Here are some excerpts from this discussion thread, as they were republished in the IDeAs, the newsletter of the UK-based Information Design Association. These excerpts were selected by Conrad Taylor (abbreviated below as CT), editor of the IDeAs.
James Souttar (February 23, 1995)
A debate we seem to be having in the UK concerns the different focus/priorities of academics and practitioners of information design.
Conrad Taylor has raised the question of whether, given that we are supposedly united around the concept of clear communication, it is really appropriate to talk about it in a way that is academically coded.
Of course (if you are an academic - preferably a semiotician), you can turn the question around and ask whether there is such a thing as clear (presumably monosemic) communication. For instance, Robin Kinross argues in his 'The Rhetoric of Neutrality'* that even railway timetables make a rhetorical statement about the organizations that publish them. From this point of view, information design is a fruitful subject for academic enquiry.
On the other hand, those at the 'coal face' might argue that the real debate over information design is for the hearts and budgets of clients: convincing them that it has a place alongside marketing and corporate identity in achieving business objectives. From this point of view, the subject needs to be widely popularized rather than cloistered in the groves of academe.
Consequently, these contrasting points of view seem to be producing some tension in the UK information design community. It would be interesting to hear some opinions on this.
* Presented in Victor Margolin, Design Discourses, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) [CT: This contribution then provoked a number of responses; some time later in the debate James added the following message:]
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James Souttar (April 30, 1995)
> this is a very, very old argument. theory vs doing...
One of the things that interests me about the theoretical perspective is that it tends to focus on methodology rather than content. How do you make certain kinds of information more accessible to their audience? How can you quantify/qualify any supposed enhancements?
What this approach ignores is, do you really need all that information in the first place? For instance, many forms collect far more information than is actually used (or used effectively).
Perhaps the question should not be 'how do we make people understand this form better and comply more' but Alfred Sloan's famous 'what is the worst thing that can happen if we leave this out'.
If you extend this principle, arguably information designers should have more leverage over the kinds of information they work with. UI designers, for instance, would be more involved in deciding whether applications really need all those features - rather than just implementing them. Technical authors would be able to tell engineers that certain aspects of a product should be *made* simpler - so that they are easier to explain.
There is far too much information, and far too much exists as relatively low grade data. If we are talking about a definition for information design, I would suggest that it is 'adding value to information'. But such a definition presupposes that somewhere there is a strategic framework for making decisions as to what information this value is added to, and why. Perhaps this framework will be Information Management- but I suspect that would come as a surprise to most IM departments. Perhaps it needs to be a new discipline-which in a commercial setting will integrate aspects of IM, MIS/EIS, Marketing and Information Design.
[CT: This brought a response from Rob Waller, as follows below...]
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A rambling contribution to the 'old, old argument' about theory and practice...
On Sun, 30 Apr 1995, James Souttar wrote:
One of the things that interests me about the theoretical perspective is that it tends to focus on methodology rather than content.
It rather depends which theoretical perspective - there are an awful lot of them.
Speaking as a practitioner, I can identify the following practical uses for research and theory in information design (although even if I couldn't think of any, I'd be happy for it to go on, just as I'm happy archaeologists exist although there's no practical use for them that I can see):
James' recent contribution moves the debate forward by recognising the limitations of information design when faced with intractable problems - information that cannot be clearly explained because it doesn't actually make sense.
[CT: Some time later, a thoughtful contribution was added by David Sless of the Communication Research Institute of Australia...]
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A rambling contribution to the 'old, old argument' about theory and practice...
On Sun, 30 Apr 1995, James Souttar wrote:
One of the things that interests me about the theoretical perspective is that it tends to focus on methodology rather than content.
It rather depends which theoretical perspective - there are an awful lot of them.
Speaking as a practitioner, I can identify the following practical uses for research and theory in information design (although even if I couldn't think of any, I'd be happy for it to go on, just as I'm happy archaeologists exist although there's no practical use for them that I can see):
James' recent contribution moves the debate forward by recognising the limitations of information design when faced with intractable problems - information that cannot be clearly explained because it doesn't actually make sense.
[CT: Some time later, a thoughtful contribution was added by David Sless of the Communication Research Institute of Australia...]
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I have been following with some interest the recent debate on theory which was introduced by James Souttar. I agree with many of the views expressed but I would like to suggest some useful ways of framing some of the problems (and non-problems) that might help, because I think James' original introduction went to the heart of a difficult problem that has not yet been addressed well.
(By the way, what I'm about to say draws on some of my published work over the last 20 years. I will happily send a bibliography to any interested insomniacs.)
James began by saying that 'we are supposedly united around the concept of clear communication' but went on to reflect that '(if you are an academic - preferably a semiotician), you can turn the question around and ask whether there is such a thing as clear (presumably monosemic) communication'. I happen to be in the position of being an information designer, an academic, and worse, a semiotician. But I don't find myself riddled with internal tensions (at least not about this issue). I think a lot of the problem arises around a misunderstanding of the idea of communication.
>From my own research and the very extensive literature on communication research and theory, I have come to the view that human communication is an inherently unstable, messy and unpredictable process. Misunderstanding is the norm, clear communication is a rare event. This view is only depressing if you believe in miracles, magic, the power of advertising, perfect love, and the possibility of getting through breakfast with your nearest and dearest without being misunderstood. We have got so used to thinking of communication as a 'success' word - part of the rhetoric we find ourselves using working in the insecure corporate world - that we sometimes forget what a struggle it is to communicate with each other in daily life.
If doing it well over the breakfast table is hard, how much harder must it necessarily be with people we don't know whose interests and expectations are different from our own?
So the hell of multiple meanings (polysemic communication) is a fact of daily life, whereas the heaven of single meanings (monosemic communication) is just a dream. Information design sits somewhere between dreams and reality, but where?
In an attempt to answer that question let me place some limits on the range of possible interpretations that can be made of any design. The question of how much diversity of interpretation occurs with any particular communication is not a theoretical question - theoretically the range is infinite - it is a practical empirical question to be determined by testing. Moreover, information designers can only be realistically held responsible for a relatively narrow range of meanings. Of course, railway timetables and other information design objects can be read in many ways apart from the obvious.
I'm not sure who Robin Kinross is arguing against when he challenges the information designers' 'Rhetoric of Neutrality'. Apart from a casual remark made by Bonsiepe in 1965, before the current generation of information designers, Kinross doesn't name anybody else in his article. I don't know any information designers who really believe that they are behaving neutrally.
Many of us have become information designers because we would like to help other people, and that is hardly neutral. The large corporate bodies that many of us work for are not neutral by any stretch of the imagination and this is reflected in the designs we do for them.
But nor is rhetoric invulnerable. If you go into any large organisation which has just had a new corporate ID done, you will find someone (usually low down and disgruntled) who will give a you a wonderful parodied interpretation of the new 'image'. (I have been collecting funny anecdotes on this topic for years. For example, an insurance company called City Mutual Life used to be known to its disgruntled employees as Shitty Mutual Life. Conscious of its poor 'image', the company changed its name to 'Capita', and was instantly referred to by the same staff as 'Crapita'. So it goes.)
This type of subversive reading is common. I don't think information designers should be responsible for controlling it one way or the other!
Rather than 'clear communication', I think it is more useful (and possibly more modest) to think of information design as a craft concerned with making information accessible and usable. This places the emphasis firmly on the userand does not involve us in silly ideas about transmitting ideas from one mind to another (clearer communication). Moreover, as part of our craft we can use methods to determine whether or not our designs are accessible and usable. That is the proper role of testing and what Rob Waller has called 'research'.
In our practice of information design at our Institute (the Communication Research Institute of Australia), we do testing as a matter of routine. It is not an add on feature but an integral part of the design process. We therefore see the hell of multiple meanings at first hand. In practice, the range is not infinite. It is fairly narrow. Usually, with sensitive listening and observation (the essence of good testing) we can narrow the range of unproductive multiple meanings down to an acceptable level. But we would never seek to control meaning absolutely, nor could we.
So the question of polysemic versus monosemic meaning is a practical problem associated with the practice of our craft of information design. The problem, I suspect, that haunts many would be information designers is that they do not use testing as a routine aspect of their practice. These would be information designers would like none the less to assert the value of their craft in the corporate world. Unfortunately, the answer there must be a harsh one: if you cannot offer evidence to demonstrate the value of your work, you cannot expect anyone to pay for it.
I believe the 'academic' questioning of information design is therefore legitimate. As Paul Stiff remarked in his review of a recent IDA conference in IDJ. As information designers we have to offer evidence of our claims otherwise we are no different from the graphic designers who simply assert that they are doing great work.
I hope this helps nudge the debate along.
[CT: Having been referred to in several of the messages, Robin Kinross then joined in:]
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I've just joined this discussion group, and seen - only - David Sless's contribution...
The messiness of communication: yes it's been clear to me for as long as I can remember thinking about design (like David, a good twenty years). But I've never wanted to believe that miscommunication is the only kind of communication.
I remember some correspondence in the mid-1980s with Steve Baker, a fairly convinced poststructuralist, who had subjected David Sless's book on semiotics to a heavy critique in the journal Art History.
I felt that Steve Baker's hellish world was one in which only misreadings happened. But, though you might take a few wrong turnings, even bad signs or maps can get you where you want. We sometimes forget to notice that.
I think that the tendency of poststructuralist (and similar) theory has been to celebrate misreading (as part of diversity and difference, and so politically OK), and to neglect the cases where what is intended in fact happens.
My piece titled 'The rhetoric of neutrality' was given as a forty minute talk at the first Information Design conference, in 1984. It was then published more or less verbatim, and subsequently reprinted in the anthology 'Design Discourse' (ed. Victor Margolin). The talk was a short provocation with just one simple idea in it ('nothing in design is neutral'). I took Gui Bonsiepe's arguments of the 1960s as the one bit of theory I would have time to think aloud about.
I do remember feeling embattled in those years, around the highpoint of the radical-conservative revolution in the UK, and that atmosphere stimulated things I wrote then. I was exercised by the way that design had been roped on to the Thatcherist waggon, as part of the salvation of the UK.
But the piece seems to have some sort of currency still. In the present big debates over graphic design, going on mainly in the USA ( e.g., see the recent three-part collection of articles in Visible Language, or recent issues of Emigré), my 'rhetoric of neutrality' has been mentioned by poststructurally-inclined writers: as an argument in favour of what they believe (nothing is neutral, everything is relative). But then this statement of the obvious comes from someone who elsewhere argues for design that contributes to the social, common world, and on the possibility of shared meanings.
A lot of this debate within graphic design (as distinct from information design) seems to depend on setting up hate-figures ('modernist', 'corporate', 'legibility'), which you then knock down, and set yourself up as in the camp of freedom, expression, creation, diversity, and everything good. So I begin to think that my talk from 1984 has some sort of use as a spanner in the works of those straw-man arguments. 'How can this guy believe in the impossibility of neutrality, as well as in the benefits of striving for objectivity?' Easy - just take off the blinkers.
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I want to pick up from Robin's contribution (having dragged his excellent 'The rhetoric of neutrality' into this discussion in the first place).
As an information designer and a tutor at London's Central St Martin's (a hotbed of post modernism and post structuralism), I frequently find myself caught in the crossfire between fundamentally different conceptions of graphic design. Being a conciliatory kind of person (sometimes!), I have tried to look for areas where there could be a useful dialogue between these approaches.
I found the arguments Robin put forward in 'The rhetoric of neutrality' persuasive, and useful in balancing the extreme scientific determinism espoused by some exponents of information design. However, like him, I am convinced of the need for 'design that contributes to the social, common world, and on the possibility of shared meanings'. A world in which every text was open to unlimited, personal interpretations would be nightmarish.
However, there is one area where I think there could be a particularly interesting meeting between these viewpoints. I am here thinking of materials that are deliberately multidimensional. One example of this, which prefigures the present debate in graphic design by nearly thirty years, is the work the late David Kindersley did with materials drawn from the writings of Idries Shah (and which culminated in his book 'Graphic Variations'). Kindersley wrote about these experiments that:
"I tried to make the letters and their arranging express the particular saying. This is the area in which I would most like to work. These sayings carry meanings at differing levels of understanding, and understanding comes and goes, depending on mood and attention. One tries to create a 'set' that will lead the reader or viewer deeper into the meaning behind the words. Some are deliberately difficult to read, in the hope that a superficial understanding will be avoided."
David Kindersley, 'Graphic Variations', Cambridge: David Kindersley and Lida Lopes Cardozo, 1979 (pages unnumbered).
What I find interesting about this approach is that, in distinction to the post structuralists, it does not assert that 'the reader must be thought of as essentially free to create the text'. However, it does assume that there will be a range of valid interpretations and that these will not all be immediately obvious at first glance (I particularly liked the bit about understanding coming and going, according to mood and attention).
There are, dare I say, shades of Bridget Wilkins and Octavo 7 in the idea of being 'deliberately difficult to read, in the hope that a superficial understanding will be avoided.' The difference seems to be in the nature of the content. Too much post structuralist design interprets material that is one-dimensional, banal and unambiguous.
In contrast, the material that Kindersley was working with is much more opaque - and he achieves, I think, a mirroring between form and content.
As information designers, we often work with material that is perhaps only one or two steps removed from raw data. The 'tsunami of data' that Richard Saul Wurman talks about has caused our society to become obsessive about strategies to deal with ever increasing amounts of information. One of the things that is likely to be swept away, if we are not too careful, is the idea that there may be forms of words that yield multiple meanings - often over an extended period of time.
How do we differentiate these from the mass of other material to which we are subjected? How do we say 'No, don't just absorb this and go on to the next thing - think about it. And not just for ten seconds, but think about it now, and tomorrow, and next week and next year - because it may mean something different then to what it seems to mean now'. Unless we can find a different graphic language for these things, I think we have little hope of preserving them against the deluge.
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