or less useless.
6. By the way, I remember a paper by Rob that looked at how the Shannon & Weaver diagram of communication had got copied and spread by later writers. He also suggested that it wasn't much use in understanding what happens in the world.
7. This is very vague - probably Rob and others can correct it - but I have the idea that 'information design', as a term and an idea, did get crystallized quite concretely with IDJ. Of course it was around before 1979, but somehow it began to come together then? A pity that IDJ has always been such a marginal, intermittent, labour-of-commitment publication.
8. In the next issue of IDJ there will be an article by Peter Burnhill, recording the course he ran at Stafford College (UK) in the 1960s and 1970s: this pursued information design of a kind. At Stafford and in other info design activities in the UK at that time, as at Ulm, political radicalism and humane ideals met up with rigorous and sometimes mathematical theories of 'information'.
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Gui Bonsiepe (August 10, 1996)
James wrote:
Hallo James
May I add some observations concerning the issue you brought up: the notion of 'information' as used in mathematical information theory and the use of 'information' by designers.
In 67 or so I was approached by a client (Siemens) to redesign their huge product catalog. As with all graphic designs that have grown on an ad hoc basis, the orginal piece showed a high degree of disorder and arbitrariness - that is: it was a visual mess.
I had studied under Max Bense at the Ulm Design School at the end of the 50ies Shannon and Weaver's information theory and tried to apply the tools of statistical distribution theory to the redesign of the product catalog. I thought - rather naively I would say today - at that time that it should be possible to prove that the redesign had a higher degree or order, not just by looking at the pages. Today I would argue against this approach that it did not take into account the social dynamic of design and design reception, and that is was tainted by an "objectivistic" approach. As far as I recall Shannon's text he was very careful and did not claim that his particular use of the term 'information' had any implications for the wider fuzzy use of this word. Explicitly he put into brackets the semantical dimension. He was interested in the efficient transmission of signals in telephone lines. One might say that information is not something "objective", but that information is constituted only in the moment of interpretation by an agent. Without agent, there are only data, signals, but not information.
Now what is the contribution of the information designer in communication processes? Using again a notion from mathematical information theory, one might say that the information designer envisages the reduction of cognitive entropy or cognitive load. In this context the notions of "maps" and "mapping" are useful - as used by Denis Wood in his book "The Power of Maps".. A map of a domain is a tool that facilitates effective action, of making intelligible an otherwise intransparent reality.
The sciences that made the "visual turn" recognized what one might call "the power of the retinal space". Designers that are trained in visual distinctions can contribute to effective communication, even if until now professional practice seems to be more advanced than theory. Particularly when we are dealing with learning, the paradigm of discoursive intelligence (linguistic distinctions) can be enriched with the paradigm of visuality. This contradicts a long and deeply engrained tradition of higher learning that privileges discoursive competence and does not even take into consideration the domain of visuality.
It is revealing that the engineering disciplines face difficulties in coming to terms with visuality that they want to grasp - and misunderstand - as "cosmetics". The notions of "cosmetical changes" or "souping up" that are often used in programming when the issue of interface design is brought up shows the lack of more sofisticated distinctions.
Innovations in technology (the world-wide process of digitalization) bring some movement into the century old predominance of discoursive mastery - and graphic designers have a unique chance to bring their know-how of visual distinctions into this new process. The basis for a new visual culture has been created by professionals without participation of graphic designers. That is an undeniable fact. The computer scientists and programmers opened a new domain that graphic designers now can enter asking sometimes some simply but uneasy questions: what is this technology good for? And not only asking these questions, but also giving some answers to issues of communication.
Though I share the concern that the claims sometimes made by the design professions are too vague, I would not consider it advisable to fall into the other extreme of design(er) bashing. Design can make - and does make - a difference.
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James Souttar mentioned:
And Tullis later applied the same formula to computer screens. His recommendations have been incorporated into guidelines for screen design. I've been investigating using the formula to evaluate GUI screens. I'll be happy to either debunk or support according to what my research shows :-) BTW at a recent conference one of the attendees told me that the Shannon formula had been discarded by the linguistic community. He did not give me any references. Does anyone have any references supporting or rubbishing the theory?
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Decker Walker (August 11, 1996)
The profound and sophisticated interpretations of the actual and potential meaning of the term "information design" contained in the last half dozen postings are certainly interesting and may reveal important meanings implicit in the term, but we shouldn't overlook the obvious, either.
The prime motive of the founders of information design as a field seems to have been to establish a profession on the model of established design professions such as engineering design, graphic design, or interior design. All professions of design specialize in the design of some class of objects. If one is to name a professional who designs a wide variety of items designed to inform and guide the actions of others, such things as tax forms, manuals, signs, computer interfaces, etc., - information design is a fairly logical, commonsense choice. One needs abstraction or else the profession is Balkanized into "forms designers," "manual designers," "sign designers," "computer interface designers,"etc., and the result is numerous tiny crafts, not a substantial profession. What are the other options? Communication design? Cognitive design? Some invented word like cybernetic design????
The term information, happily, brings overtones of rigorous science, courtesy of Claude Shannon, et al. For those trained in the hard sciences, the concept of information is of monumental importance and is certainly not outmoded. The discovery that matter, energy, distance, and time were not sufficient to account for physical phenomena, that another quantity, information, was needed and that it was connected to and described the extent of order present in a physical system and that order, in turn, was required to transmit information, led to the development of a whole new layer of physical science atop the structure left by the 19th century.
The difficulty is that the physicist's concept of information is insufficient for explaining how humans communicate using natural languages. The physicists' concept of information does not coincide with either the linguist's models of how language works or with the ordinary person's ideas about people sending messages to other people via telegraph, telephone, TV, etc. What is normally meant by human communication, however unwise we may be to use this expression, is not captured by the physicist's concept of information.
So, whether or not the founders of information design had these thoughts in mind when they took the fateful step of naming our field, the difficulties remain. But, after all, how much conceptual weight can we expect any one word to bear? Any choice we make will have its limitations. I like "information design." I think it's a useful way to lump certain design activities together. I don't expect much intellectual coherence from the term or, indeed, a clean, coherent intellectual foundation for the field. Every design activity is an intellectual bastard. That is the source of its vitality and usefulness.
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