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Information Design
Information Design

edited by Robert Jacobson

i Rata Library

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
 V

Second printing, 1999

@1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights resented. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or
mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retneval)
without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Information design / edited by Robert Jacobson,

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-10069-X (he : alk. paper)
1. Communication in design. 2. Communication—Technological
innovations. I. Jacobson, Robert E., 1948-
NK1 510.153 1999
302.2—dc21 98-53665
CIP
 Contents

Foreword ix

Richard Saul Wurman

Preface xv

1. Introduction: Why Information Design Matters 1

Robert Jacobson

/ Theoretical Foundations of Information Design 11

2. Information Design: The Emergence of a New Profession IS

Robert E. Horn

3. Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making: A Proposed Theory for Information Design 35

Brenda Dervin

4. Human-Centered Design S9

Mike Cooley

5. Sign-Posting Information Design 83

Romedi Passini
vi Contents

II The Practice of Information Design 99

6. The Uniqueness of Individual Perception 103

Roger Whitehouse

7. Information Design in Informal Settings: Museums and Other Public Spaces 131

C. G. Screven

8. Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving 193

Yvonne M. Hansen

9. Visual Design in Three Dimensions 221

Hal Thwaites

10. Collaborative Information Design: Seattle's Modern Odyssey 247

Judy Anderson

III Designing for the Technologies of Information 263

11. Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory of Design 267

Nathan Shedroff

12. Interactivity and Meaning 293

Sheryl Macy, Elizabeth Andersen, and John Krygier

13. The Role of Ambiguity in Multimedia Experience 301

Jim Gasperini

14. Sculpting in Zeroes and Ones 317

Steve Holtzman
vii Contents

15. Personal Reflections on the Development of Cyberspace 327

Simon Birrell

Epilogue 339

16. Rationalizing Information Representation 341

Jef Raskin

Contributors 349
Foreword*

Richard Saul Wurman

Well, there's today & there's tomorrow.

Today we have things called search engines—a strange kind of mecha¬
nistic, industrial-age term for information tools—with funny names like
Hotbot & Alta Vista, where you type a name or a subject & you have huge
numbers of hits, which are rated by the search engine on how close to
your name or word the original references are.
This is certainly better than nothing, but these mechanisms are not
what dreams are made of. What are our dreams about information? What
are our dreams about wisdom & knowledge?
For the first time in history, we can actually dream & expect some of it
to happen. And, since dreams are described by human beings, they are
constituted out of the fabric of what is deemed at any moment possible &
what is deemed as possible is available in new combinations.
When I told the story about Michelangelo & viewing the piece of stone
before the hammer and chisel was invented, and all that Michelangelo
was able to mouth was his admiration & observation that it's a big piece
of stone; whereas, when somebody slaps a hammer & chisel in his hand

* Adapted from a presentation made at the 1998 Technology, Entertainment, and Design
Conference. (JED)
X Wurman

upon the event of the invention of those technologies—of tool making,

metallurgy—he then, because of the availability & possibility, thinks of the
creative opportunity & shouts, "I must let Moses out!"
Let's hear it for tomorrow!
Now is the time to start shouting about having smart engines that know
who you are & anticipate the things you might be interested in. We need
smart software & smart hardware in combination which suggests sparklers
in a birthday cake, amazing connections between thought & thought,
braiding & weaving ideas, overlapping to help you create creative thoughts,
new thoughts, artful thoughts, new patterns which are yours. Tomorrow is
about personal journeys through data creating patterns that you own, trips
that are only yours, journeys & voyages that profile who you are, fantasies
of flying through information that is constantly accessible & understand¬
able, that tickle a random thought until it becomes an idea & combines
ideas until they become inventions & packages those inventions so they
become available for others. Now is the time to dream.
Let's also hear it for books like this collection edited by Bob Jacobson.
Books give laurels to the people with passion about understanding. After
dreaming comes doing. These words will help start people doing.
The President says to the Vice President, & the Vice President tells the
nation, "Gee, children would learn so much more, if only we could repair
the schools." If we take that thought further along we can feel in our
bones how much better Lincoln would have been if he didn't have to read
by candlelight in his log cabin, if only he had improved bricks & mortar.
I must say this is the worst of the educational bureaucracy, a bureau¬
cracy that focuses—if it isn't on bricks & mortar then it's on teacher's
salaries, & if it isn't on teacher's salaries it's on crime in the schools, &
if it isn't on crime in the schools then it's on strange tests called SATs &
PSATs that measure your ability in a pressure-driven situation to fill out a
multichoice questionnaire.
I wonder about the correlation between the creatively wonderful people
in our society & SAT scores. I wonder what the correlation is between who
these people are & the urgencies of an educational bureaucracy. I wonder
XI Foreword

what is being done to trace, both backwards & forwards, the process of
learning that pulls it out of the fever of short-term memory, bulimically
put on a piece of paper called a test, & this memory shortly erased because
of the requirement for still another load of uninteresting facts to be put
once again down on a piece of paper & forgotten the following week. For
most of us, that's the cycle of our educational experience.
What of the moments of learning, of understanding ourselves, our hu¬
man form, our sense, our insides & our outsides? Isn't this the logical
place to begin? Within a 5 minute walk of where we get up in the morn¬
ing, from the electrical system & the plumbing, the sewage system & the
structure, the quality of air & water, the insides of our pancreas & the
outsides of the roof, the street curve & the traffic flow, the peristaltic
action of a traffic jam & the swallowing mechanisms of our esophagus, the
cutting of a piece of bread & the chewing of some gum, the digestion of
food & the rotting of our teeth, the sloughing off of skin & the budding
of a tree. All within view, all free, all within a 5 minute walk, all there for
the taking, all for the questioning, we need a guide, we don't need a
SAT test, we don't need a. metal detector, as we walk in this garden of
knowledge.
Yesterday, I was in one of those terrifying blank moments when you
aren't certain if your eyes are opened or closed, dreaming, as the poet
Robert Graves calls it, "the waking dream'' about how little I know about
almost everything. I think I went off in this dream-state reading the
Sunday New York Times. With an image of my mind as I read these lines of
type, as if each line was on a curling piece of cellophane which blew off
irretrievably.
Then my stomach gurgled, & I realized that I don't even know anything
about my own body. I don't know if the sharp pain in my chest is a signal
that I'm about to die, or I ate beans, or I stretched my arm the wrong way
in a more & more unforgiving musculature.
So, in these moments of sheer, empty anguish—of literally being the
Zen empty bucket—the waterfall opportunity of understandable stuff, of
lazily rolling around in the warm mud of clarification, of the celebration of
XII Wurman

connecting a most minor revelation to almost anything else, the ooh-aahs

that occur infrequently, within the midst of all this terror came a gleeful
happiness that I'd always have something to do, I'd always have some¬
thing to work on. I'd always have something to make understandable.
There are an infinite number of journeys to take through the design of
understanding. First a little walking path through a field connecting to a
towpath by a canal, journeys, roads, walkways, resting places & parking
lots & harbors, highways and cloverleafs, all navigated in some personal
and self-owned journey through information, organized by signs showing
me where I am, when something took place, what category of knowledge
it is, some sort of organization by importance or size, & indexed by the
strange, artificial 26 letters of our life called the alphabet.
The business of America in the next century without doubt will be the
learning business, directed at children of all ages, taking place in the Age
of Also, through parallel systems of learning, through parallel systems of
media, real-time conversation, the pressing of the flesh, the eyeball con¬
versation, new ideas of books, smart television & smart searching mecha¬
nisms, through smart computer/tv machines, entertainment informing us
as we recognize the utter joy that occurs as we are entertained into
understanding, learning, & then wisdom. We are going to learning this
way & also that way. We are going to surf the net & also read books, CD-
ROMs & DVDs, video & cinema, conversation & music. Also & also. All
the design of understanding. All learning. All personally owned & directed.
It is now quite clear that the technology business, the entertainment
industry & the design professions have now tied the knot. Their tying of
the knot—perhaps in a more flowery way—the bow of that knot is their
more recent focus on many emerging parallel systems of learning, inde¬
pendent of the educational bureaucracy. Clearly, the most creative &
talented individuals in our society, particularly the young, talented &
creative individuals, are joining the ranks of these three businesses. They
bring to this braid of backgrounds, not only their creative ideas, but a
means of distributing these ideas & an attitude that's focused on learning.
What a wonderful moment this is.
xiii Foreword

What a wonderful moment to have the catastrophe or the perception of

the catastrophe as it effects a bankrupt educational system, come at the
same moment when technology & entertainment, or what I call tech-
notainment, & information, or what I call Information Architecture, have
a raison detre, a purpose, a reason for being, an exciting need to develop
their wings, to stretch their arms, to shake their fingers & to think up
things that they can only think up now because of the availability of an
information technology & a network for distribution & accessibility.
This is a cornucopia of the future.
A future where learning—the design of learning, the design of under¬
standing—becomes a major business. It also happens that at the time
when it's indeed the only force in American that can lead towards at least
a partial leveling of the playing field between the have-mores, the have-
nots & what seems up to now to be the never-gonna-haves. This will
constitute not only the great American business in the 21st century but its
growth to intellectual greatness.
These businesses, whose foundation will be the design of understanding,
will be a cornerstone in the creative economy in the decades to come. Isn't
it wonderful: that designers, instead of only applying mascara & fashion,
leaning on the crutch of esthetics, rewarding only each other, will now
find rewards & purpose in the society as a whole? This is an exciting
moment & the explosion of individuals across this country & the world,
who now live & breath, think & ruminate, about making things under¬
standable is growing exponentially each year.
Isn't it wonderful that information technologists & the entertainment
industry will be able to dance a dance that matters—not just an obsession
with bandwidth, storage capacities & bells & whistles.
Their dance can be heated by the warmth that comes from understand¬
ing measured by human memory & creative learning connections. Infor¬
mation in its highest form is both an art & an entertainment.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Steven Holtzman,
an intellectual pioneer—and a friend.
Preface

This anthology began and was completed at a time of considerable pro¬

fessional and personal turmoil for the editor. I was changing jobs, chang¬
ing professions, changing lifestyles, changing, well, almost everything.
What I hear from my friends and family tells me I am not unusual.
Everyone I know is having similar adventures. Change, magnificent in
its sheer magnitude, imposes itself on every aspect of our lives. We are
co-conspirators in its onslaught. For every action there is a reaction, no
less in matters of the intellect than in flashes of fire and movements of ice.
Information Design is our collective reaction to those changes and to the
ad hoc emergence of a new discipline. In its form and acceptance it is, we
hope, a harbinger of positive changes to come.
I've tried to locate the conceptual ground-zero for information design in
order to pay homage to its precursors and formative voices. My thoughts
have constantly returned to familiar names: William James, Marshall
McLuhan, Gene Youngblood, J. J. Gibbons, and, especially, Richard Saul
Wurman (who contributed the Foreword). Undoubtedly there are others. A
complete listing of those working in art, design, and the social sciences—
all our long-lost intellectual cousins—would take up a book in its own
right. In time, many will be recognized as great thinkers, and all will be
seen as pioneers of the new field. Iwo of the contemporaries bringing us
together are Yuri Engelhardt, who moderates the InfoDesign computer
XVI Preface

mailing list (infodesign@[Link]), and Raghu Kolli and his team at the
Technical University of Delft, who created and maintain the UI-Design
Web page ([Link]/uidesign).

Many individuals have cooperated to cajole Information Design into being.

(Perhaps yanked would be a better word.) There were times when this re¬
luctant editor might have succumbed to weighty problems unrelated to its
creation, times when the sheer number of changes 1 had to juggle was al¬
most too much. Those who urged me on—the contributors, the MIT Press
staff, my friends and family—deserve the lion's share of credit for whatever
merits this publication may possess.
Bob Prior, computer science and engineering editor at MIT Press, pro¬
vided the invitation that got this book going. His patience is equaled only
by his wise direction to novices like me. Sarah Speare, former executive
director of the Society for Environmental Graphic Design, along with Paula
Reese and Linda Soukop, coordinated SEGD's 1994 annual meeting in
Seattle, where I recruited this anthology's initial contributors.
The cofounders of my erstwhile virtual worlds design company,
Worldesign Inc.—Avi Bar-Zeev, Chet Dagit, and Peter Wong—offered me
insights of great value. I also benefited from the ideas of Shannon Smith,
who joined us later.
My family has been supportive throughout; I thank each one of them.
My former wife, Sandra Kay Helsel, and her son, Aerie, put up with more
than the usual author's family. Not only were we separated in time but
also in space, for literally years. During those times apart, my housemate,
Bruce Cherry, provided help with the dishes and personal wisdom.
Above all I thank the information designers, every one of them, whether
they are practicing a formal trade or just making the world a little more
understandable. They hold our future in their hands.
Introduction: Why Information Design Matters

Robert Jacobson

This book is for information designers. And because all of us, all of the
time, are both producers and consumers of information, it is for you.
Throughout history, people have systematically designed and delivered
information in an effort to share their perceptions of the world and per¬
suade others to reach the same conclusions. The Nazi version of history
that propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels twisted around the minds of the
German people, as well as the television cartoon version of the Gulf
War bear grim witness to the possibilities for coercing perception. In the
1930s, as Franklin Roosevelt's “Fireside Chats" were buoying the spirits of
depression-torn America, animation pioneer Walt Disney was cheering
moviegoers and beginning to build an entertainment empire around the
zany antics of a cast of fantasy figures. But information design has far
more distant roots: some of the earliest efforts to subjectively craft human
experience lie in the mythologies and tales told by the priests, poets, and
playwrights of the ancient world.
What makes our current discussion of information design so exciting is
its emphasis on two interrelated concepts: edification and commutativity.
Edification is the process of personal enlightenment, while commutativity is
the process of mutual change. Contemporary information designers seek to
edify more than persuade, to exchange ideas rather than foist them on us.
2 Jacobson

We have learned well that the person who issues designed information is
just as likely as its intended recipients to be changed by it, for better or
for worse. This new awareness has been forced on us by ever more
powerful technologies of communication, media that dramatically high¬
light and shorten the links between those who generate information
designs and those who receive and act on designed information.
The fact that information design is so pervasive reminds us to be careful
and deliberate in the way we apply the power inherent to this new pro¬
cess. That is, really, the purpose of this book: to show us how to be both
cautionary and hopeful, to offer us visions of how information design can
be practiced diligently and ethically for the benefit of consumers and pro¬
ducers alike.
The information designers in this book acknowledge the systemic nature
of communication. As the old saw has it, what goes around comes around.
Everyone has a part in the story. That is the meaning of interactivity. The
best information design acknowledges and uses the interactive nature of
communication to convey meaning and heighten understanding among
all parties involved in an activity or event.
These statements may seem like truisms. But only a decade ago concepts
like edification, commutativity, and interactivity were found exclusively in
scholarly tomes parked on dusty shelves marked "Philosophy,'' "Psychol¬
ogy," and "Communications Studies." Now they are being talked about on
the Internet!
Five years ago, when we conceived the idea for this book, information
design was still little known in North America, Asia, and Europe. It was
practiced by small bands of believers concentrated in the United Kingdom
and the Netherlands. Today, although the term is still exotic, the practice
of applying design to information—or as one contributor, Jef Raskin,
notes, applying design to the media through which information flows—
is becoming widespread. The problem now is, how do we conceptualize
information design so that it can be improved upon by future generations
of practitioners?
3 Introduction

The answer is not as easy as it might seem. As the contributions to this

book argue, there is no agreement that a practice called information design
actually exists. Even those who acknowledge its existence find a unitary
definition elusive. In order to systematize and pass along our knowledge
about “how to design information" or “how to be an information de¬
signer," we need a reliable lexicon and a tried-and-true theory backed up
by case studies. At present, the theory is sketchy and the case studies are
scarce. Too few studies of information design have been carried out to
support any broad generalizations about its practice.
Nonetheless, I did not permit the contributors to this book, proponents
as well as critics, to rest easy! Instead, I cajoled, pleaded with, and per¬
suaded them to seize the bull by the horns and prognosticate, based on
their experience, intuition, and expectations. After all, they are among the
leading practitioners and commentators in the field: what they think is
important and is quite likely to be accurate.
The experts whose opinions are offered in this book truly run the gamut,
from those who deny that there is such a thing as information design to
those who believe they have been practicing it for a lifetime. Readers will
have to decide about the reliability of these pronouncements for them¬
selves, based on their current understandings and the evolving state of the
art. Every designer must accept this challenge, not only about information
design but about design itself. We are fortunate in this regard: our field
changes as fast or faster than we do. We will never be bored.

This book has germinated slowly. It originated with a series of pre¬

sentations made at the 1994 Seattle annual meeting of the Society for
Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD). SEGD now boasts a professional
membership of over a thousand individuals and organizations whose
practices are built on the design of objects in multidimensional space.
These objects range from signage (the original focus of environmental
design) to highly elaborate exhibitions and commercial applications, some
of which are described in this book. SEGD's 1994 meeting was an espe¬
cially fertile setting in which to consider the nature of information design,
4 Jacobson

because the society was then involved in its own reevaluation of the
meaning of design.
I signed up the core group of contributors to this book at the SEGD
event and asked them three questions:

1. Is there such a thing as information design?

2. If there is, what might constitute a formal theory of information design?

3. How can we implement this theory in a systematic practice that can be

described to others and taught to new entrants to our field?

The contributions that resulted are among the finest expositions on

information design as a discipline. Their contributions range the full ambit
of information design.
Information design makes its mark in both the traditional arena of
two-dimensional graphics and in the postmodern domain of interactive,
computer-driven media. In these fields I was fortunate to find the individ¬
uals whose insight, creativity, and unique perspectives enrich this book.
I also recruited to our effort experts on the act of communication itself,
people whose studies transcend the preoccupations of the sectoral practi¬
tioners. I trust that their divergence from the usual practice-oriented dis¬
course on information design will serve as a touchstone for the claims
made by ardent advocates and provide a way of envisioning the future of
the profession.

Having asked the three questions of the authors, I must attempt my own
answers, so that the reader can sense as I do the ambiguities that the
contributors met and conquered.
My own belief is that there is a unique design practice that can be
identified as information design. Its purpose is the systematic arrangement
and use of communication carriers, channels, and tokens to increase the
understanding of those participating in a specific conversation or discourse.
One of information design's virtues is that its products, at least at the
moment of their conception, are unencumbered by traditional media lim-
5 Introduction

itations. The information designer initially works with fields of meaning,

not with the materials used to transmit meaning. Other designers may
quibble about this point, but in most cases they work with "stuff,'' con¬
crete or electronic materials that impose a priori design constraints.
Designing with information (whether during its assembly, transmission,
or receipt) is a heady affair. The quickly relevant constraints pertain mainly
to our finite human sensory and cognitive capacities. All too quickly
information design can degenerate into chaotic, random brush strokes on
the recipient's cognitive canvas. Because the success of information design
is so context-dependent, there is almost no way to predict scientifically for
any particular setting what will work and what will not. Each design rises
or falls according to factors that are difficult to replicate: the setting in
which the transfer of knowledge occurs, the individuals involved, the
medium or media employed, and the original and ultimate purposes of
producers and consumers.
Perhaps there are broad patterns of correlation between certain types of
information design and their effectiveness in particular settings. If so, we
must make generalizations ten miles wide to cover all the variations in
between.
Which leads me to my second question about theory. When I began this
book, I believed we could construct theories about information design
from the hypotheses presented and tested by the contributors, as well as
by others who have researched the subject. I am no longer so hopeful. The
studies of methods that apparently work, like Sense-Making (described by
Brenda Dervin, its inventor, in chapter 3), are usually context-specific.
Could Sense-Making be applied beyond the social milieu—for example, to
navigate complex collections of computerized data? I suspect it can, but
most studies pertain to human social behavior and interactions among
human beings. A similar objection applies to my other favorite method
of information design, way finding. Wayfinding (as described by Romedi
Passini in chapter 5) is beginning to provide answers for such unusual
challenges as navigating the Web, but it's been almost exclusively studied
and used by architects for conceptualizing building spaces.
6 Jacobson

Unless we are willing, like social psychologists, to construct arbitrarily

simplified contexts and then "test” information designs within them, we
may have to do without a compelling theory of information design, at
least for awhile.
Is information design, then, not a design profession but an art that
simply lacks the time-tested foundations of other arts? Does its fluidity
make it any less teachable? I believe not, on both counts.
It may be true that, as practitioners of a young profession, information
designers haven't collected enough objective, subjective, or even anecdotal
information to create a coherent corpus of rules or principles a novice can
obey. Nonetheless, the skilled information designer and the trainee with
an aptitude will be able to distinguish between what works—what makes
sense—and what does not. The more training he or she receives, the more
skilled the information designer will become. This method of learning
describes a profession in its youth, a craft as it were, devising compacts
and curing "bad ethers,” as in the early days of jurisprudence and
medicine.
We know it is possible to learn a craft. Students can learn carpentry or
masonry of a very high order without knowing the real science behind
mortar's strength or why flying buttresses permit soaring cathedral walls to
stand erect. Apprentices can learn information design in a similar way. The
painful corollary to this analogy, of course, is that many structures have
fallen because of shoddy workmanship based on lessons ill learned. There
are only so many genuine masters.

While it's difficult to ascribe to information design all the desired charac¬
teristics of a mature profession, there is clearly movement, if not yet
toward professionalization, then toward standards. Criticism of informa¬
tion systems that do not convey information well—whatever their techni¬
cal fireworks—is commonplace. In fact, one need only look to the popular
press (print, broadcast, or digital) to discover a new army of critics whose
sole occupation is commenting on the informational value of technologies
and systems. Not only information designers but also those who critique
7 Introduction

their work are increasingly conscious of the design process and aware of its
importance. The effect of such criticism will be to hammer practitioners of
information design into professionals, if not yet scientists.
The most scientific study to date of designs intended to convey infor¬
mation, Marks of Distinction by the respected Danish designer Per Mollerup,
attempts to classify trademarks according to various matrices. Mollerup
points out that successful trademarks have similar characteristics. None¬
theless, despite all the incredibly expensive research conducted to ratio¬
nalize trademarking, most trademarks are designed by individuals whose
creativity is unencumbered by overt rules. Yet for the design historian and
student, even post hoc studies of information design are useful. They im¬
part sense to an apparently chaotic process.

It has been said that living is the best method of learning. If so, how
the contributors to this book, and information designers generally, came
to their professional role has meaning. I am thinking of the pioneers
of modern information design, Charles and Ray Eames. For four decades,
beginning in 1940, first Charles alone and then with his wife Ray worked
in every conceivable medium, including puppets, film, and furniture. (The
famous Eames chair with footstool remains the epitome of contemporary
functional, comfortable design.) Later they turned to designing informa¬
tion. Perhaps their most famous contribution to information design is the
timeline mural, a linear river of historical currents and events. There were
timelines before, of course, but none possessed the information-carrying
capacity of the Eameses' version. Using the timeline as a central organizing
principle, the Eameses worked like busy ants constructing brilliant com¬
mercial and nonprofit exhibitions—including the IBM Pavilion at the New
York World's Fair and "The World of Franklin and Jefferson" exhibition
that toured during the American Revolution bicentennial year. These
exhibitions employed not only styles of presentation then in fashion but
also whatever other combinations of graphics, text, photography, and film
fulfilled the need to quickly and lucidly convey information.
8 Jacobson

The Eameses' method of design was highly systematic. First they

decomposed a design program into its myriad components and sub¬
components, a hundred subtasks for every major task. Then they analyzed
the smallest parts one by one, striving with each successive evaluation to
choose the one design alternative that equaled or surpassed in quality the
choices made before. Meticulously the Eameses arrived at the best of the
small parts and then, just as rigorously, assembled these unit by unit, until
the resulting product represented the sum of a thousand excellent deci¬
sions. Paradoxically, the result frequently stunned Charles and Ray them¬
selves, since the effect of their method was indeed often greater than the
sum of its parts.
And yet, the Eameses were also masters of intuition, for the process of
taking apart the pieces and putting them back together again was con¬
ducted in a context of simple elegance and beauty whose rules resided in
their minds alone. If the final products of their labors were honed and
fine-tuned to within an inch of excess, still the conception of these prod¬
ucts was an act of creation unique to the Eameses' sense of proportion and
propriety and their overall genius.
In our own time, many designers of information and objects seek to
emulate Charles and Ray Eames. Though some succeed, we live, for the
most part, in an era when craftsmanship is usually honored in the breach.
There is no time for most things, including information, to be designed
well. The quality we cannot attain we make up in quantity: kilobytes,
megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes—-so many bytes that we may need a data
muzzle. This deluge of information, as Richard Saul Wurman notes in
Information Architects, is contributing to a crisis of understanding on every
front. It's a common design cliche that "less is more," but good informa¬
tion design isn't a matter of more or less. Rather, it results from harnessing
the determination to engender better understanding to the appropriate
skills for doing so.

All told, I think, this volume's collective effort succeeds on several levels:
for the novice, the practicing professional, and the student of information
9 Introduction

design. For those of us in the field or considering working in our nascent

profession, this anthology provides a slice of the information design life,
mirroring our community as it exists today. For those on the outside, it
offers a selection of vista points overlooking a varied terrain, a map against
which other descriptions of information design can be checked and regis¬
tered. Despite the aspirations of its contributors to maintain their personal
visions and not be forced to fit a Procrustean standard, this book has
not deviated far from its original path. The authors' wishes have been
respected: the book is eclectic but strives throughout to make the concept
of information design more understandable to its readers.
The truest test of the hypotheses the authors advance will be the recep¬
tion the book receives from those who define themselves as information
designers and, even more, from the changes it evokes in their practice.
Abstract discussions of tangible practice—in all fields, not just design—
often degenerate into academic jargon. I trust this will not happen with
information design. Conferences and journals produced by information
designers are taking up the debate and giving it a welcome practical
bent.
These developments will have an effect. The only question is, how pro¬
found? Will the field of information design race ahead and outdistance the
publication of Information Design? Or will this text become a benchmark
for the profession's further development? The authors had to address the
three questions we started with because they are inevitable. Our effort may
be a wild stab or a milestone. Time will tell.
For you, the reader, information design (whether under that name or
another) will have increasing meaning. If you practice information design,
you will discover that we are no longer an exotic breed able to mystify our
means and motives. There are enough bona fide information designers,
and critics, to engender a lively critique of each others' work in the
months and years ahead. If you consume designed information (through
any information media), you will probably notice greater sophistication in
the quality of your experience.
10 Jacobson

I conclude on an optimistic note. Information design, whatever its label,

will enhance our society's ability to collect, process, and disseminate in¬
formation and to produce understanding. We may not yet fully appreciate
how this is happening, but the contributors to this book make a good start
toward explaining it.
Remember, too, that a book is a designed medium. Did we, professional
information designers and students of information design, succeed in our
purpose? Let me know. I can be reached by e-mail at bluefire@[Link]. It
will be my greatest pleasure to share with the contributors and publishers
your comments and reflections. After all, it is your understanding of
information design that we have worked hard to enlarge.
/ Theoretical Foundations of Information Design

Where do we find information design and how can we identify it when we

see it or experience its effects?
Design theory provides a substantial infrastructure of formal knowledge
about the practice of design. It explains, through abstractions, how design
works and how it can be made more effective. A workable theory, how¬
ever, requires something more: an adequate knowledge of the phenomena
to which the theory pertains. The experiments and observations necessary
for constructing a theory cannot be made at random. We have to know
where to look and what to look for. Interestingly, the contributors to this
section almost unanimously direct us to the realm of power relationships
as the source of all information design. They could be right. The invest¬
ments now being made in information design certainly suggest that there
is more to the practice than simply getting out a neutral message on this
or that mundane matter.
There is also a consensus among the contributors to this part of the
book that information design is real and not an intellectual chimera.
Nevertheless, as long as the theory is still problematic, practitioners and
observers will need to enunciate for themselves compelling arguments for
the concept of information design. And each argument must rest on its own
laurels. Part I presents four positive statements for the reader's evaluation.
12 Theoretical Foundations of Information Design

Bob Horn's historical review of information design (chapter 2) describes

several continuing themes associated with the practice. These include the
strong interpretive responsibilities assumed by past information designers
as part of their overall mission to elucidate and clarify the meaning of
things. In this sense, information design has a moral as well as a practical
responsibility. How effectively the designer communicates a particular
viewpoint may be subordinate even to this larger purpose when he or she
begins work on a project to inform, educate, or propagandize. Horn pre¬
supposes that the information designer will be alert to this interpretive
power and aware of the inherent moral question reposing in any assign¬
ment. Of course, this isn't always the case, but when it is designers are
truly put to the test and compelled to fashion their own internal guide¬
lines.
The moral dimension of information design is even clearer in Brenda
Dervin's discussion of power relationships and their consequences for infor¬
mation designers (chapter 3). The designer, she suggests, gets to choose
between serving power and having many resources at one's disposal, or
taking a more radical position and working with far fewer resources. Pre¬
sumably, the more the information designer identifies with the dispossessed
—those currently without access to the information necessary for bettering
their lot, those for whom the world is eternally in informational chaos—
the cleverer and better skilled he or she must be to succeed. This is the
context for Dervin's methodology of Sense-Making, which is a powerful
tool widely used by libraries and other institutions whose job it is to dis¬
tribute information equitably. But Sense-Making is also a moral guide that
could be cynically misapplied.
Mike Cooley is an information designer who has been through a moral
meat grinder, apparently to good effect (though it must have been very
unpleasant at the time). In the 1970s, Cooley led a designers' strike as part
of a general labor action at the British manufacturer Lucas Ltd. The
designers came up with hundreds of new-product ideas they hoped could
be used as intellectual capital to fend off an unfriendly acquisition and the
subsequent downsizing. Unfortunately, the strike failed and the designers
13 Theoretical Foundations of Information Design

were let go. Cooley, freed of his corporate responsibilities, became a

staunch advocate of design education based on tacit knowledge and the
guild model of learning (chapter 4). He has since successfully incorporated
his theory of design—centered on the human subject—into several impor¬
tant industrial initiatives being undertaken by the European Commission
and European Union.
The architect Romedi Passini concludes our pursuit of a formal informa¬
tion design theory by examining how wayfinding, an architectural meth¬
odology, can be applied to information design (chapter 5). Wayfinding as a
practice embodies a modern architectural ideal: helping people find their
way through the built environment (by, for example, color coding the
signs in hospital complexes). Passini argues that information designers can
help them navigate through information environments too. Interestingly,
Richard Saul Wurman, who provides the Foreword for this volume, sees an
even closer identity between the theories of information design and ar¬
chitecture, which he fuses in the unified concept of information architecture.
Although the term has been appropriated by computer database designers,
it is a more apt description of Passini's work.
2 Information Design: Emergence of a New
Profession

Robert E. Horn

Egyptian scribes sat every day in the marketplace and wrote hieroglyphic
letters, reports, memos, and proposals for their clients. At least since then,
the business of assisting others to make their communications more effec¬
tive has flourished. Specialists in communication already abound in our
society: ghost writers, technical writers, advertising writers and art direc¬
tors, public relations writers, and marketing consultants are only the most
obvious ones. In any field of human endeavor there is a process of, first,
specialization and, then, increasing professionalization. Information design
is the most recent manifestation of the age-old profession of communica¬
tions assistance.

What Is Information Design?

Information design is defined as the art and science of preparing informa¬

tion so that it can be used by human beings with efficiency and effective¬
ness. Its primary objectives are

1. To develop documents that are comprehensible, rapidly and accurately

retrievable, and easy to translate into effective action.

2. To design interactions with equipment that are easy, natural, and as

pleasant as possible. This involves solving many problems in the design of
the human-computer interface.
16 Horn

3. To enable people to find their way in three-dimensional space with

comfort and ease—especially urban space, but also, given recent develop¬
ments, virtual space.

The values that distinguish information design from other kinds of

design are efficiency and effectiveness at accomplishing the communica¬
tive purpose.

Need for Information Design

Why has information design emerged as a profession? First, managing

information in our complex modern society requires sophisticated com¬
puting and communication devices and networks that operate with ever-
increasing efficiency and effectiveness. Simply storing large amounts of
information on computers and retrieving it does not solve our information
needs. In fact, gigantic storehouses of information overload us with too
much information and burden us with navigational problems that have
sometimes make us feel that we are "lost in cyberspace." What we need is
not more information but the ability to present the right information to
the right people at the right time, in the most effective and efficient form.
The second factor behind the recent push for the professionalization of
information design is the increasing cost of time: management, technical,
and professional. Much of what most managers and technical professionals
do every day is process information. If the information is poorly designed,
they operate inefficiently and their organizations are not as effective as
they might be. I once hired a secretary who had previously worked as one
of four secretaries to a IBM vice president. Three of the secretaries were
kept busy full time just summarizing the information coming into the
office so the vice president could use it.

Information Design: Not an Integrated Profession

Information design is not yet a fully integrated profession. Its practitioners

have quite different views of the profession—even different names for it.
17 Information Design

In newspaper and magazines it is called information graphics; in business,

it's presentation graphics or business graphics; and in science, it's known as
scientific visualization. Computer engineers refer to interface design, while
conference facilitators use the term graphic recording and architects talk
about signage or wayfinding. Graphic designers just call it design. While
these practitioners no doubt have distinct interests that might warrant
different names, many of their core concerns and practices are similar. The
different terms simply indicate that information design is still mostly
characterized by separate groups that have little or no contact with each
other. Even so, there is undoubtedly an increasing tendency to march
under the new banner of information design. This book is an example of
that tendency. Moreover, in the last decade, a number of design and con¬
sulting companies have begun to assemble their marketing messages
around the concept of information design.

History of Information Design

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to trace the history of the informa¬
tion design movement in each of the professions mentioned above.
Nonetheless, we can look at the history of information design as a profes¬
sion in itself by considering some of those who contributed to its devel¬
opment (see figure 2.1).

Inventors
One of the unusual aspects of information design as a profession is that
we can identify many of those who invented particular classes of commu¬
nication units (e.g., bar charts, pie charts, or time lines). There are tower¬
ing figures in the history of information design invention and use. William
Playfair, who lived at the time of the American Revolution, invented sev¬
eral major types of graphs and charts and popularized them use through
his writings on political and economic topics. In addition to her con¬
tributions to medicine, Florence Nightingale is credited with inventing
new types of statistical graphs and being one of the first to use informa¬
tion design in a public policy report, a massive 800-page document on
18 Horn

Figure 2.1
Contributors to the Emerging Information Design Profession.

hospital administration she prepared for Prime Minister Palmerston during

the Crimean War (Cohen 1984). Although Michael George Muhall invented
pictorial statistics just before the turn of the century, it was Otto Neurath,
HISTORIA
the Austrian social scientist, who developed a methodology for displaying
DAS PESSOAS
QUE MARCARAM them effectively (1973). David Sibbet (1980) has devised a set of techniques
D.I
for graphically recording the process of group dynamics as they develop
during a meeting. James Beniger and Dorothy Robyn (1978) provide a list
of the inventors of quantitative charts, and H. G. Funkhouser (1938) use¬
fully summarizes the early history of statistical graphics. I devote a chapter
of Visual Language to the history of these innovations (Horn 1998).

Systematizers and Analysts

The systematizers have tried to bring all the pieces of the graphic language
together to analyze them from a particular point of view. Jacques Bertin
developed a comprehensive semiotic analysis of large portions of informa¬
tion design in his Semiology of Graphics (1983). Another early pioneer in
79 Information Design

this areas was Gui Bonsiepe (1966), whose early studies demonstrated that
the visual language of graphics has analogues to many traditional rhetori¬
cal devices. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993) and Will Eisner's
Comics and Sequential Art (1985) are excellent analyses of one "dialect" of
visual language, the comic book. William Bowman (1968) produced an
important early taxonomy of graphic communication, while Michael
Twyman (1973) has provided an important analysis of how many types of
static information design direct eye movement. My own book, Mapping
Hypertext (1989), is not only an introduction to the world of on-line
applications for information design but also (in its three central chapters)
an overview of the structured analysis of subject matters and structured
writing (see below).

Universalists
From time to time, individuals have hoped that purely visual communica¬
tion, without the use of words, could become an international auxiliary
language. A purely iconic language could substitute in certain situations,
such as travel, for normal spoken language. In the optimistic era that fol¬
lowed World War II, the movement for iconic language attracted advocates
like the eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead and her principal graphic-
language compatriot, Rudolf Modley (1952). E. K. Bliss (1965), who devel¬
oped an enormous and extremely clever iconic language of upwards of ten
thousand symbols, was a prolific inventor and supporter of universalism.
Like Mead, Modley, and Neurath, Bliss wanted to devise a purely iconic
common language to free humanity from the tower of Babel created by its
thousands of spoken languages. Purely iconic languages do not usually
catch on, however, except in the field of transportation, which now uses
internationally recognized symbols for all aspects of transportation and
travel.

Collectors
Once any profession starts to grow, writers and publishers bring out refer¬
ence books about it. Information design has its share of these. Among the
20 Horn

more interesting, from a systematic point of view, is that of Henry Dreyfus

(1984), who collected all the specialized icons from several dozen fields
and incorporated them into a still-valuable reference book. Thompson and
Davenport (1980) put together an engaging visual dictionary of the images
and metaphors found in contemporary advertising.

Writers of Instruction Manuals

Once a profession thinks it knows something that others do not know, a
spate of how-to books appears. At Stanford University, Robert McKim
(1972, 1990) pioneered in demonstrating that visual thinking is not solely
a means of artistic expression but is also a powerful tool for problem
solving in many professions. Stephen Kosslyn's recent book on designing
graphs and charts (1994) is a good example of a practical information
design instruction manual. Gene Zelazny (1991) has written a similar book
on business charts. Gary Glover's introduction to the new field of clip art
(1994) will enable many more people to use icons and illustrations in their
information design. A book by William Horton on icon design (1994) is
another excellent example of an instruction manual on a limited topic.

Aestheticians
Information design has great variability in style and quality, which often
affects its usefulness to researchers concerned about issues of precision and
clarity. Foremost among the aestheticians is Edward Tufte, whose concepts
of data-to-ink ratio and chartjunk stand as enduring signposts in the skill¬
ful and graceful use of visual language. His three books, The Visual Dis¬
play of Quantitative Information (1983), Envisioning Information (1990), and
Visual Explanations (1997), have provided the field of information design
with pioneering studies in how communication can be both beautiful
and useful.

Popularizers
In recent decades, magazines and newspapers have been leaders in the
popularization of information design. Stephen Baker's (1961) book, Visual
21 Information Design

Persuasion, is an extraordinary window into methods advertising designers

have long known about and practiced to make information attractive and
persuasive. Nigel Holmes, longtime art director at Time, is an acknowl¬
edged teacher and pioneer in this area. He recognized, in particular, how
design attractiveness affects whether readers will actually read and use in¬
formation. Recently he described these "infotainment” values in several
books (Holmes 1984, 1991, 1993). David Macaulay's The Way Things Work
(1988) is another brilliant example of information design at work. We
must also credit Richard Saul Wurman with raising public awareness of the
importance of information design in his books, Information Anxiety (1989),
Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Learning to Give, Take and Use Instructions
(1992), and Information Architects (1997).

Researchers
Research on communication, education, learning, human factors in tech¬
nology, computer interface design, and perception all bear on the use of
information design. However, most of the research does not use that term,
even as an indexing category. To locate citations relevant to information
design on research databases, therefore, we have to check many other
keywords. But, as information designers begin to bring this research
together, they can build on such firm foundations as the work of William
Cleveland (1985), who has made important discoveries in the field of
understanding quantitative graphics and charts. The research in structured
writing (summarized in Horn 1993) is another area that is providing more
secure foundations. Excellent summaries of the research on diagrams and
other methods of presenting information graphically can be found in
Winn (1982, 1990) and Horton (1991).

The British Information Design Society

In the history of information design a unique place must be reserved for
the Information Design Society. As far as I can tell, this group invented
and popularized the term information design. Its conferences have brought
together users from several disciplines: design practitioners, researchers in
22 Horn

psychology and education, computer graphics specialists, and teachers.

Many practitioners of information design in the United States are members
of this organization, as there is no comparable association in their own
country. The society's Information Design Journal, currently edited by Paul
Stiff, has been a major source of coherence for development of the profes¬
sion.1 Great Britain has also led the United States in the development of
interdisciplinary university programs in information design. The program
at the Department of Typographic and Graphic Communication at Read¬
ing University, chaired by Michael Twyman, is an outstanding example of
such a program.

Research Foundations for Information Design

Although there has always been a component of skilled practitioners
thinking analytically about information design, research is becoming in¬
creasingly specialized—and fundamental. Compared to other professions,
however, information design has barely begun to develop and integrate its
own research community; it still draws on other fields for its research base.
Fortunately, more and more researchers are becoming interested in the
problems information designers must solve.
Information design rests, therefore, on a variety of research foundations,
including such disciplines and subject areas as human factors in technol¬
ogy, educational psychology, computer interface design, performance
technology, documentation design, typography research, advertising, com¬
munications, and structured writing. Some of the more important sum¬
maries of the research in these areas are

• Interface design: Smith and Mosier (1986), Shneiderman (1987, 1992)

■ Educational materials design: Fleming and Levie (1993)

■ Typography: Evans (1974), U.S. National Bureau of Standards (1967),

Tinker (1963)

■ Visual communication and learning: Goldsmith (1984), Pettersson

(1989), Horton (1991)

■ Quantitative display of information: Cleveland (1985)

23 Information Design

Research in cognition, which provides both a theoretical base and

experimental data, is becoming fundamental to all of these fields (see, e.g.,
Eysenck and Keane 1990). In medicine, information design research and
applications parallel work carried out in many of the above-mentioned re¬
search domains, under the name medical informatics.

Foundational Research: Structured Writing

Structured writing (called Information Mapping® in its commercial appli¬

cations) is foundational to some areas of information design.2 It provides a
systematic way of analyzing any subject matter to be conveyed in a writ¬
ten document. Production of a written communication (such as a report,
memo, proposal, training manual, procedural or operations manual, or
electronic performance-support system) requires a method for ensuring
that all relevant subject matter has been obtained and is presented in the
form the user needs. Structured writing is such a method. It consists of a
set of techniques for analyzing, organizing, sequencing, and displaying the
various units of information.
One of the insights gained from stmctured writing is that the paragraph
is too poorly defined to be a basic unit of the analysis. Instead, structured
writing divides information into domains in which basic units—called
information blocks—can be precisely described. Forty such information
blocks can be used to sort 80 percent of the sentences found in writing
about most relatively stable subject matters (such as the sentences found
in training manuals and introductory textbooks). The ability to provide
such precise functional descriptions has been used in the design of various
training and reference documents. Although this is not the place for a full
description of structured writing, we should point out that it is a mature
methodology based on over twenty-five years of research and business im¬
plementation (Horn 1989, 1992a, 1992b, 1993, 1997). It has more than
200,000 users in the business and technical writing professions and has
become part of the democratization of information design. So far, stmc¬
tured writing has been used primarily by writers. Information designers
24 Horn

working in other fields are only now beginning to understand the impor¬
tance of using structured writing as one of the secure foundations for
analyzing the subject matter of documents.

Failure to Fully Integrate Research

It is symptomatic of a recently self-conscious profession that its knowledge

of itself, its practices, and its research foundations are only partially known
to practitioners. Many information designers have not read much of the
research relevant to the profession. Perhaps one example will show what I
mean. There is widespread interest among information designers in devis¬
ing iconic signage for public places, even though research has cast doubts
on the viability such an enterprise at this point in history. In one study of
108 international symbols (32 of which are widely used), fewer than half
of the respondents clearly understood what 86 of them meant. Only three
of the symbols were understood by more than two-thirds of the sample
(Easterby and Graydon 1981, summarized in Sless 1986).
Other studies producing similar results induced me to advocate the use
of what I call VLicons™ (Visual Language icons) rather than icons. VLicons
integrate words and images in the same small communication unit (Horn
1998) and often perform some of the same important semantic functions
as icons. They identify, they focus attention, they help set a mood, and
they may aid in retrieval.3 But they differ from icons in that they do not
attempt the task of full communication with images alone. Instead, VLicons
take advantage of the best aspects of words and images and integrate them
tightly to convey meaning. They utilize the possibility that words and
images effectively combined can disambiguate each other. Information
design is still to some degree the prisoner of an old either-or paradigm in
which words and images exist in completely separate domains of use.

Tensions in Information Design

As a profession, information design is currently experiencing a variety

of tensions. Often these result from the clash of different ideologies or
25 information Design

Tensions in Information Design

► ◄
Graphic designers Technical communicators
Gods of Style and Gods of Clarity,
Fashion, Novelty, Precision, Legibility,
Impact, Self-expression Simplicity,
Comprehensibility

► ◄
Professionals Amateurs

We have the We are getting the

training and computer tools to do
experience information design

Figure 2.2
Tensions among Practitioners of Information Design.

value positions that have grown up in the course of solving particular

problems and have been extended to uses beyond their original boundaries
(see figure 2.2).

Value Differences

There is, for example, a considerable tension between (1) graphic designers
—who learn in art school to worship the gods of Style and Fashion,
Novelty, Impact and Self-expression—and (2) technical communication
people—who worship the gods of Clarity, Precision, Legibility, Compre¬
hensibility, and (often) Simplicity. The graphic designers grew up in
schools where Advertising and Fashion were the Senior Deities. The tech¬
nical people's Senior Deity is Communication. Some graphic designers fall
in love with a particular typeface and size and use it at the expense of
clarity of communication. Many graphic designers assigned to help the
training and documentation organizations of a company appear to be
incapable of imagining that someone else might have a different set of
values. When I was CEO of an information design consulting company,
I often asked documentation and training managers to state their major
problem. 1 expected to hear that it was tight budgets or short deadlines for
producing documents (especially in the software industry). This is what
26 Horn

they told me: "Graphic designers are my biggest headache, because they
simply won't produce simple illustrations for our manuals. They won't
listen.”
The information design community is just beginning to create a self-
identification. As a result, working relationships among the different
professions out of which it is growing are often uneasy. Practitioners
sometimes see themselves, first and foremost, as engineers, architects,
graphic designers, or illustrators (or as psychologists, educators, or writers)
and only secondly as information designers. Nonetheless, when asked about
their problems, they usually point to common issues. They also admire a
common set of books (many of which are cited in this article). What they
get excited about is information design, not the problems of their particu¬
lar profession.
The tension between the graphic designers and researchers is also im¬
portant. Researchers tend to avoid trying to measure style, novelty, and
self-expression, partly because it is very difficult and partly because their
research grants and contracts usually come from organizations whose
major commercial priority is evaluating the clarity, legibility, and efficiency
of communications. This tension sometimes also grows out of the vastly
different social, economic, or moral values of designers and researchers
working in advertising, and information designers and researchers in more
technical communication fields.

Democratization

Every profession has the problem of trying to exclude those who "don't
know what we know.” The professional says, "Let us do it. We're the
professionals. We have secret knowledge. You don't really know how to
do it right.” This possessiveness is to be expected. Information design has
already begun trying to defend its boundaries. Unfortunately, some infor¬
mation designers perceive a threat in the democratization of information
design that has resulted from putting information design features into
computer software.
27 Information Design

Already, there are business graphics and statistical packages advertising

that the charts and graphs they produce follow principles researched and
outlined by information design pioneers Edward Tufte and William Cleve¬
land. This is occurring even though some people who call themselves
information designers have not yet heard of Tufte and Cleveland!
Other software packages being designed today are gobbling up various
areas of information design expertise. There is software that incorporates
publishing and page-design principles commonly taught in art school.
Some software packages provide templates that automatically incorporate
principles of color combination, so that a user only needs to choose a
cluster of colors that work together. When you can describe rules and
guidelines with sufficient precision and stand behind them with sufficient
research, you can put them into software so that anybody who buys the
software can use them.
The ubiquity of the computer prevents us from even asking whether
further democratization of this nascent profession should be welcomed.
We do not have a choice. The computer provides millions, if not tens of
millions, of people with the capacity to do at least a modicum of infor¬
mation design in the everyday documents they prepare. Thus tensions
between a profession trying to emerge and consolidate and the multitude
of amateurs performing many of the same tasks are likely to continue.

Information Design and Visual Language

Information design can be thought of as the professionalization of another

communication phenomenon: the emergence of a new language. Visual
language is defined as the tight coupling of a words, images, and shapes
into a unified communication unit (Horn 1998). “Tight coupling" means
that you cannot remove the words or the images or the shapes from a
piece of visual language without destroying or radically diminishing the
meaning a reader can obtain from it. In diagrams, for example, you cannot
remove the boxes or arrows without severely damaging or destroying the
communication. Words and images are tightly integrated in most business
28 Horn

slide presentations and in many examples of information graphics used by

newspapers and magazines. Similarly, tight integration is apparent in the
words and images in comic books, in most advertising, as well as in most
video, film, and animation. A great many publications, both in paper and
on-line, are now composed at least partly of visual language.
Visual language is a language, I maintain, because one cannot under¬
stand its syntax, semantics, or pragmatics by using only the linguistic
concepts developed to analyze spoken languages. Nor are the tools of
analysis used by either the visual arts or linguistics sufficient to analyze
what is happening in visual language. To create a true linguistics of visual
language we need new concepts that focus on how words and images work
together.
Visual language has emerged just as other languages have—by people
creating it and speaking it. It has evolved, I believe, because of the urgent
needs of contemporary individuals and organizations to deal with com¬
plexity. Many ideas are best expressed with visual language, and others can
only be expressed by visual language.
Along with information design, visual language has also developed
rapidly in the past decade because of the personal computer and, especially,
the widespread availability of computer graphics programs—software that
allows the user to draw, paint, and present quantitative information in
chart form. In many ways, practitioners of information design have been
the inventors and first users of visual language. They have helped it
spread. And, as visual language has become democratized into what some
now call our visual culture, many people have realized that there is a great
need for more professionalized information design.

Changes in the Ratio of Visual Elements to Words

One major shift to which research has called attention is the dramatic
increase in the image-to-word ratio in documents of all kinds (Horn 1998).
Many publications that in the past might have used one illustration per
article now have one illustration per page. Thus the sheer volume of visual
29 Information Design

elements has changed. But that is not all. In my characterization of visual

language, I focus attention on the tight integration of words and visual
elements, whereas in the old document paradigm, words and images are
separated. Images were referred to as figures and often did not even appear
on the page on which they were discussed. That practice is changing; more
and more, words and images are coming together.
Also underway is "the Great Sorting Out of the Functions of Words and
Images When They Are Tightly Integrated.” In the Sorting Out, we study
what words do best and what it is that the visual elements do best when
the two are tightly integrated; that is, we are developing the functional
semantics of visual language. It turns out that we need a whole set of new
guidelines and rules for understanding this tight integration, principles
that are quite different from those used when words and images operate
separately (Horn 1998). As we understand this integration more compre¬
hensively and deeply, we apparently increase the integration of our own
words and images. This has happened in my own work on the analysis of
the words and images in diagrams: they have become more integrated. The
functional semantics of visual language can now be extended to fully effect
the tight integration of visual elements and words.

Conclusion

In ancient times, scribes had to invent the papyrus on which they wrote.
Over many centuries they modified writing symbols from ideographs to
phonetic script to meet the changing needs of their times, lheir modern
counterparts, tomorrow's information designers, will also have to improve
the tools and techniques of their trade to meet the even more rapid and
complex changes of the twenty-first century.
The profession may well develop along the lines taken by medicine,
where training in the foundational sciences is combined with internships,
residencies, and practice to train the effective professional. In many ways
we already see this kind of training emerging in the field of interactive
interface design (Winograd 1996).
30 Horn

If the profession becomes more unified and practitioners understand

that it rests on a multifaceted foundation of both creative design and rig¬
orous research, it will continue to make major contributions to solving
human communication problems. This future will require greater profes¬
sional self-consciousness, the development and sharing of good practices,
and increased incorporation of research findings into the design process.
And, finally, it will require all of us to accept the democratization of in¬
formation design.

Notes

1. Current research on the use of information can be found in many sources, including
Special Interest Group on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) and Special Interest Group on Com¬
puter-Human Interaction (SIGCHI); All publications of the Association of Computing
Machinery (ACM); research journals in human factors engineering and the graphics arts;
and, especially, the Information Design Journal (address: Information Design Association,
PO Box 239, Reading RG6 2AU, England; e-mail: ltstiff@[Link]) and Visible Lan¬
guage (U.S.A.), published by the Rhode Island School of Design (R.I.S.D., Graphic Design
Dept., 2 College Street, Providence, R.I. 02903).

2. The primary source of training in structured writing is Information Mapping, Inc.

(address: 300 Third Avenue, Waltham, Mass. 02154; telephone: 617-890-7003). Informa¬
tion Mapping is a registered trademark of Information Mapping, Inc.

3. VLicon is a trademark of the visual language and information design work of Robert E.
Horn, 2819 Jackson Street #101, San Francisco, Calif. 94115. For a complete discussion of
the functional semantics of VLicons, see Horn 1997.

References

Baker, Stephen. 1961. Visual Persuasion. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Beniger, James R., and Robyn, Dorothy L. 1978. Quantitative Graphics in Statistics: A
Brief History. American Statistician 32, no. 1 (February 1978): 1-11.

Bertin, Jacques. 1983. Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, and Maps. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.

Bliss, E. K. 1965. Semantography, 2d ed. Sydney, Australia: Semantography Publications.

Bonsiepe, G. 1966. Visual/Verbal Rhetoric. Dot Zero.

31 Information Design

Bowman, William j. 1968. Graphic Communication. New York: John Wiley.

Cleveland, William S. 1985. The Elements of Graphing Data. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Wads¬
worth and Brooks/Cole.

Cohen, 1. Bernard. 1984. Florence Nightingale. Scientific American 250, no. 3 (March):
128-37.

Corel Corporation. 1994. Corel Gallery Clipart Catalog. Ottawa.

Dreyfus, Henry. 1984. Symbol Source Book: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic
Symbols. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Easterby, R. S., and Graydon, I. R. 1981 Comprehension/recognition tests. AP Report 100

(January 1981). (Birmingham, England: University of Aston.)

Eisner, W. 1985. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, Fla.: Poorhouse Press.

Evans, Harold. 1974. Handling Newspaper Text. London: William Heinemann.

Eysenck, M. W., and Keane, M. T. 1990. Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook.

Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Fleming, M., and Levie, W. H., eds. 1993. Instructional Message Design, 2d ed. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications.

Funkhouser, H. G. 1938. Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of

Statistical Data. Osiris 3: 269-404.

Glover, Gary. 1994. Clip Art: Image Enhancement and Integration. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Goldsmith, Evelyn. 1984. Research into Illustration: An Approach and a Review. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Gombrich, E. H. 1960. Art and Illusion. New York: Pantheon.

Holmes, Nigel. 1991. Pictorial Maps. New York: Watson-Guptill.

Holmes, Nigel. 1993. The Best in Diagrammatic Graphics. Mies, Switzerland: Rotovision.

Holmes, Nigel. 1984. Designer's Guide to Creating Charts and Diagrams. New York: Watson-
Guptill.

Holmes, Nigel, and DeNeve, Rose. 1985. Designing Pictorial Symbols. New York: Watson-
Guptill.

Horn, Robert E. 1989. Mapping Hypertext: Analysis, Linkage, and Display of Knowledge for
the Next Generation of On-Line Text and Graphics. (Available from Information Mapping,
Inc., 300 Third Avenue, Waltham, MA. 02154. Telephone 1-800-627-4544 or 617-890-
7003.)
32 Horn

Horn, R. E. 1992a. Clarifying Two Controversies about Information Mapping's Method.

Educational and Training Technology International 2 (no. 29): 109-117.

Horn, R. E. 1992b. How High Can It Fly? Examining the Evidence on Information Mapping's
Method of High-Performance Communication. Lexington, Mass: The Lexington Institute.

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11-17.

Horn, R. E. 1997. Structured Writing as a Paradigm. In Instructional Development, State of

the Art, Charles R. Dills and Alexander Romiszowski, eds. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educa¬
tional Technology Publications.

Horn, R. E. 1998. Visual Language: A Global Language for the 21st Century. Bainbridge
Island, Wash.: MacroVU®, Inc. (Available from the publisher, Box 366, 321 High School
Road, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110.)

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Graphically in Paper and Online. New York: John Wiley.

Horton, William. 1994. The Icon Book: Visual Symbols for Computer Systems and Documen¬
tation. New York: John Wiley.

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3: 185-226.

Kosslyn, Stephen M. 1994. Elements of Graph Design. New York: W. H. Freeman.

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Kitchen Sink Press.

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D. Reidel.

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Sibbet, David. 1980. Fundamentals of Graphic Language: Practice Book. San Francisco:
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3 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making: A Proposed
Theory for Infomation Design

Brenda Dervin

The writers represented in this volume offer the term information design as
a designator for a new arena of activity. Their underlying assumption is
that as a species we face altered circumstances that demand a new practice.
They further assume that prior to the advance of the new communication
technologies there was no pressing need for information design; without
these increasingly unnatural channels, people effectively distributed infor¬
mation through existing channels in natural ways.

Information Design: Something New, Something Old

While granting that others have drawn many strong arguments from these
assumptions, 1 want in this chapter to challenge the central idea that
information design is a new idea. Reducing the issues briefly to a polarity,
it is useful to start by considering two ways to conceptualize information.
One way, implicit in the above assumptions, is that information is some¬
thing that describes an ordered reality and has some knowable, or at least
idealized, isomorphic relationship to that reality (i.e., it represents in an
identical way the form and content of reality). In short, information
instructs us, this assumption says, about the nature of the world we live
in: its history, its future, its functioning, our place in it, our possible
actions, and the potential consequences of those actions. Information,
36 Dervin

conceptualized in this way, can only be seen as inherently beneficial, for it

offers enormous survival value. Clearly, such a set of assumptions makes
the economic and effective distribution of information an uncontested
mandate.1
Intrinsic to this way of conceptualizing information is the implication
that the "something” labeled information can be readily distributed, like
concrete objects, from time to time, place to place, and person to person.2
To follow this metaphor to its conclusion, we must put aside temporarily
any misgivings we may have about the capacities of human beings to act
as observers. Aside, then, from needed improvements in human powers of
observation, in this metaphor we see information as a natural thing
potentially movable from place to place by natural means. In our current
circumstances, therefore, only the fact that unnatural forces are at work
demands that we create a new practice: information design.
A second, alternative view of information contests this scenario. Evi¬
dence is accumulating that we are using the enormous capacities of the
new technologies to do what we have already done in the past—though
on far larger scales, much faster, at greater distances, and with much
greater frequency. Further, taking a hard look at fundamentals and setting
aside issues of scale, I argue in this chapter that the information design
thus far offered by the new technologies is not that much different from
that made possible by the old technologies or, since early history, by
nontechnological human practices.
In order to consider these fundamentals in detail, however, we must
start with an alternative assumption about information itself: that there
is nothing natural about information. Information, no matter what it is
called—data, knowledge, or fact, song, story, or metaphor—has always
been designed. This alternative assumption about information is what
drives this chapter. In it, I argue that assuming information design to be a
new practice can only deter us from facing head-on some alternative con¬
ceptualizations of what that activity could be about.
In the succeeding sections of this chapter, I develop this argument by
first presenting a brief history of our treatments of the concept information
37 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

and discussing the implications of these treatments for a practice called

information design. I then extract from this discussion guiding principles
important for theorizing about the practice of information design. Next,
I present an exemplar theory, methodology, and practice called Sense-
Making, which embodies these principles. I conclude with several illus¬
trations of how Sense-Making can be applied to practical situations.

Concepts of Information: A Brief History

It is beyond the purpose of this chapter to dig deeply into the historical
roots of our treatments of the concept information. Rather, my goal here is
to provide briefly a context for the alternative I am presenting. We can
simplify a complex history by tracing the treatments of information in the
western tradition through seven roughly chronological narratives.

1. Information describes an ordered reality.

2. Information describes an ordered reality but can be "found” only by

those with the proper observing skills and technologies.

3. Information describes an ordered reality that varies across time and

space.

4. Information describes an ordered reality that varies from culture to

culture.

5. Information describes an ordered reality that varies from person to

person.

6. Information is an instrument of power imposed in discourse on those

without power.

7. Information imposes order on a chaotic reality.

While I present these narratives in the rough chronological order of

their appearance in the philosophical literature, the chronology is really
cumulative, in the sense that all narratives are present in our time in
various combinations and in both commensurate and highly contested
arrangements. We could describe the narratives extensively in terms of
38 Dervin

their philosophic underpinnings. For present purposes, however, we need

provide only just enough of the basic ideas behind them to give founda¬
tion to my argument. Essentially, the argument is this. Historically, infor¬
mation was conceptualized as a natural description of natural reality. This
way of seeing information remains the dominant conceptualization
assumed in the design of information systems—and it is heavy baggage.
Most of our ideas about information design attempt to achieve narrative
No. 1 while struggling with narratives Nos. 2 through 7.
There are three themes that run through the chronology of narratives.
One focuses on the nature of reality, one on the nature of human ob¬
serving, and one on the involvement of power. Briefly, the chronology
suggests that over time conceptualizations of information's capacity to
describe reality (i.e. its ontological assumptions) have first been tempered
and then directly contested. The tempering came first with a growing
understanding of the limits of human observation (as in No. 2); then with
a growing understanding of the impacts of time and space (as in No. 3).
Ultimately, the very foundational assumptions of reality were shaken (as in
Nos. 6 and 7). At one extreme we have an ordered and universal reality; at
the other, a chaotic and inaccessible reality.
The second theme focuses on human observing, which, the chronology
suggests, was historically assumed to create “informations" that were iso¬
morphic with reality (as in No. 1). Over time, this conceptualization
evolved: first to incorporate the idea that information needed a way to
correct and control the potential biases and errors of human observing (as
in No. 2); and then, in chronological steps, to accept the relativistic notion
that observing differs according to contextual, cultural, and personal per¬
spectives (as in Nos. 3, 4, and 5). Finally, most recently, it integrated the
belief that human observing is a product of discourses of power (as in
No. 6). At one extreme, therefore, we have an epistemology assuming a
universally applicable ability to observe an ordered reality and at the other
an entirely relativistic, solipsistic (i.e., unique to each person), or tyrannical
view of observation.
The third theme focuses on the involvement of power in information.
This theme is more subtle, because it does not permeate the movement
39 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

across narratives but rather bursts forth suddenly in No. 6. In earlier

assumptions, power was irrelevant; information was assumed to have a
universal character based on an assumed capacity to precisely mirror real¬
ity. Moving through the narratives, however, we can see the impact of
historical struggles with power: cultural relativity, for example, applied to
ideas about information argues for the right of peoples' observings to dif¬
fer, not only across time and space (as in No. 3), but also across cultures
(as in No. 4). But people within cultures differ as well, and when individ¬
ual voices demand to be heard we see the emergence of personal relativity
(as in No. 5) and, ultimately, the concept that all attempts to formalize
information are bounded within discourses of power (as in No. 6).
We have drastically abbreviated a great deal of philosophical history in
the above paragraphs. The important point for our purposes here is this:
we can think of narratives Nos. 2 through 7 as resulting, in part, from
struggles to maintain narrative No. 1. Nested within the narratives are a
host of polarities that plague the design and implementation of informa¬
tion systems—not to mention the very construction of our societies.
Alternatively, however, we can reconceptualize the narratives as subordi¬
nate parts of a larger picture. Sometimes, this view assumes, information
describes an orderly reality; sometimes it requires specialized observing
skills and technologies; sometimes it varies across time and space, and
from culture to culture and person to person. Sometimes it represents the
imposition of power; sometimes it imposes order on chaotic reality. If one
accepts all the narratives as useful, the difficulty becomes how to transcend
the seemingly inherent contradictions among them. For these purposes,
therefore, I propose an eighth narrative:

8. Information is a tool designed by human beings to make sense of a

reality assumed to be both chaotic and orderly.

The Alternative Narrative and Its Implications

It is possible to look at narratives Nos. 2 through 7 as a struggle with two

ideas inherent in narrative No. 1—the notions of a fixed and orderly real-
40 Dervin

ity and of a human power to observe that can accurately perceive that reality.
As the historical narrative unfolds, increasing complexities are introduced
into the assumptions underlying the nature of observing, while assump¬
tions about reality are reduced to an impossibly simple choice—either
reality is orderly or it is inaccessible and chaotic.
Narrative No. 8 builds on the earlier narratives most clearly in its posi¬
tion on observing at the same time as it attempts to transcend the impos¬
sible choice by accepting both the ordered realities of narratives Nos. 1
through 5 and the imposed/chaotic realities of narratives Nos. 6 and 7.
Thus narrative No. 8 posits that humans live in a reality that sometimes
manifests itself in orderly ways and sometimes manifests itself in chaotic
ways.
The importance of this ontological position lies in its implications for
how systems handle human differences in information-making. Narratives
Nos. 1 through 5, after presenting all the reasons why people see the
world differently, cannot resolve the differences or find a way to ameliorate
them except with a tautology: people see the world differently because
they differ. Thus there is no mandate (nor any possibility) for one person
to learn from another. At this point, therefore, the solipsism becomes un¬
bearable, and we retreat for resolution to narrative Nos. 1 and 2. But each
chronological advance in our theories of information makes this retreat
more and more difficult, and it becomes ultimately impossible, as narrative
No. 7 demonstrates.
In contrast, narrative No. 8 forces us to a different resolution, one with
profound implications for information design. The resolution is that in the
face of differences we must look for differences not in how humans, indi¬
vidually and collectively, see their worlds but in how they "make" their
worlds (i.e., construct a sense of the world and how it works). This view is
more than just a mandate to understand how others see the world; it
makes that understanding an ontological necessity. For if we conceptualize
the human condition as a struggle through an incomplete reality, then the
similar struggles of others may well be informative for our own efforts.
Notice here how much traditional baggage we must jettison—the idea,
for example, that there is a given amount or kind of information that can
41 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

fully instruct us about a given reality. Instead, this narrative assumes that
movement through a given time-space (as well as gaps in physical, natural,
and/or social reality) introduces an inherent inability to be completely
instructed (i.e., to attain complete information). By assuming ontological
chaos as well as order, we force ourselves to understand that it may be
more useful to conceptualize human beings as information designers
rather than information seekers and finders.
Sometimes the information designing seems suggestive of a reality that
is ordered; when, for example, a consensus regarding observing—process,
product, and consequences—yields an informative outcome we call fact
because its application to material conditions produces reliable and useful
outcomes. But the only way we can account for the overbearing evidence
that today's fact is tomorrow's folly, or worse the cause of tomorrow's re¬
bellion, is to reconceptualize what is involved in facts. Fact, as a word, has
traditionally had an essentialist meaning: a fact describes a reality that is.
On the other hand, factizing, as a verb, suggests that among the many
ways in which people make their worlds is a proceduring, a designing
called making facts. There are many other words that can be used as verbs
in this way. A suggestive list might include, besides factizing: emoting,
comparing, concluding, predicting, consequenting, avoiding, communing, creating,
opinioning, socializing, imposing, terrorizing, inculcating, challenging, resisting,
and destroying.
With this simple idea—that whatever it is that humans make informa¬
tionally of their worlds, they are always involved in acts of design—we can
pull together the threads offered by the discussion above. The result is a
view of humans who are themselves ordered and chaotic moving through
a reality that is ordered and chaotic. Humans make sense individually and
collectively as they move: from order to disorder, from disorder to order.
This narrative refocuses our attention away from information as such to
the constant design and redesign of the sense by which humans make and
unmake their worlds. Because of its emphasis on information as designed
and redesigned—as made, confirmed, supported, challenged, resisted, and
destroyed—this approach positions power as a primary consideration
42 Dervin

rather than as afterthought. Borrowing from narrative No. 6, this narrative

requires that the power inscribed in information be subject to continuing
deconstruction (i.e., constant analysis and reanalysis). One possible conse¬
quence of doing so would be a capacity in information-system design to
avoid the ways in which systems now build in inequities. In essence, our
current design situation is one in which information is assumed to be
natural but is in fact designed. And, because it is designed without atten¬
tion to design, it fits the needs, struggles, and resources of the designers.
This puts all others at a disadvantage.
Theories that explain why the others don't make use of these valuable
design systems can take a variety of forms. Nonetheless, they can be sum¬
marized in the argument that humans are too chaotic and overwhelmingly
various to make responsive system designs possible. Yet, if in fact we have
developed theories of information and system designs based on narratives
Nos. 1 to 5, then we know that, ultimately, difference can always be
measured against a standard. The system is X; people who cannot or will
not use it are not-X. Research efforts to understand these recalcitrant non¬
users seem to show that they lack both understanding of and interest in
what is deemed by the designers to be appropriate use of the system. This
finding, in turn, leads some to conclude that information design must be
reduced to the lowest common denominator and, in turn, to theories of
madness or badness that locate the source of problems in users' defects.
Such theories persist despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Some Principles for a Theory of Information Design

Each of the earlier narratives about information moves us away from the
idea that seeking and finding information does not involve design. What
emerges in narrative No. 8 is a conceptualization of information that,
although informed by the complexities of narratives Nos. 6 and 7, does
not abandon the human potential for observing implied by the earlier
narratives.
For purposes of our discussion, I label narrative No. 8 a communication
perspective on information. The central idea here is that information is made
43 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

and unmade in communication—intrapersonal, interpersonal, social, orga¬

nizational, national, and global. With this view of information, informa¬
tion design cannot treat information as a mere thing to be economically
and effectively packaged for distribution. Rather, it insists that information
design is, in effect, metadesign: design about design, design to assist people
to make and unmake their own informations, their own sense. Some
of these metadesigns may pertain to human activities amenable to fact
transmission, though studies suggest that relatively few human uses of
information can be addressed solely in a factizing mode. The theory
behind narrative No. 8 also contends that metadesign must deal with the
entire complex range of what humans do when they make sense, when
they construct their movements through what is assumed to be an ever-
changing, sometimes chaotic, sometimes orderly, sometimes impenetrable
time-space.
Narrative No. 8, then, mandates a particular kind of theory, one that
focuses on information as made and unmade in communication; as
designed by all humans, individually and collectively, in struggle and
mediation; as relevant to both making and unmaking order and chaos; as
theoretically incomplete and always open to potential challenge; as rele¬
vant not only to the centered human but also the decentered human;
as pertinent to the human heart, body, and spirit as well as the human
mind.
Further, this theory of information design decrees that we create an in¬
formation system to assist people in designing their own information and,
in particular, in sharing with each other the ways in which they have
struggled individually and collectively to both create order out of chaos
and create chaos out of order when order restricts or constrains them.
Such a theory would demand that we redefine the standards by which we
judge something as informative: in essence, redefine what we mean by
success and failure. The system would allow not only the factizing that
permits regimentation as a sometimes useful way of making sense but also
the myths and storytelling that permit us to tolerate and muddle through
diversities and seeming incompletenesses.
44 Dervin

Sense-Making: An Exemplar Theory, Methodology, and Practice

The Sense-Making approach, which has been twenty-two years in devel¬

opment, is in actuality a set of assumptions, a theoretic perspective, a
methodological approach, a set of research methods, and a set of commu¬
nication practices. The approach was originally developed to assess how
patients/audiences/users/clients/citizens make sense of their intersections
with institutions, media, messages, and situations and to apply the results
in designing responsive communication/information systems. Since its
early development, the approach has been applied in a variety of contexts
(e.g., political communications, everyday information seeking, health com¬
munications, organizational images, mass media, and telecommunications).
It has been used at various levels of analysis (e.g., individual, group, orga¬
nization, community, culture) in both quantitative studies with sample
sizes as large as a thousand and in qualitative studies with as few as twenty
participants. Work resting on the approach has been published and cited,
primarily, in the various communications, information, and library science
fields, with some secondary usage in other fields.3
The phenomena of interest for Sense-Making is sense-making, which we
define broadly in terms of the set of assumptions about reality, observing,
and power suggested by narrative No. 8. Sense-Making starts with the
fundamental assumption of the philosophical approach of phenomenology
—that the actor is inherently involved in her observations, which must be
understood from her perspectives and horizons. What differs in the Sense-
Making formulation is the explicit acceptance of a reality assumed to be
both orderly and chaotic. Sense-Making, then, brings these assumptions
together by asserting that—given an incomplete understanding of reality
(ontology) and an incomplete understanding of what it is to know some¬
thing (epistemology)—w'e arrive at an uncompromising problematic for the
human species: how to bridge persistent gaps in existence (gaps between
self at time 1 and time 2, between person 1 and person 2, between person
and society, organization and organization, and so on).
45 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

From this reasoning, Sense-Making extracts two assumed mandates for

the species: one is to make sense without complete instmction in a reality,
which is itself in flux and requires continued sense-making; the second is
to reach out to the sense made by others, in order to understand what
insights it may provide into our continuing human dilemma. Sense-
Making emphasizes the importance of the latter requirement in particular,
for it is not rooted (as most calls for understanding difference are) only in
a relativistic epistemology but rather in the assumption that humans must
muddle through together and that their usual tools assuming a wholly
ordered reality are inadequate for making sense of all their experiences in a
world that is both ordered and chaotic.
Setting this understanding within the common polarities of social theo¬
rizing today, Sense-Making explicitly enters the research situation in the
"in-between” spaces between order and chaos, structure and individual,
culture and person, self 1 and self 2, and so on. Sense-Making focuses
on how humans make and unmake, develop, maintain, resist, destroy, and
change order, structure, culture, organization, relationships, and the self.
The Sense-Making theoretic assumptions are implemented through a
core methodological metaphor that pictures the person as moving through
time-space, bridging gaps, and moving on. Sense-Making thus requires
theorizing based on concepts relating to time, space, movement, and gap. It
also rests on a theory of the subject that is consonant with its ontological
and epistemological assumptions: the human is conceptualized as centered
and decentered; ordered and chaotic; cognitive, physical, spiritual, and
emotional; and potentially differing in all these dimensions across time
and across space. Sense-Making assumes that the rigidities in information
use implicitly hypothesized by demographic, personality, and many con¬
structivist theories pertain only to a subset of human possibilities. As
humans move across time-space, both rigidities and flexibilities are possi¬
ble. Sense-Making assumes that one of the reasons why our theories of
information use and their potential applications to design have been so
weak is that they have focused primarily on predicting patterns in rigidi¬
ties, rather than patterns in flexibilities.
46 Dervin

One way in which Sense-Making differs markedly from other approaches

is that it explicitly, and necessarily, privileges the ordinary person as a
theorist involved in developing ideas to guide an understanding of not
only her personal world but also collective, historical, and social worlds.
Sense-making must theorize about the individual human in this way
because of narrative No. 8's acceptance of ontological incompleteness. If
reality is incomplete, then movement through it must be guided by
theory, not merely by fact. Further, in its attention to movement, Sense-
Making requires us to focus on power by attending to forces that facilitate
movement and forces that inhibit and constrain movement.
While Sense-Making relies heavily on concepts of time, space, move¬
ment, and gap, we must emphasized that these are not set forth as if
sense-making were merely a purposive, linear, problem-solving activity.
Instead, they are posited as merely a subset of human possibilities. The
Sense-Making metaphor must be understood as a highly abstract frame¬
work. Similarly, while Sense-Making focuses on the human individual, it
does not rest on an individualistic theory of human action. Rather, it
assumes that structure, culture, community, organization are created,
maintained, reified, challenged, changed, resisted, and destroyed in com¬
munication and can only be understood by focusing on the individual-in¬
context, including the social context. Note, however, that this is not the
same as saying that the only way to look at the individual is through the
lens of social context; this kind theorizing would imply that the individual
is entirely constrained or defined by that social context, which would
admit no room for resisting, changing, inventing, or muddling through.
In the context of both research and applications, Sense-Making is
implemented within the Sense-Making triangle, which encapsulates the
Sense-Making metaphor in a picture of the human (individually or collec¬
tively) moving from a situation (time-space) across a gap by making a
bridge, and then moving onto the other side of the bridge. The three
points of this triangle, therefore, are situation, gap/bridge, and outcome.
In the research context, for example, the Sense-Making metaphor may
be implemented in interviews in several ways, ranging from brief inter-
47 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

views of twenty to thirty minutes to in-depth interviews lasting from one

or two hours and up to six hours. The foundational interviewing
approach, the one most aligned with Sense-Making's theory, is called the
micro-moment time-line interview. In this approach the interviewer asks
the respondent to describe one or more critical situations in detail: first
in terms of what happened first, second, third, and so on; then, for
each time-line event, in terms of the situations (e.g., barriers, constraints,
history, memory, experience), gaps (e.g., confusions, worries, questions,
muddles), bridges (e.g., ideas, conclusions, feelings, opinions, hypotheses,
hunches, stories, values, strategies, sources), and outcomes (e.g., helps,
facilitations, hurts, hindrances, outcomes, effects, impacts). Since Sense-
Making provides only a theory of the interview and not a script, actual
implementation can take myriad forms, depending on the purpose of the
study (e.g., needs assessment, evaluation, audience reception, etc.). In an
alternative approach, the respondent is examined in detail about the basic
time-line and then asked to choose the most important event, or question,
or contact, and so on. Some interviews begin with the situation, others
with the gap, the bridge, or the outcome.
It is important to note that Sense-Making conceptualizes the research
situation as itself an applied communication situation involving attempts
to understand how others have designed their senses of their worlds.
In this situation, the researcher is involved in a metadesign focusing on
design. Similarly, in application to what is commonly called practice, Sense-
Making posits a theory of practice, a metadesign for design. In this way,
there is no discontinuity between Sense-Making as a research approach
and Sense-Making as an approach to the design of practice. In the follow¬
ing sections of this chapter I present some illustrations of applications to
practice and draw some conclusions from those applications.

Some Applications

To date, as Sense-Making has been applied primarily in research contexts,

most of the applications to practice have been hypothetical. There have
48 Dervin

been, however, a number of actual practice applications. We can use these

applications, along with several hypothetical cases, to show how the the¬
oretic guidance offered by narrative No. 8 translates into a theory of the
practice of information design and, ultimately, to metadesign. The illus¬
trations that follow are presented in no particular order; their selection
has been guided only by a wish to present variety.4 While only a few
of the examples described are highly technologized, it is a fundamental
assumption of Sense-Making that the enormous flexibilities the new tech¬
nologies offer make implementation of Sense-Making in practice poten¬
tially powerful.
In implementing such systems, fundamental questions would need to be
answered, such as: How much diversity is sufficient to trigger user sense¬
making? How can we serve factizing needs without cutting-off challenges
to factizing and without retreating to a conceptualization of information
as a thing to be transferred? How do we handle vested interests? Can a
profession serve the sense-making needs of users without being subject to
the powerful influences of other professionals who have vested interests in
particular kinds of sense? Given the enormity of these questions, some
might contend that the illustrations presented are exercises in impractical
idealism. One alternative point of view, however, suggests that there is
a large space in society for professional facilitators of sense-making. Yet
another suggests that the myriad challenges we see to nation-states, orga¬
nizational systems, and all kinds of experts are manifestations of the fail¬
ure of these structures and experts to be informationally useful to people.

Sense-Making the Reference Interview

The most extensive application of Sense-Making to date has been at the

library reference desk. An estimated five hundred professional librarians at
several locales have been trained to use the Sense-Making approach in
the reference interview. Some reference librarians report that they have
changed entirely to this approach, while others say they combine Sense-
Making with other techniques. Librarians using this approach as a dialogic
49 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

interface between librarian and patron focus on developing a picture of the

user's sense-making triangle. To do so, they ask such questions as: What
led you to ask this question? How do you hope to be helped? If you could
get the best possible answer, what would it be like? What are you trying
to do?

journal Authors as Sense-Makers

In a small test application, abstracts of ten journal articles were prepared

for students in two classes. Traditional abstracts and keywords were pre¬
sented to one class. In the second class, in addition to these traditional
elements, students were given authors' answers to such Sense-Making
questions as: What was it that you hoped to accomplish with this article?
What led you to write it? How did writing it help you? How do you think
it will help others? What was your major struggle with the article? What
remains unresolved? Students were asked to rank the articles in terms of
their potential usefulness and were then given copies of the actual articles
to use in writing term papers. Three months later they were asked to rate
the articles' actual usefulness. The actual and potential usefulness rankings
of the students who received the Sense-Making abstracts were significantly
closer than those who received the traditional abstracts. The implication is
that author abstracts guided by Sense-Making provided more potential
bridges of connection to readers.

Sacrificing the Coherent journalism Narrative

In this small-scale test application, journalism students were taught to

sacrifice the coherent narrative that is the foundation stone of journalistic
practice and, instead, to surround their phenomena of interest within the
kind of circling of reality mandated by Sense-Making. The students were
taught to ask themselves questions such as: What leads me to care about
this? Who else cares? What leads them to care? What different groups of
people care? Within groups, what disagreements might there be? What
50 Dervin

would be alternative views of the reasons for the dispute? Is there

consensus across groups/people on any points? What explains this? The
student journalists were also taught how to select for observation and in¬
terview people at five or six maximally different sites, taking into account
issues of power and difference, and, within sites, to seek out both conflict
and consensus and people with and without power. In writing up the
results of their efforts, the students were to display the results as a number
of incomplete, sometimes overlapping, sometimes disparate narratives
rather than as one coherent narrative. To assess the results, a group of
student readers talked with the student journalists, focusing the discussion
on such questions as: Given that a journalist cannot present all viewpoints
in an article, what degree of difference among interviewees—and within
the minds of individual interviewees—would be sufficient to trigger the
reader's own sense-making processes? How could technologies be used to
implement this kind of journalism?

Transforming a Professional Stereotype

Interested in the level of activity around its video desk, a public library
asked users to explain how the videos they watched helped them. The
results transformed how the librarians thought about their video collec¬
tions. Users reported a range of life-enhancing and survival outcomes that
ran counter to the stereotype of video as an entertainment medium. As a
result, the library both increased its video budget and developed program¬
matic connections between the video collection and literacy training.

How Books Help

At another library, readers were invited to post their answers to the fol¬
lowing questions on a bulletin board: How did the book you are returning
today help you? What leads you to say this? Librarians observed that
patrons stood at the board for long periods reading other readers'
Si Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

responses. They also noticed an increase in demand for several books that
ordinarily had low circulations.

Student Sense-Making

A trial Sense-Making system was developed for a college class. First,

researchers interviewed students who had taken the class in the past.
Using Sense-Making, they asked the former students to describe the sense¬
making they had applied to writing their term papers. After analyzing the
situations, gaps, bridges, and helps the students reported, researchers struc¬
tured them into an interactive computer program so that new students
could plot their own paths through the input on an as-needed basis. A
large number of paths were possible; students could enter through sit¬
uations, gaps, bridges, or helps. For example, a student might start by
choosing a situation description ("I hate this class”), a bridge ("What's
the best resource on this topic?”), a gap ("Ffow can I choose a topic when
I'm so confused”), or an outcome ("What's the easiest way to do this?”).
Once through the gate of each entry, additional gates were offered, again
developed inductively based on the actual sense-making needs of those
who had gone through the experience in the past. Students could, for
example, ask a question and then select the kind of answer they would
like—for example, what a librarian said, what the teacher said, what a
good student or a selection of different students said. Users could also add
their own comments if they found that their own sense-making needs
were not well enough represented.

Information Presentation at a Blood Donating Center

At a blood center, donors' needs for information usually arise within the
context of a sequenced movement of intake, testing, preparation, donat¬
ing, and recovering. Most attempts to inform donors about the process,
however, occur before they come to the center. A Sense-Making study
showed that there are reasonably well-demarcated sequences of sense-
52 Dervin

making that can address donors' information needs and questions at par¬
ticular points in the process. Results also suggested that donors often had
information needs they could not easily articulate publicly; these could be
handled with a donor-controlled, interactive, path-flexible sense-making
system. The research results also indicated that donors were well aware of
disagreements and differences of opinion among health professionals that
sometimes produced different answers to their questions, and they wanted
the information system to address these varying perspectives.

Information Sheets for Patients

In a small-scale application at a cancer clinic, patient information sheets

concentrated on the major questions raised during Sense-Making inter¬
views. Each sheet focused on one question. Since patients' interviews
showed that they were very concerned about conflicts in information, the
sheets placed major emphasis on those issues. The typical question was
followed by answers from three or four doctors, one or two nurses, and
several patients. The answers were followed with comments that circled
around the conflicts, each source explaining her or his understanding of
what accounted for the differences.

Surveilling an Organization

In an organizational context, a leader used Sense-Making to begin every

staff meeting by asking each staff member to talk briefly about the pre¬
ceding week's work. What successes did you have last week? What suc¬
cesses did we collectively have last week? What made these successes
possible? What barriers or struggles did you face last week? What barriers
or struggles did we collectively face last week? What do you see as leading
to these barriers/struggles? What do you think would help overcome
them? The leader reported that participants resisted the process at first but
that over time it become a meeting highlight. In addition, the leader
noted that consensus-building became much easier and that staff members
53 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

became more and more tolerant of and cooperative with each other. Fur¬
ther, critical needs for information collecting became more clearly appar¬
ent, and people's efforts to answer the questions grew less wasteful and
better focused.

Constructing a Research Community

Much the same approach was used in a research community where each
participant presented his or her work for group discussion. Presentations
were kept brief—no more than thirty minutes—and no interruptions were
allowed. At the end of the presentation, each listener was asked to speak
for three or four minutes in answer to these questions: What was helpful
to you about this presentation? How did it help? What connections do
you see between your work and this presentation? What leads you to say
that? What confused you about this presentation? What would have
helped you handle that confusion? What would you have liked to see in
this presentation that was not there? How would that have helped you?
After this round, the subject was opened up for general discussion. Evalu¬
ations by both leader and participants suggested that the process helped
everyone enter more easily into constructive dialogue and find ways to
connect with and assist each others' work.

Self Sense-Making

In this application, people used the detailed micro-moment time-line

interview to ask themselves about a situation of struggle or confusion
or threat. Following the usual approaches to the interview, the self¬
interviewers described what happened in detail and then examined each
time-line step in terms of what conclusions or ideas or thoughts had
arisen, what emotions or feelings they felt, and what confusions or worries
they faced. Each conclusion, idea, thought, emotion, feeling, confusion,
worry was then probed. What led to it? How does it connect to the rest of
my life? Did it help me or facilitate my efforts? Did it hurt or hinder me?
54 Dervin

How? What constraints or barriers or forces are at play? What explains

these? Over the past twenty years more than a thousand people have
conducted these self-interviews. Many have observed increases in their
understanding of not only themselves but also others and the conditions
and events that affect them. Further, they have reported improvements in
understanding how and what information from others could be helpful in
similar situations.

Conclusions

In this chapter I have traced briefly the history of theories of information

design and have proposed that we must change our theory if we are to
pursue a practice that is maximally helpful to the human condition. I have
also presented an exemplar approach called Sense-Making, whose theory
and methodology calls for looking at information design as a dialogic
circling of reality, a reality that can be reached for but never touched,
described in gossamer but never sculpted. This practice focuses on meta¬
design—design about design—and explicitly acknowledges that its work
involves not merely transferring information from here to there but
assisting human beings in their information design.
If we are to pursue this challenge, we will have to examine our use of
terms traditionally held to be fundamental to information processes—fact,
knowledge, data—and, even, the concept information itself. Our views of
information are challenged by what many observers call the most impor¬
tant philosophic rupture of our time, with order on one side and chaos on
the other. Traditional views of information define it as serving the former
and threatened by the latter. What I propose in this chapter is a recon¬
ceptualization that chooses both order and chaos and that focuses on the
ways humans individually and collectively design the sense (i.e., create the
information) that permits them to move from one to the other. Some may
see this reconceptualization as diminishing the role of information design,
but an alternative view suggests that it may enrich that role to one of
far-reaching consequences for the human species.
55 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

Notes

1. Since the mandate for this volume is to write for a diverse audience, 1 present the
arguments in this chapter in as accessible language as possible without arduously tracing
the roots of ideas and supplying detailed footnotes. Citations are reduced to the bare
essentials and to only the most recent work by scholars whose ideas I have relied on.
Readers who wish more detailed and extensive presentations—albeit developed for dif¬
ferent purposes—are directed to Dervin 1993, 1992, 1989a, 1989b, 1994. I owe particular
gratitude to Richard F. Carter (1989, 1991), whose work has informed my own thinking
more than any other.

2. In this chapter, the terms information, knowledge, knowing, data, and truth are used
purposely without any attempt to distinguish precisely among them. The intent is to
point out the ways we use these terms without definition in everyday discourse, even
everyday scholarship. It is a major premise of this article that most of the conceptual
edifices constructed to distinguish one term from another in fact posit truth—defined as
statements isomorphic to reality—as the criterion for knowledge and information.

3. In this presentation, Sense-Making the approach is distinguished from sense-making

the phenomena by the use of two capital letters.

4. More complete descriptions of most of these examples can be found in Dervin 1992,
Dervin 1989a, and Dervin and Dewdney 1986. More information can also be obtained
from the author.

References

Best, S., and Kellner, D. 1991. Postmodern Theory. New York: Guilford Press.

Bruner, J. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Carter, R. F. 1989. Reinventing communication, scientifically. In World Community in

Post-industrial society: Continuity and Change in Communications in Post-industrial Society,
vol. 2. Seoul, Korea: Wooseok.

Carter, R. F. 1991. Comparative analysis, theory, and cross-cultural communication.

Communication Theory 1: 151-58.

Clifford, J. 1986. Introduction: Partial truths. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography, J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus, eds., pp. 1-26. Berkeley: University of Califor¬
nia Press.

Dervin, B. 1989a. Audience as listener and learner, teacher and confidante: The sense¬
making approach. In Public Communication Campaigns, 2nd ed., R. Rice and C. Atkin,
eds., pp. 67-86. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications.
56 Dervin

Dervin, B. 1989b. Users as research inventions: How research categories perpetuate ineq¬
uities. Journal of Communication 39: 216-32.

Dervin, B. 1992. From the mind's eye of the user: The sense-making qualitative-
quantitative methodology. In Qualitative Research in Information Management, J. D. Glazier
and R. R. Powell, eds., pp. 61-84. Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited.

Dervin, B. 1993. Verbing communication: Mandate for disciplinary invention. Journal of

43: 45-54.

Dervin, B. 1994. Information <—> democracy: An examination of underlying assump¬

tions. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45, 6 (July): 369-85.

Dervin, B., and Dewdney, P. 1986. Neutral questioning: A new approach to the reference
interview. RQ (Summer): 506-13.

Fraser, N. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social The¬
ory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, M. Bergman Ramos, trans. New York: Herder
and Herder.

Foucault, M. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge, A. M. Smith, trans. New York: Pan¬
theon. (Original work published in 1969).

Gandy, O. H. 1988. The political economy of communication competence. In The Politi¬

cal Economy of Information, V. Mosco and J. Wasko, eds. Madison: University of Wiscon¬
sin Press.

Geertz, C. 1975. On the nature of anthropological understanding. American Scientist

(January-February): 8-14.

Giddens, A. 1989. The orthodox consensus and the emerging synthesis. In Rethinking
Communication: Paradigm Issues, vol. 1, B. Dervin, L. Grossberg, B. J. O'Keefe, and E.
Wartella, eds. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berke¬
ley: University of California Press.

Habermas, J. 1972. Knowledge and Human Interests, Jeremy Shapiro, transl. Boston: Beacon
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Hayles, K. N. 1990. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science.
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Lather, P. 1991. Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern. New
York: Routledge.
57 Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making

Lukes, S. 1974. Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan.

Lyotard, J. F. 1984. The Posti?ioden: Condition: A Report on Knowledge, G. Bennington and

B. Massumi, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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4 Human-Centered Design

Mike Cooley

It is said that we learn from history. The evidence, however, is not entirely
convincing and frequently indicates that the opposite is true. We often
seem determined to slavishly repeat the mistakes made at earlier historical
stages. It would be unfortunate indeed if we were to use information
technology to do to intellectual work what we have already done at such
terrible cost to skilled manual work. Thus when we talk about information
design a little caution and modesty are in order.
What do we mean by design and how do you design information? The
notion of design arose during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in
Europe and connoted the separation of thinking and doing. That is not to
suggest for a moment that designing was a new activity. Rather it was
separated out from a wider productive activity and recognized as an activ¬
ity in its own right. Design can be said to constitute a separation of hand
and brain, of manual and intellectual work, of the conceptual part of work
from the labor process. Above all it indicated a process called designing that
was to be separated from doing. It is clearly difficult to locate a specific
historical turning point at which it occurred. Rather, it should be viewed
as a historical tendency.
Up to the stage in question, great structures, which to this day define
our twenty-first century, were “built" by master builders. Subsequently the
structures were “designed" by architects and the construction was then
60 Cooley

undertaken by builders. Whereas earlier, site drawings conveyed an inten¬

tionally or purpose, which would then be interpreted within a tradition
and cultural context, the drawings at later stages became merely a set of
instructions. In this, we can already detect, in embryo, the central tenets
of Taylorism. Frederick W. described it thus: "In my system the workman
is told precisely what he is to do and how he is to do it and any
improvement he makes upon the instructions given to him is fatal to
success" (cited in Cooley 1993).
These processes went hand in glove with—some would say were a con¬
sequence of—our notion of science. For a process or a design to be scien¬
tific it must display the three predominant characteristics of the natural
sciences: namely, predictability, repeatability, and mathematical quantifi-
ability. This, by definition, precludes intuition, subjective judgment, tacit
knowledge, dreams, imagination, and purpose.
That narrow scientific view is obsessed with the notion of "the one best
way" (witness the mathematics of convergence or Leibnitz's attempts at an
exact language) and with rule-based systems. All of this is deeply prob¬
lematic. For example, any active trade unionist will tell you that an effec¬
tive way to stop anything in its tracks is to "work to rule." It is all the
little things we do outside the rules, through our sense of purpose, that
keep everything going.
It may be held that these concerns, if they are relevant at all, apply only
in the field of manual work. Yet one of the founders of computing,
Charles Babbage, maintained: "We have already mentioned what may
perhaps appear paradoxical to some of our readers: that the division of
labour can be applied with equal success to mental as well as to mechani¬
cal operations and that it ensures in both the same economy of time"
(cited in Cooley 1993). Not surprising, then, that some of our German
colleagues refer to new information-technology environments as "the pro¬
duction line in the office" (.Fliessband im Btiro).
What we see on all sides is a tendency to automate those who work_
whether manually or intellectually—rather than to informate them. In the
meantime, we still tend to confuse the potential of these technologies with
67 Human-Centered Design

their realities. Perhaps as the millennium draws precariously to its close it

will also provide the stimulus to look creatively at information design and
so structure our systems as to enhance and celebrate the most precious
asset of any society, which is the skill, ingenuity, creativity, imagination,
and commitment of its people.

This Extraordinary Millennium

The year 2000 marks the end of the most extraordinary millennium in
human history. During it, humanity has witnessed the decline of feudal¬
ism, the growth of capitalism, and the weakening of religion as the leading
edge in European society. We have facilitated the emergence of Cartesian
science, the concentration of populations into modern cities, and the de¬
velopment of earth-shrinking transport systems. Above all, there has been
the growth of industrial society. We have allowed the great storytelling
traditions to all but wither away. We have devised the means of flying,
declared Jackson Pollock a great artist, bounced on the moon, and killed
forty million people in just one war.
We clearly perceive ourselves to be an upwardly mobile species. Yet at
no time in human history have so many of our citizens felt alienated from
and threatened by the society that we have created. Through our science
we have become the first generation of the only species to apparently have
it within its power to destroy not only itself but life on the planet as we
know it. We have become far too smart scientifically to survive much
longer without wisdom.
We should reflect upon the beauty and upon the devastation we have
wrought on our own two-edged way to the twenty-first century. The de¬
linquent genius of our species has produced the beauty of Venice and also
the hideousness of Chernobyl; the playful linguistic delights of Shake¬
speare and the ruthlessness of British imperialism; the musical treasures of
Mozart and the stench of Bergen Belsen; the caring medical potential of
Roentgen's X-rays and the horrific devastation of Hiroshima.
62 Cooley

The last century of this millennium has been characterized by a con¬

vulsed and exponential rate of technological change in which our speed of
communication has increased by 107, our speed of travel by 103, and of
data handling by 106. Over the same period our depletion of energy
resources has increased by 104 and weapon power by 107.
We have seen the polarization of wealth and activity. In developed
countries there are computer programs to help people diet, while out of
the 122 million babies born in developing countries in 1982, 11 million
died before their first birthday and an additional 5 million died before
their fifth birthday. In some countries it is more today!
At the end of the millennium we appear to stand as the masters of
nature. We scrabble millions of tons of material around each year, and in
doing so we shift the equivalent of three times the sediment moved each
year by the world's rivers. We mine and burn billions of tons of coal each
year, so venting the waste—which includes carbon dioxide, the principal
contributor to the greenhouse effect—into the atmosphere. In many parts
of the world we have turned the soil into a craving junkie incapable of
producing without its next fix.

Stimulus

Symbols in him detemiine the kind of stories we tell and the stories we tell determine the
kind of history we make and remake.
—Mary Robinson

The year 2000 could, and should, provide a powerful stimulus to examine
where, as an industrial society, we are going. To do so at the macrolevel,
we will require the perspective of a historian, the imagination of a poet,
the analytical ability of a scientist, and the wisdom of a Chief Seattle.
We shall have to be capable of thinking holistically, working in multi¬
disciplinary groups, coping with change, and developing systems and
products that are sustainable and caring of nature and humanity. Our
current educational systems are fundamentally inappropriate and woefully
inadequate to address this historical task. In relation to manufacturing and
63 Human-Centered Design

industry, it seems self-evident that developing the skill and competence

necessary in the twenty-first century will require nothing short of a cul¬
tural and industrial renaissance.
To come about, this will require citizens possessed not just of knowledge
but also of wisdom. It will require the courage and the dignity to ask
simple questions of profound significance. Why is it that if we grow our
own lettuce and repair our own car, the gross national product (GNP) goes
down, whereas if there is a pile-up on the motorway and in the carnage
scores of people are killed and piles of cars are destroyed, the GNP goes
up? What compels us to design products to fall apart after five years? What
is the deranged mentality of the expert in artificial intelligence who said
on the BBC that human beings will have to accept their place in the evo¬
lutionary hierarchy of animals, human beings, and intelligent machines?
These are key issues as we approach the twenty-first century, and our
educational system should be preparing people to discuss them in an in¬
formed, creative, and imaginative fashion.

The Industrial Future

If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grains will grow and which will
not ...
—William Shakespeare

There is a growing recognition that the future cannot merely be an extra¬

polation of the past. We cannot assume it is possible to have an ever-
increasing rate of production and consumption. The mass production of
throwaway products based on energy-, capital-, and chemical-intensive
forms of production, whether in manufacturing or in agriculture, is no
longer possible nor acceptable. The ecological damage we are doing is now
making this clear to growing numbers of concerned citizens. Furthermore,
these intensive forms of production are also giving rise to political and
social tensions and are contributing significantly to growing structural un¬
employment worldwide. The so-called lucky ones who retain their jobs are
increasingly involved in new technologies resulting in processes not only
64 Cooley

stressful for people but which frequently reduce them to mere machine
appendages. A European Community report highlighted these issues and
advocated anthropocentric systems as a long-term, sustainable alternative
(EEC 1990). The report suggested that industrial society needs to move
from an economy of scale to an economy of scope and on to an economy
of networking and thus that there is an urgent need for a society of
proactive, creative, involved citizens at all levels. It made the point that
society will gradually become one of "continuous innovation,” where the
capacity to design and build prototypes and to have skill-based, short-
batch manufacturing capabilities will be of growing importance.
It advocated that linguistic, cultural, and geographical diversity (regarded
by some as a weakness) should in the future be perceived as an advantage
and a source of innovation. In addition, technological and educational
support systems should enhance that diversity rather than diminish it.
Anthropocentric systems, which I prefer to call Efuman-Centered Systems
(HCS), are the appropriate context for these new developments to flourish.

Human-Centered Systems (HCS)—An Overview

My own conclusion is that engineering is an art rather than a science and by saying this I
imply a higher, not a lower status.
—H. H. Rosenbrock (1990)

The HCS approach rejects the mechanistic paradigm of technological and

societal development. HCS provides a powerful alternative philosophy for
systems design and broader educational and societal development. It
strongly questions the basis of the scientific methodology, which accepts
only the predictable, the repeatable, and the mathematically quantifiable.
This is because the scientific methodology excludes intuition, subjective
judgment, and tacit knowledge.
HCS also rejects the notion of the "one best way” and the "sameness”
of scientific ideas and suggests instead forms of science and technology
that would be culturally specific. A great emphasis is put on the impor-
65 Human-Centered Design

tance of diversity, providing a motivation to reflect and enhance cultural,

educational, and even product diversity. HCS envisages quite different
forms of human-machine interaction resulting in a human-machine sym¬
biosis. It regards the social and cultural shaping of technology as central to
the design and development of future technological systems and society as
a whole.
This challenges much of the given wisdom about the information soci¬
ety, emphasizing knowledge, wisdom, and action rather than data and in¬
formation. A dialectical interaction is necessary between the subjective and
the objective, challenging the appropriateness of the narrow technocentric
and cognitive-engineering approaches to systems design and emphasizing
new forms of “emancipatory technology” with new mechanisms for user
involvement.
The initial debate on HCS systems concentrated in the main on the
human aspects of production and skill in an industrial setting. Recently,
the concept has begun to be used to address socioeconomic and cultural
issues that are becoming central to the industrial and social development
of Europe as it approaches the twenty-first century. The Forecasting and
Assessment in Science and Technology project (FAST) has recently carried
out a survey of the potential for anthropocentric developments in most of
the countries of the European Union (EU) (EEC 1990, 1991). In order
to test in practice the concepts of HCS systems, the European Strategic
Programme in Information Technology (ESPRIT) funded a major research
and development project (directed by the author) to design and build
the world's first human-centered, computer-integrated manufacturing sys¬
tem. Partners from Germany, Denmark, and Britain were involved (Cooley
1993).

A Tool Rather than a Machine

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses; When the fact fails me, I approve my
senses.
—Robert Graves
66 Cooley

Our aim was to provide an advanced system in which the human being
would handle the qualitative subjective judgments and the machine the
quantitative elements. It involved a radical redesign of the interface tech¬
nologies. At a philosophical level, the objective was to provide tools (in
the Heideggerian sense) that would support human skill and ingenuity
rather than machines to objectivize that knowledge.
One of the main processes of current technological development is to
render systems active and human beings passive. Our project's objective
was to demonstrate that it is possible to design forms of technology that
reverse this process, thus enhancing the activity and dominance of the
user. It meant providing powerful analogical systems in which it was pos¬
sible to program the devices according to the traditional ways of working
while enhancing them by providing very modern software and hardware
tools.
In the context of high-level intellectual work (in this case designing), it
was necessary to challenge the concept of menu-driven systems. These
frequently reduce the designer to being like a child with a LEGO set. The
child can make a pleasing pattern of predetermined elements but cannot
change those elements. To overcome this, an electronic sketchpad was
designed which restores to the designer the creative freedom of a Renais¬
sance artist. The system is now being tested at a number of major Euro¬
pean companies, including Rolls Royce and BICC in Britain and BIBA in
Germany.
The whole project has raised very important questions for education at
every level. The skill and competence at every level of the organization is
changed and expanded. So also is the worker's perception of himself or
herself. On the shop floor, those who functioned and thought of them¬
selves as machine operators metamorphized into cell managers. They can
take an overview of the functioning of the cell and acquire additional
competences in the fields of planning, costing, and systems maintenance
(figure 4.1). They are provided with powerful support tools through work¬
stations with adaptive interfaces. Such interfaces acknowledge and cele¬
brate traditional craft skills and provide for graphical programming and
67 Human-Centered Design

Planning Practice Machining

A = Component
B = Total machine
C = Whole workshop

Figure 4.1
(© Cooley 1992)

sketchpad input devices and ensure that the absurd QWERTY keyboard
does not get in the way of the real domain competences.
Experience in a number of countries demonstrates that those able to
make best use of such systems are those who emerge from a quasi¬
apprenticeship system and therefore start from a high “competence plat¬
form." The whole process is one in which the operator "builds on the
familiar to create the new." Part of the competence and some of the skills
required to work in such environments will be the capacity to

1. Absorb new knowledge and transform it

2. Draw conclusions about the unknown from the known

3. Take initiatives

4. Make decisions
68 Cooley

5. Work with a team

6. Adopt a systematic, analytical approach

7. Plan independently

8. Take on responsibility

The German company manager who identified these requirements for the
future tellingly observes: "It will go without saying that in the majority of
cases these skills cannot be taught in isolation during instruction or in the
classroom but only in conjunction with technical exercises and concrete
practical problems at the workplace.”
Those involved in systems design will need to be competent in the
design of adaptive tools that accord closely with the traditions and prac¬
tices of the domain area (see figure 4.2). Furthermore, they will need to be
competent in the design of systems and organizations that display the
following characteristics.

Coherence The embedded meanings, if not immediately evident, at least

must not be cloaked or obscure. A related concept here is transparency,
which means rendering highly visible what is going on and what is
possible.

Inclusiveness The system should be inviting and tend to invite you in and
make you feel part of a community of activities with which you are
familiar and on friendly terms.

Malleability A possibility to mold the situation to suit, to pick-and-mix

and sculpt the environment to suit one's own instrumental needs, aes¬
thetic tastes, and craft traditions.

Engagement A sense that one is being invited to participate in the process

and which creates a feeling of empathy.

Ownership A feeling that you have created and thereby own parts of
the system. A sense of belonging and even companionship as traditional
craftsmen may feel with a favorite machine tool.

Responsiveness A general sense that you can get the system to respond to
your requirements and your individual needs and ways of doing things. A
69 Human-Centered Design

Computing competence Domain competence

Assembly Programming Tool Adaptive Problem

languages languages kits tools areas

1950s Problems described in computer's internal language

O O
O O

1990s Knowledge-based adaptive human centered evironments

Figure 4.2
(© Cooley 1992, after Fischer)
70 Cooley

system that makes visible its own rules and then encourages one to learn
them and to change them at will.

Purpose Meant in the sense in which Rosenbrock describes it. The system
is capable of responding to the purpose the user has in mind and then
encouraging him or her to go beyond it.

Panoramic Most current systems tend to encourage the user to converge

on narrower activities. Good embedded systems should also provide win¬
dows or apertures through which one can take a wider or more panoramic
view. This encourages the acquisition of boundary knowledge and allows the
user to act more effectively and competently by locating what he or she is
doing in the understanding of a wider context.

Transcendence When operating the system, the user should be encour¬

aged, enticed, and even provoked to transcend the immediate task
requirements. The possibility of acquiring boundary knowledge and a
macrolevel vision of the process as a whole should be self-evident.

Initial Results

Hard-nosed industrialists and their compliant foot soldiers, industrial

engineers, have tended to regard the type of systems described above as
being at the best a diversion from "the real world of industry" or at
the worst, "dangerous liberal waffle." But times are changing. A crisis
in many of the rigid, hierarchical large organizations is forcing a radical
re-examination of much of the given wisdom. At an economic level, a
multidisciplinary report on the future of U.S. industry pointed out, "We
have tended to treat our workforces as a cost and a liability, whereas our
major competitors have treated them as an asset whose skills should be
ever enhanced" (Dertouzos et al. 1989).
Professor Anthony Hopwood has highlighted the need for accountants
to re-examine their arid thinking. They spend 75 percent of their time in
dealing with direct labor costs, though direct labor costs now only con¬
stitute about 10 percent of the total costs if one considers industry as a
77 Human-Centered Design

whole. On the other hand, material, which accounts for 50 percent of the
cost, is subject to only 10 percent of accounting effort (Hopwood 1990).
At the technical level the case is even more compelling. In machine-
based, hierarchical, Tayloristic systems that relentlessly drive toward wall-
to-wall automation, there is now a growing recognition that such systems
are extremely vulnerable to disturbance. They are typically good at coping
with high-frequency, low-impact events, but bad in dealing with low-
frequency, high-impact ones—for example, the uncertainty of the real
world. Otherwise stated, machine-dependent systems are highly synchron¬
ized and coordinated. When one part of the system goes down, the high-
level synchronization is turned into its dialectical opposite and one gets
massive desynchronization rather in accord with catastrophe theory.
An alternative scenario, as studies in Germany have pointed out, is to
have proactive, capable, interventionist workers for whom the system is
transparent. These workers can anticipate system failures, take remedial
steps, and if downtime occurs know what steps to take to minimize its
consequences. Research already shows that such systems are much more
robust and capable of handling disturbance. Moreover, the resultant
downtime is significantly less than in machine-dependent systems.
Practical tests carried out in the real world of manufacturing are even
more compelling. When the British Company BICC tested out a form of
cell- or island-based production utilizing human-centered systems with
powerful graphical outputs to assist decision making on the shop floor, the
results were that on-time delivery increased from 31 percent to 86 percent,
manufacturing lead time approximately halved, work-in-progress value
reduced by 45 percent, and excess overtime required to meet schedules
declined by 75 percent.
In addition to demonstrable economic benefits, there may be long-term
advantages in the form of flexibility and strategic capability for innovation.
Of equal importance, but less easy to quantify, are social benefits such as
a higher quality of working life, dramatically improved motivation, and
the liberating of one of society's greatest assets, the skill, ingenuity, and
creativity of its people. The resultant flexibility will become paramount
72 Cooley

in coming years as there are more custom-bound, short-batch production

runs and as an economy of networking becomes widespread. Concurrent
or simultaneous engineering will further reinforce the need for systems of
this kind.

Overstructuring

Management is just a bad habit inherited from the army and the church.
—Danny Conroy-Craftsman

A feature of modern industrial society is its overstructuring. This arises

within production from a mechanistic, Tayloristic view of optimum orga¬
nization. The United States led in this overstructuring of industry and, as a
recent report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pointed out,
it is seriously debilitating because it treats human beings as liabilities
rather than as assets (Dertouzos et al. 1989).
Although these lessons are beginning to be understood in industry, the
educational system in general—and universities in particular—still seem
determined to pursue teaching forms based on factory models. When
Henry Ford donated a hundred million dollars to an institution he called
the School of the Future, he said, "I have manufactured cars long enough
to the point where I have got the desire to manufacture people. The
catchword of the day is standardization" (cited in Cooley 1990).
More recently, I have described methods of organizing universities as
factories within which the students are referred to as commodities, the
examinations as quality-control procedures, graduation as delivery, and the
professors as operators. They have a Frank Wolf algorithm (computer-based)
to work out the rate at which the professors are "producing" (Cooley
1993). The factory model is now all-pervasive. It conditions and distorts
every aspect of life in the technologically advanced nations. I am not sure
if it was ever true in the Shakespearean sense that all the world's a stage,
but it is certainly true that at the close of the twentieth century all the
world's a factory—and all of nature that surrounds us is inert material for
its remorseless production line.
73 Human-Centered Design

Paradigmatic changes are already at hand, and within these we will

require people with the competence to cope with ill-defined, loosely
structured situations that cannot be defined in a unidimensional way and
that embody high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability. At a design
level, we will have to consider a scientific methodology based on purpose
and not one based only on causal explanations (Rosenbrock 1990).

Education, Not Training

Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer deserves to be!

—David Smith

Many of the factorylike universities have ceased any pretense at education

and are instead concerned with instruction. In many cases, they are so
highly structured that even the instruction becomes mere arid training.
Training usually provides a narrow explicit machine- or systems-specific
competence that is quickly obsolete with technological change. Education
is of a much more durable quality; as one of my German colleagues put it,
it is "a state of mind.”
My hierarchy of verbs in these matters is that you program a robot, you
train an animal, but you educate human beings. Education in this sense is
not just what occurs in schools or universities, where, so often, students
and teachers are, as Ivan Illich points out, "schooled to confuse teaching
with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with compe¬
tence, and fluency with the ability to say something new” (Illich 1971: 9).
Education is merely a subset of the cultural milieu in which it occurs.
Thus apprenticeships in the classical sense were the transmission of a cul¬
ture. They produced the giants who define our European civilization: Leo¬
nardo da Vinci, Filippo Brunelleschi, Giotto. A great skill, as we approach
the twenty-first century, will be to use the new technologies in such a
fashion as to build upon the best traditions of those rich learning pro¬
cesses. In a Developing European Learning through Technology Advance
(DELTA) project I directed, we developed a multimedia learning environ¬
ment that seeks to transmit not expertise but rather the means by which
74 Cooley

Figure 4.3
(Reprinted with permission from John Seeley Brown, "Toward a New Epistemology for
Learning," in Intelligent Tutoring Systems at the Crossroad ofAI and Education, ed. C. Frasson
and J. Gauthiar [Norwood, N.J.: Ablax], 1989)

expertise is acquired. To use a crude analogy, it is to the learner what a

flight simulator might be to a trainee pilot.
Over and above this, it provides the basis for a new epistemology of
learning. Above all, it embodies a cognitive apprenticeship (figure 4.3). It
recognizes in the best Polanyi tradition that "There are things we know
but cannot tell" (1962) and that the richness of human competence can
only in part be reduced to rule-based systems. Further that an interaction
must exist between the rule-based core and the heuristics, fuzzy reason¬
ing, imagination, and intentionality that surrounds it. Thus we advocate
emancipatory technologies (figure 4.4).
75 Human-Centered Design

Tayloristic Rejection of

Figure 4.4
(Reprinted with permission from H. H. Rosenbrock, Designing Human-Centred Technology
[Berlin: Springer], 1989)
76 Cooley

In all of these systems, we question the given wisdom that daily advises
us that we live in an information society. We may perhaps live in a data
society, whereas what is required is the competence to operate at the
knowledge/wisdom/action end of the cybernetic loop (figure 4.5). I freely
admit that it took us many years and much technocratic rambling to
arrive at this rather obvious conclusion. If we had been more fully exposed
to the ideas, however ill-structured, of artists or poets, this might have
been more obvious. Thus the basic “theory'' behind figure 4.5, for exam¬
ple, was anticipated by T. S. Eliot in one of his poems, “Where is the
wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/Where is the knowledge we have lost
in information?" (Eliot 1990). One might presume to add the line “Where
is the information we have lost in data?” Frequently, the big issues in
society are prefigured by our poets and our artists, and we diminish our¬
selves as engineers and scientists if we do not interact with them in a
multidisciplinary way. The ability to do so may be an important require¬
ment as we approach the twenty-first century.
In order to transcend the narrow boundaries of existing disciplines, a
number of programs have now been implemented throughout the EEC—
now the EU—to address these difficulties. An exciting one was stimulated
in Sweden. It is entitled “Culture, Language and Artificial Intelligence."
Engineers, scientists, musicians, playwrights, dramatists, and master crafts¬
men all came together for an “event," and in consequence a new book
series was launched, poems were written, paintings were produced, and a
new journal, A.I. and Society, was launched.
All of this is to stimulate a multidisciplinary, multicultural approach
to dealing with the problems of industrial society as we approach the
twenty-first century. The International Research Institute for Human
Centred Systems, an institute without walls, has been founded to facilitate
the development of the skills and competences to do so.1

Let There Be Enterprise!

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing blit sea.
—Francis Bacon
77 Human-Centered Design

Figure 4.5
(Reprinted with permission from M. Cooley, Architect or Bee? [London: Chatto &
Windus], 1987)

In this chapter I have concentrated on the abilities that will be required

in industry in the twenty-first century. Many of these will be of vital
importance in related areas such as product innovation. There are many
policymakers, including some key ones in Japan, who believe that the
next "Schumpeter shove" will be in the field of ecologically desirable and
socially useful products. In this connection, the need for sensitive anten¬
nae to identify emerging markets and the ability to develop new markets,
social markets, and community projects will be of paramount importance.
78 Cooley

We urgently need enterprising, social entrepreneurs! Linked to this neces¬

sity will be the important capacity to interact creatively with other designers,
innovators, and user groups through organizations such as the EU/SPRINT-
supported Technology Exchange.2 More commonly known as the Product
Bank, the exchange has available some five thousand new products in
various stages of preparedness from concept through commercialized prod¬
uct. In addition, pattern recognition, the ability to identify synergetic oppor¬
tunities across disciplines—electronics and medicine, multimedia techniques
and culture, information technology and education—will be at a premium.
Furthermore, there will be extensive opportunities for those with the
capacity to grasp them and link communication technologies with cultural
products, in the manner of Village Action Projects in Finland and the
"sense of place" and "social citizenship" proposals in Italy. These projects
will be particularly important at the periphery of Europe, which still has
some of the richest cultures. Furthermore, properly used, they could en¬
hance the language revival in the West of Ireland.
In an overall sense, I advocate entrepreneurial and enterprising capacities
that far transcend their traditional concern with narrow, short-term profit
maximization. The abilities required in the twenty-first century will sub¬
sume these traditional areas and will also stretch into community work
and care, urban renewal programs, heritage activities, and social and cul¬
tural activities in the wider sense. In this broader regard, the Druid theater
in Galway, with its various multiplier effects, should be conceptualized as a
very entrepreneurial and enterprising undertaking.
Entrepreneurial skills have to do with motivation, commitment, and
imagination. Even in their most straightforward commercial forms, they
are not those which can be learned in a university alone (if at all). What I
am suggesting here, however, is that part of that motivation in the future
will be driven by ecological concerns, a sense of community, and a desire
to see technology assist the lame to walk, the blind to see, and the hungry
to be fed. It should not be driven by system possibilities alone. This will
require taking a human-centered view at an all-embracing level, and al¬
ready activities are underway that are laying the basis for such develop¬
ments (figure 4.6).
79 Human-Centered Design

Figure 4.6
(Reprinted with the permission of Dr. K. Gill, International Research Institute for
Human-Centred Systems)
80 Cooley

Imagination

It stands almost complete and finished in my mind so that I can survey it like a fine
picture or a beautiful stahie.
—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Industrialization has in many ways reduced and overconcentrated our

competences as human beings. We confer life on machines and diminish
ourselves. We are gradually becoming observers of life rather than its
active participants. Education in the sense in which I use it above should
imbue a sense of excitement, discovery, and imagination. We are far too
obsessed with narrow facts, details, and exams. Exams essentially find out
what people do not know rather than what they do know.
There used to be a tradition in some of the older universities that if you
didn't like the examination question you were set, you simply ignored it
and wrote your own question. Life in the widest philosophical sense
should be about writing one's own questions, and education should facili¬
tate that. It should stimulate and excite our imagination and sense of dis¬
covery. The great Einstein on one occasion observed that "Imagination is
far more important than knowledge." And, he went on to say, "The for¬
mulation of a problem is far more important than its solution, which may
be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new
questions, to look at old problems from a new angle marks the real
advances in science."
Human-Centered Design provides one exciting context in which to
consider these pressing issues "from a new angle.”

Notes

1. Details on the journal A.I. and Society and the International Research Institute for
Human-Centred Systems is available from Dr. K. Gill, Department of Information Studies,
Brighton University, Brighton, Sussex BN1 9PH, U.K.

2. The Technology Exchange. Wrest Park, Silsoe, Bedford MK45 4HS, U.K.
81 Human-Centered Design

References

Cooley, M. 1990. The New Shape of Industrial Culture and Technological Development.
Tokyo: Keizai University.

Cooley, M. 1993. Architect or Bee?: The Human Price of Technology. London: Hogarth Press.
(Also available in German, Japanese, and Swedish and forthcoming in Irish. Distributed
by Technology Innovation Associates, 95 Sussex Place, Slough, Berkshire SL1 INN, U.K.)

Dertouzos, M. L.; Lester, R. K.; Solow, R. M.; and the MIT Commission on Industrial
Productivity. 1989. Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Eliot, T. S. 1990. "Chomses from The Rock." In Selected Poems, p. 107. London: Faber &
Faber.

European Economic Community (EEC). 1990. European Competitiveness in the Twenty-first

Century: The Integration of Work, Culture and Technology. Report on Forecasting and As¬
sessment in Science and Technology (FAST). (Available free from FAST, 200 Rue de Loi,
200 B-1049 Brussels, Belgium)

European Economic Community (EEC). 1990, 1991. Prospects for Anthropocentric Pro¬
ductions Systems. FAST Reports on EC Member States. (Available from FAST as above)

Hopwood, A. 1988. Production and finance: The need for a common language. In
Proceedings of the New Manufacturing Imperatives Conference, pp. 79-89. London: Axiom
Systems Design.

Illich, I. 1971. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.

Polanyi, M. 1962. Tacit knowing: Its bearing on some problems of philosophy. Review of
Modem Physics 34 (no. 4): 601-616.]

Rosenbrock, H. H. 1990. Machines with a Purpose. Oxford University Press.

Information Design: An Old Hag in
Fashionable Clothes?

Romedi Passini

In the field of design, new terms are regularly introduced and old ones are
put aside. Sometimes old terms are rediscovered and put to new use.
Sometimes new terms buzz for short periods and then fall, forgotten.
Eventually they are replaced. This semantic play may account for little
more than the superficial beautification of old and worn-out design con¬
cepts and practice. In such cases a new term, at best, provokes critical
reactions; at worst, it dazzles some designers and clients into expectations
of wonders that never come to pass.1
The introduction of a new term, on the other hand, may be fully justi¬
fied if it refers to new notions, or if it signifies profound changes in
established practice. It then creates its own identity and serves as a sym¬
bol, a rallying point for the foundation of a new school of thought and,
maybe, the development of a novel design paradigm.2
Information design is not a new term, but its popularity has certainly
increased in recent years. A number of professional journals, associations,
design groups, and even university programs use the information-design
banner to proclaim a new identity. A glance at recent publications shows
that the phrase is an umbrella term to cover the planning of everything—
from user instructions to warning labels, from manuals to timetables, from
official forms to invoices, from traffic instructions to traffic signs, from
84 Passini

wayfinding signs to maps, from technical information sheets to scientific

papers, from simple computer layouts to virtual environments—and the
list continues. As used in this paper the term information design means
communication by words, pictures, charts, graphs, maps, pictograms, and
cartoons, whether by conventional or electronic means.
I use it to refer to a design approach that, I believe, is clearly emerging
and that promises to evolve into a distinct design practice. The aim of this
chapter is twofold: first, to review some basic criteria for this new design
practice and, second, to illustrate the importance and the meaning of
those criteria in a particular field of application—the design of information
for helping people find their way around in complex settings.

Designing Information

Who could dispute the fact that during the last two decades information,
its access and its use, has had a strong impact on our society? More and
more of our work depends on the effective use of information. New possi¬
bilities to access information are affecting our daily lives, not only at work
but also at home and during leisure time. Social functions have become
more and more specialized, creating greater complexity and, consequently,
new needs for information. The urban and architectural environment has
also grown more perplexing; just finding our way around our built envi¬
ronment, a trivial task in the past, is now a distinct challenge. Thus the
design of information and its efficient communication are more critical
than ever before.
In an amusing article, David Sless, after pointing to all the things we sell
(including ourselves), asks what else there is to sell but information (Sless
1994b). In his view, information is becoming the ultimate commodity
and, probably, a profitable line of business. This new focus and promising
opportunities create a climate conducive to rethinking the way we produce
and present. The emergence of information design as a field of study and
practice is a sure sign that something new is in the making.
85 Sign-Posting Information Design

Distinguishing Characteristics of Information Design

Graphic design is the traditional profession most closely associated with

the design of information. The distinction between information design
and graphic design might appear tenuous at first. Both are concerned with
information displays and with communication, but the distinction makes
sense if we look at it in a microhistorical context.
Graphic design over the last few decades has tended to emphasize ap¬
pearance and give expression to certain contemporary aesthetic values. The
profession, as it is still taught and practiced, has its roots in the early
twentieth- century Art Deco style, and, to a lesser extent, in Dadaism
(Kinross 1992). Information design, on the other hand emphasizes com¬
munication and is as concerned with content as with form (Sless 1994a). It
has its roots in a variety of disciplines—including information theory and
the cognitive sciences—and brings together design and research.

Knowledge Base for Information Design

Any object in existence has the potential for communicating information,

and anything we do has the same potential. Although we can refer to
some aspects of communication in general terms, I would argue that we
need to see information design in the light of a particular field of applica¬
tion. The issues in designing a government document, for example, are
not quite the same as those involved in designing a wayfinding system or
a warning label. As information serves a specific function (filling in forms,
wayfinding, warning, etc.), understanding that function is probably the
single most important aspect of efficient information design.
Nonetheless, many functions, even those that have their own character¬
istics and requirements, have something in common. Whenever people set
goals and use information to attain those goals in novel conditions, they
engage in a mental activity that can be conceptualized as problem solving.
Indeed, filling in a government form and wayfinding are both problem¬
solving activities. Providing information for problem solving is one of the
86 Passini

major tasks of information design. Understanding how people solve prob¬

lems provides designers with the criteria needed to determine what infor¬
mation is required and where or when it has to be accessible.
If information is the issue, there has to be not only a source and a
transmitter of information but also a receiver. Respecting the receiver's in-
formation-processing characteristics is fundamental to transferring infor¬
mation. The ways people read and understand messages vary with the task
and the individual. They are not the same when confronted with a set of
instructions at work and using a sign system to find their way around in a
complex setting; nor are they the same when struggling to make sense of
a government form and trying to understand a wayfinding map. Under¬
standing the ways we process different kinds of information provides the
designer cues to the most suitable forms of presenting that information.

Research and Information Design

Researchers have identified a number of variables that can affect informa¬

tion processing. Having to deal with great quantities of information may
lead to overload conditions, which in turn may reduce the processing of
information (Arthur and Passini 1992). Cultural, social, and age differences
may also make responses to information more complex. The complexity of
the messages themselves, combined with information-processing differ¬
ences among receivers and contextual variables, makes it difficult to predict
the effectiveness of an information display. In fact, a strong argument can
be made that design solutions can only be properly assessed by potential
users—regardless of how confident the designer is about the proposed
design.
Adams (1994) distinguishes between two kinds of information-design
research: (1) outcome research, which is usually done by specialist in¬
vestigators, assesses products according to scientific methodology and
uses large test samples, while in (2) process research, designers incorporate
changes in small, scaled, flexible increments. Though designers prefer the
latter type of research because of its accessibility, time efficiency, and free-
87 Sign-Posting Information Design

dom to study the issues they consider most important, the practice has its
pitfalls, especially if designers do not fully understand the scientific con¬
cepts of reliability and validity.
interessante
There is also a danger, however, in relying solely on assessment research
to build a discipline: it tends to be conservative. Although it produces
improvements on present conventions, it is not particularly well suited for
generating new ideas and questioning existing assumptions and practices.
New approaches and innovations originate in research of a more funda¬
mental nature and can give rise to a rejuvenation that is, I believe, impor¬
tant for information design to survive and develop.
The knowledge base for designing information emerges from the behav¬
ioral sciences, in particular from work in cognitive psychology. It is also
linked to ergonomics and environmental psychology. Those who question
the contribution of these sciences to information design may misunder¬
stand the role of science. Science does not provide solutions, it only
provides information and knowledge that designers can use to develop
solutions and new approaches. It would be ironical if designers—who
design information so that others can solve problems—were to fail to use
information to solve their own difficulties.

Pitfalls for Information Design

Some might identify the objective of information design as the production

of information, whereas the objective should be to attain a more general
design goal. Thus the objective of information design for wayfinding is not
to design signs but to help people move efficiently to their chosen desti¬
nations. The measure of quality for a design is not simply the designed
product but also users' behavior and satisfaction. Information is not an
end in itself. If this point is not emphasized, information design could
well end up being merely the design of good (i.e., beautiful) information
displays. And what would we gain from that?
The term infonnation design assumes that what users need is information,
when, in fact, other design interventions might be more effective.3 Rather
 88 Passini

than designing a label warning parents that a child might be able to push
over a high chair if it is placed too close to a wall, we could probably solve
the problem more satisfactorily by designing a stable chair. Information
design is not the only, and not always the best, design intervention.

Information Design and Wayfinding

In this section I introduce the cognitive and behavioral notions that are

Vai ensinar o metodo key to designing information systems. The concept I use as an illustration
dele is wayfinding, defined in terms of problem solving.4 This concept is essen¬
tial not only for determining what information is necessary, where it
should be, and what form it should take, but also for establishing an
underlying design logic.

The Concept of Wayfinding

Wayfinding refers to the cognitive and behavioral abilities associated with

purposefully reaching a desired physical destination. It was introduced in
the mid-1970s to replace the notion of spatial orientation, which referred
more specifically to an individual's ability to mentally represent a place.5
This representation is sometimes referred to as a cognitive map.
Wayfinding conceptualized in terms of problem solving comprises three
major processes: (1) decision making and the development of a plan of
action to reach a destination; (2) decision execution, transforming the plan
into behavior at the appropriate place(s) along a route; and (3) perception
and cognition (information processing), providing the necessary informa¬
tion to make and execute decisions (Passini 1984, Arthur and Passini
1992).
Wayfinding is distinguished from other types of problem solving by
operating in an architectural, urban, or geographic space. It incorporates
the mental representation of large-scale spaces (cognitive maps) that char¬
acterizes the older notion of spatial orientation. Cognitive maps, in this
context, are part of information processing. They are, in addition to being
89 Sign-Posting Information Design

records of direct environmental perception and cognition, possible sources

of information for both making and executing decisions.
A major distinction must be made between wayfinding in unfamiliar
settings and wayfinding in familiar settings or along familiar routes. On
familiar routes, people know what to do to get to their destination. In
other words, they have a record of the required decisions and, thus, do not
need to make decisions—only execute them. Executing decisions is a less
conscious and more automatic process than actual decision making, which
accounts for the ease with which people follow well-known routes. They
retain decision plans in one form or another and remember or recognize
the places where they have to execute specific decisions.6

What Information Is Needed

According to our conceptualization of wayfinding, people need informa¬

tion to make and execute decisions. Therefore, the wayfinding decisions
they make determine the content of the required information. (So much
for internal consistency of the argument!) But what does that mean for the
design of information? How can a designer know what decisions future
users are going to make?
interessante Two empirical observations help in answering these questions. First, for
similar tasks, decisions vary a great deal from one type of setting to
another. Second, within the same setting, the decisions of different users
tend to be similar for a given task (Passini 1984). These observations
suggest that the key decisions are determined more by the setting and its
architectural characteristics than by individual characteristics. It also indi¬
cates that information, if it is relevant and consistent with the wayfinding
task, will be used. The more efficient the support information, the more
similar the wayfinding solutions of its various users. It is interesting to
observe that settings with poor wayfinding information lead to more ex¬
ploratory decisions, whose objective is usually to find relevant information.
The issue is slightly complicated by the observation that some users tend
to rely more on information of a linear, sequential order that leads them
90 Passini

from one point on a route to the next, whereas others are more likely to
rely on information of a spatial nature that provides them with an overall
picture of the setting.7 These two wayfinding styles are only partly user-
specific; they are also affected by the setting's architectural and spatial
characteristics. Most people will rely on a linear sequential style when
finding their way in complex underground spaces where cognitive map¬
ping is difficult. This suggests that, as a rule, designers should provide
information for both wayfinding styles.
There is a tendency to see wayfinding information only in terms of
signs. The analysis of the decisions people make in real wayfinding sit¬
uations, however, shows clearly that most decisions are actually based on
information of an architectural nature—entrances to buildings, transition
points from one zone to another, exits, paths, stairs, escalators, elevators—
as well as information about overall spatial features—for example, the lay¬
out of a building or the pattern of a street system (Arthur and Passini
1992). For this reason, the content of wayfinding information should not
be limited to signs but should also include such architectural and spatial
features. Each of the three elements depends on the presence and articu¬
lation of the others.
To establish a list of decisions for which they have to provide informa¬
tion, designers must first identify the locations of the main access points
of a setting and—from the users' point of view—the key functions of the
space (i.e., the key destination zones). The principal wayfinding decisions
can be established by considering the following user tasks: (1) going from
each access point to the destination zone and back; (2) going from one
destination zone to another; and (3) circulating within the destination
zone. The designer can identify the need for more detailed decisions by
recording the points along the circulation routes where the users have to
choose among directional options.

Where Information Is Needed

Information is needed when and where users have to make a decision.

Information may be needed in the planning stage of a journey. Some
97 Sign-Posting Information Design

people need little information to start with but develop their wayfinding
solution as they confront new situations and new information. Others
prefer to plan a trip in some detail before embarking on it. To do so, they
need more information than the improvisational wayfinder.8
Information is also needed when people make and execute decisions at
specific points along their way to a destination. The location of an infor¬
mation unit along a path is determined by the location of the corre¬
sponding decision point. Graphic designers and building managers often
complain, in this regard, that users do not pay attention to signage. People
attempting to deal with a complex setting do not take in everything but
tend to choose what seems relevant to them; they pay attention to what
they need. An information unit located at a place when it is not needed at
the time has a good chance of being ignored.

The Question of Form and Presentation

If the content and the location of wayfinding information are determined

by users' wayfinding decisions, its form and presentation relate to the way
people perceive and recognize information displays. Through experience,
graphic designers have developed a design culture incorporating a good
deal of knowledge about these issues. It concerns letterforms and styles,
spacing, legibility and distance, angular distortions, halation (i.e., the
spreading characteristics of light), the use of symbols and colors, the illu¬
mination of signs, and even the design of arrows.9
At this point it is useful to consider an important methodological design
issue often encountered when transferring an information design from the
drawing board to the real setting. The readability of a display in the studio
may not carry over to its application in the setting. A sign containing
many units of information, for example, while easy to read in a quiet,
stable setting may be difficult to make out in a complex environment
where users are in motion. The reason, in this case, is quite simply that
people's habits of perception in complex settings when they are moving
are different from when they are motionless in a quiet situation. In a busy
92 Passini

street or corridor people typically scan a setting by glancing at particular

fixation points for less than two-tenths of a second. Although this percep¬
tual technique is suitable for coping with great quantities of information
in complex settings, it is not adaptable to reading many units of written
information on a sign.10
Understanding environmental perception in complex settings also sug¬
gests the design solution: people are able to perceive small numbers of
written units in a glance. Information obtained from such a quick look is
retained in the form of a short-lived iconic memory that can only be read
when it has been translated into a more stable memory (Neisser 1967).
Although this translation process can only deal with a limited number of
words, grouping longer messages into small three-unit packages restores
the user's ability to perceive it at a glance. The lesson here is twofold:
designers need (1) to know about the basic perceptual and cognitive pro¬
cesses and (2) to test information displays in the real setting with real users,
while avoiding generalizing from results obtained in nontypical conditions
(drawing board) to real settings.

From Information to Information Systems

Up to this point we have looked at individual decisions and the informa¬

tion required to make them. Decisions, though, are not isolated events.
They are linked together, and it is their linkages that give them their full
meaning in a problem-solving context. In order to take an elevator to a
given floor, for example, the user has to press the call button, enter the
elevator, press the destination button on the control panel, keep track of
the floors reached, and get out at the desired floor.
We can consider these decisions in the order described as a solution, a
blueprint for taking an elevator. In wayfinding terminology we refer to
such a blueprint as a decision plan. The decisions to press the call button,
to enter the elevator, and so on, all lead directly to behavior and thus do
not require additional decisions.
The decision to take the elevator to floor n was probably not the main
wayfinding task but was related to other decisions: for example, to enter
93 Sign-Posting Information Design

task decision higher-order decision behavioral decision

D to meet person P
at building B

D to enter building B

D to follow the path

D to go up the stairs
D to go through the doors

D to find the address of person P

D to look around
D to consult the indicator

to take elevator to floor n

D to press the call button

D to enter the elevator
D to press the button n
D to check the floors reached
D to get out at floor N

D to find room number z

D to look for information

D to ask the receptionist
D to follow the indicated corridor

Figure 5.1
Hypothetical Decision Diagram. The task decision is at the left while the decisions lead¬
ing directly to behavioral actions are shown on the right.

the building, to find the address of the desired destination, and, after
arriving by elevator at the desired floor, to find room number z. These
decisions, in this order, constitute a general blueprint (decision-plan) for
completing the original wayfinding task, which might be to meet person P
at building B (see figure 5.1). The decisions of that blueprint requiring the
person to make additional decisions are called higher-order decisions. They
can be seen as subtasks—just as taking an elevator is a subtask.
Decision-plans are hierarchically structured.11 At the top (the top-left in
figure 5.1) is the original task, which is linked to a series of higher-order
decisions describing in a general way how to solve the task. Each of these
decisions, if it cannot be directly executed, represents a subtask for which
94 Passini

a decision plan has to be developed. At the bottom of the hierarchy are

the decisions that lead directly to behavioral actions.
The hierarchical links between decisions signify an in-order-to relation.
They describe the reason why a decision is made. So, one may read that
the decision to press the call button is made in order to take the elevator
to floor n, and that this decision is made in order to meet person P. A
decision-diagram, thus, represents all the decisions in the structured solu¬
tion to the original wayfinding problem.
Each decision requires information. Posting signs only at intersections
tends to ignore the higher-order decisions. If used systematically, they will
lead people to a destination, but they do not propose a structured way to
solve the problem. Furthermore they can only be applied to a limited
number of destinations. Information design should consider all decisions,
including those of a higher order. This principle leads to more efficient
information design and to more intelligent wayfinding.12
The logic that links decisions into a decision plan is the same logic that
links information into an information system. In other words, an infor¬
mation system is a structured ensemble of information that corresponds to
a way of solving a wayfinding problem.

Information Design and Professional Boundaries

We have already pointed to the fact that architectural design is also con¬
cerned with wayfinding. The articulation of entrances to buildings, transi¬
tion points from one zone to another, exits, paths, stairs, escalators,
elevators—all are part of architectural communication and are essential to
wayfinding. Architects and architectural planners also intervene, on a dif¬
ferent level, by organizing and linking spaces, thus creating overall layouts
that include the circulation system. By doing so they establish the way¬
finding context, setting the stage and defining the wayfinding problems
users have to solve. The circulation system is also a determining factor in
the ease or difficulty with which users can form cognitive maps of the
setting. It is true that information designers can enhance user's cognitive
95 Sign-Posting Information Design

mapping by finding ways to communicate the layout, including the circu¬

lation system; nonetheless, much of the ability to map a setting is inher¬
ent in the nature of the layout itself (O'Neill 1991, Passini 1984b).
The conception of the layout and the circulation occurs very early in the
design process, and at this point wayfinding considerations are already
crucial. To be efficient, wayfinding communication, should not just follow
the architectural conception of the layout and be relegated to “mopping
up the mess," but should be utilized from the first to define the way¬
finding problems future users will have to solve. This poses the intriguing
question of who should do what.
The boundaries of design for wayfinding are clearly not in accord with
the traditional disciplinary boundaries. Wayfinding design and, more spe¬
cifically, information design includes behavioral considerations and is thus
interdisciplinary in nature. It also overlaps the professional boundaries of
at least two congruent design disciplines, architectural planning and
graphic design. Relations between the two professions have always been
problematic. Architects often see signage as a necessary evil that needs to
be controlled so as not to disfigure a building. Graphic designers complain
that they are not involved in the design of wayfinding support systems
until after the key decisions have been made and the setting is being built.
Often they are called in at the last-minute to install some signs before

opening day.
The solution to this problem is rather complex, and probably political
as well, for each profession wants to maintain its field of influence. At
the very least, architects should be made aware of wayfinding and how
their architectural conceptions affect it. They should also be aware of the
importance of articulating the major elements related to wayfinding
(entrances, intersections, horizontal and vertical circulation, etc.). Graphic
designers also need to be aware of wayfinding and comprehend its con¬
ceptual basis as well as to understand the architectural dimensions of

wayfinding design.
This knowledge should be transmitted in schools of design and archi¬
tecture. It is difficult, though, to assess the feasibility of such a proposal.
96 Passini

Design schools already have more subjects to teach than they can teach
adequately during a limited time span, and students may not see the im¬
portance of adding yet another subject of study.
It might be more realistic, therefore, to construct a new field specializing
in information design and providing a knowledge base in all the related
disciplines. Such a specialty would incorporate expert knowledge in a
given field, such as wayfinding, with training in basic architectural,
graphic arts, and communication skills. The designer would also be trained
in behavioral research, not necessarily to conduct complex studies but at
least to understand research and to be able to incorporate research into the
design process.
This profile corresponds to the previously introduced criteria for an
information-design paradigm. It has been our experience over the years
that very few complex public settings work in terms of wayfinding. Health
care and educational facilities, transportation terminals, and multifunc¬
tional settings, old and new, are particularly difficult to get around. This
new field might provide an interesting and rewarding professional avenue
for designers and give information design the necessary definition and
professional standing.

Notes

1. Edward Carpenter, in a similar vein, questioned the term wayfinding-. "Design break¬
through or trendy buzzword?" (Carpenter 1989).

2. The notion of paradigm in a research context was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The same arguments about its unifying force and
its power of generating methods and results can be made for design.

3. Wogalter (1994) discusses several hazard-prevention methods. The design of warnings,

he points out, is not the most efficient strategy. The first and best defense against acci¬
dents, when possible, is to remove the hazard from the product (i.e., redesign the item).

4. In earlier writing I used the term wayfinding design to cover all architectural and
graphic aspects of the issue. The phrase environmental communication also refers to sup¬
port information and can be equated with information design.
97 Sign-Posting Information Design

5. For early references toward conceptualizing wayfinding, see Kaplan (1976), Downs and
Stea (1977), and Passini (1977).

6. Cognitive maps of familiar routes also contain information that can be used in taking
familiar routes. Little is known about the relative importance and interplay of recorded
decision plans and cognitive maps.

7. For an early study of cognitive map typology, see Appleyard (1970).

8. In a study we were able to show that blind people tend to prepare routes in more
detail than sighted people (Passini and Proulx 1988).

9. For general references on these issues, see Arthur and Passini (1992), Wildbur (1989),
and McLendon (1982).

10. Boersema, Zwaga, and Adams (1989) studied the eye movements and number of fix¬
ations of people in settings full of competing advertising signs.

11. Similar hierarchical structures have been proposed for other goal-directed events
(Lichtenstein and Brewer 1980).

12. People with reduced cognitive abilities may have special information requirements.
In a recent study exploring the wayfinding abilities of patients with dementia of the
Alzheimer's type, we found that patients at an early or intermediate stage of the disease,
while still able to find their way under certain facilitating conditions, were incapable of
developing an overall plan to solve wayfinding problems (Passini et al. 1994).

References

Adams, A. 1994. The role and methodology of testing in information design. In Proceed¬
ings of the International Symposium on Public Graphics, pp. lo.1-13.20. Utrecht. Stichting
Public Graphics Research.

Appleyard, D. 1970. Styles and methods of structuring a city. Environment and Behavior 2
(1): 100-18.

Arthur, P., and Passini, R. 1992. Wayfinding, People, Signs and Architecture. Toronto:
McGraw-Hill.

Boersema, T.; Zwaga, H. J. G.; and Adams, A. S. 1989. Conspicuity in realistic scenes: An
eye-movement measure. Applied Ergonomics 20 (4): 267-73.

Carpenter, E. 1989. Wayfinding: Design breakthrough or trendy buzzword? Print 43 (1):

92-163.

Downs, R., and Stea, D. 1977. Maps in Mind. New York: Harper & Row.
98 Passini

Kaplan, S. 1976. Adaptation, structure and knowledge. In Environmental Knowing, G.

Moore and R. Golledge, eds., pp. 32-46. Stroudsburg, Pa.: Hutchinson and Ross.

Kinross, R. 1992. Conversation with Richard Hollis on graphic design history. Journal of
Design History 5 (1): 73-90.

Kuhn, T. S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Lichtenstein, E. H., and Brewer, W. F. 1980. Memory for goal-directed events. Cognitive
Psychology 12 (3): 412-45.

McLendon, C. 1982. Signage: Graphic Communications in the Built World. New York:
McGraw-Hill.

Neisser, U. 1967. Cognitive Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

O'Neill, M. 1991. Effects of signage and floor plan configuration on wayfinding accuracy.
Environment and Behavior 23 (5): 553-74.

Passini, R. 1997. Wayfinding, a study of spatial problem solving. Unpubl. Ph.D. diss.
State College: Pennsylvania State University.

Passini, R. 1984a. Wayfinding in Architecture. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Passini, R. 1984b. Spatial representation: A wayfinding perspective. Journal of Environ¬

mental Psychology 194: 153-64.

Passini, R., and Proulx, G. 1988. Wayfinding without vision: An experiment with totally
blind people. Environment and Behavior 20 (2): 227-52.

Passini, R., Joanette, Y., Rainville, C.; and Marchand, Nicolas. 1994. Wayfinding abilities
in dementia: An experiment suggesting generic design ideas. In Proceedings of the Inter¬
national Symposium on Public Graphics, pp. 23.1-23.11. Utrecht: Stichting Public Graphics
Research.

Sless, D. 1994a. What is information design? In Designing Information for People, R. Pen¬
man and D. Sless, eds., pp. 1-16. Canberra: Communication Research Press.

Sless, D. 1994b. Information, the first and final commodity. Communication News 7 (3):
1-3.

Wildbur, P. 1989. Information Graphics. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Wogalter, M. S. 1994. Factors influencing the effectiveness of warnings. In Proceedings of

the International Symposium on Public Graphics, pp. 5.1-5.21. Utrecht: Stichting Public
Graphics Research.
II The Practice of Information Design

The contributors to this volume found it difficult no, impossible to

remain in the realm of the theoretical and the abstract. They are hands-on
people, problem solvers as well as problem defmers, and very often they
express their ideas better in the media they use every day than in formal
philosophical discourse. Presuming that there is an activity called informa¬
tion design—even if we can't entirely agree about its components—we can
learn several important practical lessons about that activity from the con¬

tributors to this section.

Roger Whitehouse is an award-winning practitioner of Universal Design
_a design system for getting information to all individuals, regardless of
whether their perceptions of the world are conveyed through the tactile
sense, sound, sight, or in some other way. In Chapter 6 he makes a strong
case for the idea that the information designer must honor each recipient's
unique and valuable perceptual point of view. In describing his famous
case study of The Lighthouse, Whitehouse provides us with a detailed
taxonomy of the devices Universal Design employs to ensure that all
groups of individuals, each with its own unique sensorium (deaf, blind,
"normal," and so on), have access to an information design experience.
Whitehouse has created an impressive succession of inclusive information
designs and is one of the relatively few information designers who focus
on this problem. It's not that other designers don't acknowledge the need,
100 The Practice of Information Design

but they are often so challenged by the simple task of creating the infor¬
mation experience that they forget there are wide differences in the per¬
ceptual mechanisms people use to take in information.
In chapter 7 Chandler Screven takes a broad and equally inclusive look
at environmental design, deducing from his extensive experience a series
of rules that may make it easier to design successful instructive environ¬
ments. Screven is an avid devotee of the systems perspective: in his
worldview, nothing happens in the designed environment that does not
affect other processes taking place within that environment. From the first
stages of a design idea through it final implementation in concrete forms,
this simple acknowledgment requires the information designer to consider
many human and environmental factors—for example, the energy level of
people attending an exhibit who expect to acquire bits of instructive, long-
lasting wisdom as they progress from entry to exit. Unlike other, more
common life experiences, attending a particular exhibition is something
we generally do only once or, if truly moved, maybe two or three times.
The exhibition designer, therefore, gets but one chance to make his or her
mark. Screven offers some valuable suggestions on how to do so.
Except perhaps for the design of everyday appliances and clothing,
graphic design is the most ubiquitous design modality. In most cases,
printed or digital graphics are used in conjunction with other ways of
communicating meaning (usually words). Sometimes, however, graphical
images alone can become a powerful pattern language (or ideography): they
not only symbolically represent meanings but also have elaborate mean¬
ings of their own. Such is the work of Yvonne Hansen, an information
designer whose eclectic forays into a variety of other media inform her
central work with graphics as a communication medium of unusual power.
Hansen notes that just as there are different spoken and textual languages,
so there are different graphical languages. The skillful deployment of these
languages, she argues, can accomplish many different ends. Hansen's con¬
tribution (chapter 8) offers us insights into how we can use graphics to
enhance understanding of complex, often abstract relationships without
relying on the normally obligatory captions and textual explanations.
101 The Practice of Information Design

Moving from the printed or electronic page into three dimensionality

at once amplifies our ability to design information and complicates the
process. Currently, almost every design-industry trade show has a feature on
three-dimensional (3-D) design, implying that everyone is doing it. Maybe
so, but the fact remains that working in more than two dimensions requires
prodigious spatial skills that many designers do not possess, because of
sensory and cognitive disabilities or lack of training. In chapter 9, Hal
Thwaites, who annually hosts a meeting on 3-D media at Concordia Uni¬
versity, takes us on a tour of the vagaries of multidimensionality. We
should emphasize that, although Thwaites is concerned mainly with repre¬
sentations in three-dimensional space, many forms of information design-
tor example, websites and scientific visualizations—regularly employ more
than three dimensions by hyperlinking texts and illustrations or by dis¬
playing complex relationships involving the dimensions of time and place.
Researcher Tamara Munzer, whose work, regrettably, is not represented
in this collection, takes multidimensionality even further, suggesting the
use of non-Euclidean geometries to organize information consisting of
more than three dimensions. (Munzer's work can be found at www-graphics.
[Link]/-~Munzer.) Thwaites shows us, however, that working in
three dimensions is tricky enough: what awaits future information de¬
signers as they tackle the even knottier problems of conveying four or
more dimensions of meaning is mind-boggling.
Yet another dimension relevant to information design is the dimension
of human collaboration. In chapter 10 artist and information designer
Judy Anderson describes a Seattle collaborative design project that linked
not only many individuals but also many organizations in an effort to
communicate the unexpected pleasures of sensibly planned public trans¬
portation. Her subject is the Puget Sound Metro's program for adding art
to travel, to encourage commuters to leave the car at home and take the
bus to work. Anderson was central to this project, and her account, which
captures so well the enthusiasm of the participating artists, also contains
an implicit caution. Every designer knows there is a complex and intimate
relationship between design and politics, but the situation becomes even
more complicated when ideology is at stake.
6 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

Roger Whitehouse

In a recent project for The Lighthouse in New York, I became more aware
than ever of the unique manner in which each of us perceives and
processes the environment around us. It's not just a matter of the differ¬
ences between, say, a sighted and a blind individual—as fascinating and
demanding as those differences are when we set about studying them in
detail—but of the remarkable variations between one sighted individual
and another or among different blind individuals. If information design is
to be meaningful, it must be responsible to the full range of perceptual
viewpoints.
The essential premise of this essay, then, is that there are unique features
of individual perception that have important implications for the design of
information. However, as design cannot respond to each person on an in¬
dividual basis, designers must search for some areas of commonality. Per¬
haps we can think of these areas as the circles of separate spotlight beams,
each encompassing a specific group of individuals. In ideal situations, the
beams can be broad and so include a large group of people; in other cases,
they must be more tightly focused. The essential lesson for designers,
therefore, is that we must be diligent enough in our efforts to understand
individual needs to ensure that no one is left in the dark, either inadver¬
tently or through our ignorance.
104 Whitehouse

In the following account from his essay "The Man Who Mistook his
Wife for a Hat," author and neurologist Oliver Sacks provides us with an
intriguing glimpse into the world of a patient who, in other ways essen¬
tially normal, had lost the ability to understand and process what he saw,
a condition known as visual agnosia.

... Not only did Dr. P. increasingly fail to see faces, but he saw faces when there
were no faces to see: genially, Magoo-like, when in the street, he might pat
the heads of water-hydrants and parking meters, taking these to be the heads of
children; he would amiably address carved knobs on the furniture and be
astounded when they did not reply. (Sacks 1985: 7)

In another account, "To See and Not See," Sacks describes the case of
Virgil, who, blind from early childhood, had his sight surgically restored at
the age of fifty. Suddenly and miraculously he could see but, like an
infant, had no way of comprehending what he saw. Tragically, instead
of having his universe expanded by these new-found senses, Virgil found
himself trapped in a no man's land between two totally inconsistent
identities. The comfortable perceptual equilibrium of blindness with which
he was familiar was shattered by the raucous intrusion of the visual world.

On the day he returned home after the bandages were removed, his house and its
contents were unintelligible to him, and he had to be led up the garden path, led
through the house, led into each room, and introduced to each chair.... As Virgil
explored the rooms of his house, investigating, so to speak, the visual construction
of his world, I was reminded of an infant moving his hand to and fro before his
eyes, waggling his head, turning it this way and that, in his primal construction of
the world. (Sacks 1995: 127)

I cite these two examples, unusual and dramatic as they are, because
they begin to give us an important insight into the nature of perception.
They open the door to the notion that our perception of the world is not
the same experience for all of us; that reality, like beauty, is perhaps in the
eye of the beholder.
These, admittedly, are not everyday examples. What about the rest of
us? When you or I see a fire hydrant, our spouse, or a hat, we probably
understand them as a fire hydrant, our spouse, or a hat. Can I, therefore,
105 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

assume that what I see is the same as what you see? Or, more specifically,
that what I understand from what I see is the same as what you under¬
stand from what you see? What if the way we perceive things is much
more individual and unique? What if we each, in effect, have our own
special perceptual identity, our own unique “perceptual fingerprint”? Per¬
haps it is time to take a closer look at how and what we think we see.
At any specific point in our lives, our individual perceptual fingerprint is
made up of three essential components. First, it depends on our sensory
mechanisms, the receptors: such things as the rods and cones of our reti¬
nas, which determine whether or not we are colorblind, or the physical
construction of our eardrums, which affect how well we hear. Second, it is
depends on the processing of the information received by the brain. For
instance, although we actually see things upside down, we perceive them
right side up. If we wear special glasses that invert our vision, our brain,
after a short but unpleasant period, corrects the situation and we see right
side up again—until we remove the glasses. Then the whole process starts
all over again. The specific brain cells allocated to processing sight vary
greatly from one individual to another. There is evidence to suggest that in
some instances areas of the primary visual cortex of blind individuals may
in time be given over to the processing of auditory information, partially
compensating them for the loss of sight. The third influence on perceptual
individuality is the meaning we ascribe to what we see, hear, taste, smell,
or touch. This interpretation, in turn, depends on memory, on the culture
in which we have been brought up, and on the myriad experiences we
associate with what our senses tell us.
Examples of perceptual differences abound. Some individuals who have
perfect pitch can identify or whistle middle C or any other note precisely.
At the other end of the scale are those who are tone deaf and can't even
hold a tune when given a middle C to start with. Others, such as expert
wine tasters, have such highly developed senses of taste and smell that
they can identify the specific vineyard and vintage of a wine. To some of
the rest of us, smell and taste are relatively insignificant aspects of our
total sensory universe. In the area of visual perception, similarly, there are
106 Whitehouse

those who possess a so-called photographic memory, the visual counter¬

part of perfect pitch. Some individuals can memorize an entire page from
the telephone book at a glance and recall individual numbers from it with
apparent ease. (Personally, 1 can't remember a telephone number long
enough to read it from the directory and dial it.)
With regard to the first component of perception, our sensory mecha¬
nisms, it is worthwhile to remember that nearly 10 percent of the male
population—including myself, as it happens—is red-green colorblind. The
very term red-green colorblind, however, only serves to emphasize and per¬
petuate the misconceptions we have about perception. In fact, I perceive
all colors, including red and green, very vividly. However, I experience
them differently than you may. To me they appear less clearly differen¬
tiated from each other; and reddish and greenish colors become increas¬
ingly less distinguishable as they become pale or muted or diluted with
other colors—as in pastels, browns, or grays.
What about other red-green colorblind individuals? Do they inhabit the
same special universe that I do? In fact, red-green colorblindness varies
considerably in its intensity. There are also two very distinct types of this
condition: one is a function of the red-sensitive receptors of the retina, the
other of the green-sensitive receptors. Over the years, I have often had the
experience of working in a darkroom under the illumination of a red
safelight. I noticed that other people seemed quite nimble at finding their
way around, while I can hardly make out anything in the cryptlike gloom.
Though it occurred to me that this was probably due to my colorblindness,
I noticed that a colleague of mine, who was also red-green colorblind,
skipped around in the dark with no apparent difficulty. I was about to
abandon my theory when I discovered the answer to the apparent puzzle:
I am a protanope, and he a deuteranope—that is, my eyes are deficient in
seeing red, his in seeing green. Notwithstanding the very different con¬
sequences of our respective sensory mechanisms, he and I are grouped
together in the common category of red-green colorblindness.
The second component of perception is the way our brain, in the most
basic way, understands and interprets what our senses tell us. In the days
107 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

when I still practiced architecture in London, I had a very well-educated

client, a publisher, who could not understand the drawings for the new
house I was designing for him. The floor plans were very explicit and clear,
but no matter how I explained them, it became increasingly obvious from
his questions that he didn't understand them at all. When I took him to
the site of the house and explained what I was proposing, walking around
and pointing to this location and that, he understood clearly. He simply
did not have the conceptual "software,” as it were, to look at the two-
dimensional drawings and create a three-dimensional image in his mind.
The third component of perception is meaning: what does your sen¬
sory experience mean to you? Past experiences, memory, and cultural
influences all affect meaning. For example, those of us brought up in in¬
dustrially developed cultures may have a rather different system of pro¬
cessing what we see than others do. In Western culture the environment
abounds in straight, and frequently parallel, lines: the facades of buildings,
streets and sidewalks, railroad tracks—our world is constructed of beams,
planks, and panels whose very essence is to be parallel. Moreover, an
environment of parallel lines is one rich in natural perspective—the lines
of the curb, street, or highway converge toward a point on the horizon.
People in other cultures, such as the Zulu of Africa, see far fewer straight
lines. Linear perspective is rarely experienced and so is typically not a
developed attribute of their perception. Instead, they inhabit a landscape
of plains, hills, and meandering rivers inhabited by trees and animals.
Their immediate environment is of circular huts, pots, and baskets. Instead
of the linear perspective with which we are familiar, they inhabit a free¬
form world of organic shapes. As a result, their perceptual experience tells
them, size is the clue to distance; perspective is of little consequence.
When given distortion-illusion tests, the Zulu react only slightly to the
effects of perspective. By contrast, in industrially developed cultures, the
effects of perspective very strongly influence our perception. All the bold
vertical lines in figure 6.1a and 6.1b are identical in length. Placement of
the bold lines in 6.1a, however, creates a strong illusion that leads people
acculturated to perspective to perceive the right-hand line as longer than
108 Whitehouse

Figure 6.1
A Distortion-illusion Test, (a) People acculturated to perspective see the right-hand bold
line as longer than the left, (b) As the background lines do not suggest perspective, most
people see that the lines are the same length.

that on the left; as the background lines in figure 6.1b do not suggest
perspective, the fact that the lines are the same length is clearly evident.
A Zulu, not having a developed sense of perspective, would probably see
little difference between the apparent length of the two bold lines in either
diagram.
Not only do our individual perceptual differences distinguish us from
one another, but all three components of perception—sensory mecha¬
nisms, interpretation, and meaning—also change, often dramatically, over
the normal course of our lives. As babies, we leave a womb where we
receive little sensory stimulation and, with all our sensory input devices in
full working order, emerge into an explosion of light, color, sound, smell,
noise, movement, touch—sensations that have absolutely no meaning for
us. As newborns we may look at a cat, but we do not perceive "catness."
In fact, as infants, we do not see a cat at all, but a confusion of shapes and
colors, of light and dark—a meaningless, if interesting, jumble.
From that point on, our brains begin to work overtime, making con¬
nections between one thing and another until a coherent picture begins to
emerge. One set of movements, patterns, shapes, smells, and tactile sensa¬
tions slowly evolves into Mom. Another set becomes the cat, yet another
the sideboard. We test each one out: feel them, chew on them, focus on
them, and evaluate the dramatically different results. Chewing on Mom is
109 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

good; on the sideboard, not too bad; and on the cat, a disaster. Rapidly, an
increasingly complex awareness and understanding of the world around us
emerges. We learn to compare and contrast, to sort out our experiences,
to make connections and categories. In fact, as the process of perception
develops we not only learn how to perceive specific things, but, in doing
so, we learn the skill of perception itself. If, as adults, we see a praying
mantis for the first time, despite its unusual shape we have now developed
the ability to understand it as a creature and identify it as an insect, with a
head, legs, eyes, and body. The newborn, in contrast, would simply not
"see" it at all.
During childhood and young adulthood our sensory mechanisms, if not
impaired, probably reach their peak. My fourteen-year-old daughter can
read the small print on the back of an aspirin bottle in a darkened room
without any difficulty. When she holds the bottle five inches away from
her face, she can focus on it quite comfortably. At this distance, the type
creates an adequately large and distinguishable image on her retina.
As time rolls on, many of us begin to notice that we can't focus as
closely as we once did. At some point, typically in our mid-forties, holding
the newspaper at arm's length is no longer sufficient to enable us to read
it; the type just appears too small. After a visit to the opticians, everything
is fine again, for a while at least, until, once again, we start holding the
paper farther and farther away and have to pay more visits to the optician
to get even stronger reading glasses. Then, as the ability of our eyes to
focus continues to decrease, we may also need a distance prescription and
are introduced to our first pair of bifocals.
As we move through our environment, things become increasingly
awkward for us. Going to an art gallery and trying to read the captions
becomes frustrating. Because our ability to focus is now so limited, and
because indoor light levels make this worse by causing our pupils to dilate,
we inch backward and forward, knees half-bent, head thrown back, so that
we can squint out of the bottom of our trifocals in an attempt to get the
caption on the wall into clear focus. Sadly, our need to indulge in these
Neanderthal-like antics—made all the more difficult by stiffening joints—is
no Whitehouse

the consequence of inattentive design. If the labels were at the correct

height and angle, of sufficient size, and properly lit, we would not have to
suffer this absurd indignity.
By this age, other changes are taking place. Our night vision has become
noticeably reduced. In fact, at sixty years of age we need a great deal more
light to read by than we did as a teenager. Our ability to adjust from
bright to low light has also dramatically decreased, and the afterimage of
car headlights in our rearview mirror at night makes night driving in¬
creasingly less pleasant and more difficult.
All of these changes, however, are absolutely "normal,” and in middle
age we are probably at the peak of our productive lives. At our regular visit
our ophthalmologist may well pronounce our eyes "in perfect health.” We
are just experiencing the normal effects of natural aging.
Perception, thus, is a much more personal affair than we might have
imagined. In Oliver Sacks's account of both Dr. P. and Virgil, we are sur¬
prised to discover that what we see and what we understand are two very
different matters. It comes as a shock to realize that perception is not just
a simple matter of seeing something and learning what it is. First we have
to establish a whole set of, as it were, perceptual beliefs to serve as a
framework for interpreting sensory experiences. Our unique perceptual
abilities are, in fact, an essential component of our very identity. If we
recognize that our individual sensory equipment and our ability to inter¬
pret what this equipment tells us also differ—sometimes dramatically—we
begin to see perception in a wholly new light.
For designers, this situation presents a special challenge, one to which
we have so far largely failed to respond. We seem to have assumed that we
are each located at the center of the perceptual universe. We may have
done, at best, a good job of responding to the demands of that idealized
universe. At worst, however, this attitude has disenfranchised many whose
needs we could readily meet. Whereas we could just as easily choose a
color palette perceptible to the entire sighted population, we routinely
expect the approximately 10 percent of the male population who are
colorblind to differentiate among colors that are, to all intents and pur-
Ill The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

poses, indistinguishable and that render most color-coded maps unintelli¬

gible. Why do we continue to package dose-critical drugs intended for
adults in medicine bottles that display essential information in four-point
type and feature childproof caps that only children could possibly read or
open? Why do we only erratically and infrequently place street numbers
on individual buildings? Apart from making wayfinding difficult for those
with good vision, this creates a frustratingly impossible hurdle for anyone
with any kind of impaired sight.
The probable answer is adaptability, one of our greatest human attributes.
We seem to adapt ourselves without complaint to unnecessarily difficult
circumstances. Nonetheless, designers should not accept the lowest level of
performance as an acceptable design parameter just because people will
put up with it. We need to pay much more attention to the real needs of
users of all ages and cultural groups. Even then we may not be able to take
everyone's needs into account all of the time; but if we are at least cogni¬
zant of the full range of perceptual differences, we will probably be able to
satisfy a much more inclusive group much more regularly and effectively.
First of all, designers have to learn about the perceptual differences and
needs of those who will use what they create. Sadly, very little useful in¬
formation of this kind is available. Many narrowly focused clinical studies
have been conducted on many detailed aspects of perception in general
and vision in particular. They are generally designed to provide highly
reliable and precise information; and to accomplish this they are properly
confined to very specific issues with a limited number of variables. They
also tend to be undertaken in clinical settings, which yield results that are
not necessarily ideal for designers. What we need to know is what works
out there in the real world: not an understanding of visual acuity obtained
from a relaxed and seated subject in a comfortable, well-lit room, but
information about how a frustrated and confused subject worried about
meeting an appointment while struggling with an overloaded shopping
bag comprehends a critical message in a crowded and noisy environment.
All this is not to criticize hard-nosed clinical research, but simply to ac¬
knowledge that such research is designed with different goals in mind. The
112 Whitehouse

resource that we lack as designers is accumulated wisdom. The number

of potential parameters affecting any real life situation is so great that
obtaining clean clinical information is next to impossible. But what we
can do—and do with relative economy—is obtain some less tidy informa¬
tion by conducting simple real-life tests in real-life situations. Such infor¬
mation might also help us focus on areas of concern that can then be the
subject of much more controlled and detailed research.
I recently had the opportunity to do just that, in the one specific area of
vision impairment, when my firm was asked to design a comprehensive
wayfinding system for the new headquarters of The Lighthouse Inc., in
New York. This task provided us with a unique opportunity to study a
specific population whose special perceptual needs also could lead us to a
better overall understanding of how all individuals perceive and process
their environment.
The Lighthouse is the world's leading provider of services for individuals
with vision disorders. Its clients range from those whose reduced vision is
the natural consequence of aging, to those with severe loss of vision or
with partial or total blindness resulting from disease or accident, to those
who have been blind from birth.
Apart from the particular profile of its users, The Lighthouse offered us a
special opportunity. Because it works with clients on a day-to-day basis
to provide them assistance and training, we were able to set up a series
of simple tests with the same users during their daily visits, helping us to
determine what differing perceptual needs our design solution would have
to meet.
To begin, we sought out the existing research literature and other work
that would help us understand the task at hand. The Lighthouse itself
provided a great deal of specific information on such issues as color and
contrast for people with poor vision and on the details of its clients' vari¬
ous types of vision impairment. We found, however, very little informa¬
tion about other questions we needed to answer in order to design an
effective system. For instance:
113 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

■ How do users with little or no effective vision form cognitive images that
enable them to find their way around?

■ Are tactile maps a possible solution to the problem of general orienta¬

tion? If so, what form should they take? What kind of, and how much,
information should they contain?

■ How do users read tactile information? What letterforms work best.-* How
big should the letters be and how should they be spaced? What are the
most effective locations for tactile information?

• What is the most effective kind of visual information for individuals

with low vision? How big should letters be? Should they be all upper
case, or is upper and lower case better? What letterforms are most easily
understood?
■ What about contrast and color? Light on dark, or dark on light? Is
monochrome or color better?

■ Will symbols help? What kind of symbols can be distinguished tactually?

Can tactile and visual symbols be combined effectively?

■ To what extent will a one-size-fits-all approach work, or are the needs of

different user groups in certain areas so divergent that duplicate or redun¬
dant information systems are needed?

To unearth some answers to these issues, and to evolve a final design,

we first set about designing the design process itself. The conventional
approach would have been to find out what we could, extrapolate from
that to fill in what we didn't know, use our intuition to develop a design
solution, and then build it and hope for the best. Instead, we decided to
build a set of approximate prototypes based on whatever information we
could gather, test them with an appropriate group of users, then use that
information to build another set, test those, and repeat the process until
we felt confident we could design and build the final components to
install in the completed building. Even when the system was complete we
planned to return to evaluate it after users had become familiar with the
system over a period of time. In this way, we hoped to begin establishing
some common wisdom about what really works.
714 Whitehouse

Figure 6.2
Testing for Letterform Preferences. Individuals with little or no effective vision helped
identify the most readable style, size, contrast, and spacing to use on tactile signage.

Together with the staff of The Lighthouse, we first put together a series
of tests. We typically used a group of six to eight individuals, each with a
different type of vision disability or blindness relevant to the specific tests
being conducted (figure 6.2). Working with each subject in the group for
fifteen minutes to half an hour—with enough time between interviews to
get organized and provide some buffer space—added up to a manageable
day's work.
Altogether, we devised twelve different tests, some of which progressed
through several iterations. Six of the tests were for individuals with
impaired but useful vision.

■ Preference for light or bold letterforms

■ Preference for serif or sans serif letterforms

115 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

• Preference for all upper case, as opposed to upper and lower case,
letterforms

• Size of letterforms for use on eye-level signs

■ Acceptable degree of contrast between message and background

■ Preference for light on dark or dark on light copy for messages

The other six tests were for users who had no effective vision.

■ Preference for light or bold tactile letterforms

■ Preference for serif, sans serif, or other letterforms for tactile messages

■ Size of letterforms for use on tactile signs

■ Intercharacter spacing for tactile letterforms

■ Tactile map forms

■ Effectiveness and potential form of tactile symbols

Although we could not always conduct tests as thoroughly or as com¬

prehensively as we wished, the information we were able to obtain was
invaluable for creating our wayfinding system at The Lighthouse. It led us
to develop some unique design features, including special tactile maps,
custom tactile typefaces, the placement of visual and tactile components
on separate plaques, and a tactile "ledge" to make reading Braille and
other tactile elements more comfortable. The finished building is the first
in the world to be completely signed: visually, tactually, and audibly. We
do not believe it is in any way the ultimate solution; we regard it, rather,
as a laboratory for the ongoing evaluation of its many special features. The
degree to which our various design components emerge as useful main¬
stream solutions remains to be seen.
This is not the place to document in detail all the extensive practical
results and observations that emerged from our work. But, as a conse¬
quence of observing the test subjects and listening to the comments we
encouraged them to make, we began to understand the ways in which
each user's perceptual process was unique and affected the system we

planned.
116 Whitehouse

a TIMES ROMAN
HELVETICA BOLD
VAG RUNDSCHRIFT

b HAPTIC T04
HAPTIC VT10

'SA40MW
S A A G M W
Figure 6.3
Typefaces Tested for Tactile Signage, (a) Three standard typefaces, (b) Typeface designed
for the Lighthouse; slightly bolder form (bottom line) was suitable for both tactile and
visual signage, (c) Modifications to conventional letterforms (bottom row) helped tactile
readers distinguish between similar characters.

One of the first series of tests we designed concerned the issue of suit¬
able tactile letterforms. When we started this project, we were unable to
find any information on this subject. Although we set out with the simple
goal of discovering what letterforms would be most legible, we uncovered
a wealth of invaluable information about other issues we were not even
aware of when we began. By the time we finished, we had designed two
custom typefaces to incorporate and make use of what we had learned.
We began by testing different letterforms (figure 6.3): a serif face (Times
Roman), a conventional sans serif face (Helvetica Bold), and a geometrical
engineering sans serif face (VAG Rundschrift). In this test, we measured
how long it took subjects to read nine random characters of each alphabet
tactually and asked them about their preferences. (Interestingly, on two
occasions subjects preferred letterforms other than those they had read
most quickly and with most apparent ease.) We also logged all pairs of
characters they mistakenly transposed.
117 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

Of the typefaces we tested, the geometrical engineering face, VAG Run-

dschrift, was the best performer. In fact, two users managed to read it in
half the time it took for them to read Times Roman. Six of the seven
individuals tested also expressed a subjective preference for this face. Hel¬
vetica fared only marginally better than Times Roman. While this might
seem inconsequential in the context of visual type, it took an average of
about twenty to thirty seconds for each user to read a set of nine charac¬
ters. Considering that the average message is much longer than that, the
time it takes to read a tactile lettering message becomes critical.
In the letterforms test, the act of observing the users and discussing their
progress with them provided us with the most valuable information.
Instead of tracing the outline in a clear progression—for instance, follow¬
ing the curve of an S—users "kneaded” the character, often with more
than one finger, as if it were dough. The typical running commentary
might be: "What is this? Is it a 9? No, it's got another bump down here; is
it a B? But there's no flat bit; or an 81 No, it seems to be open here; is it
an SI Yes, that's it, it's an S." Then the reader would go on to the next
character, intently going over and over that character until he or she had
determined its identity. As part of this test, we also noted which characters
tended to be confused with each other. The most prevalent mistakes—and
they occurred quite frequently—included the following pairs: MW, MN,
OQj VY, A4, II, 00, and 69. Interestingly, several users confused the char¬
acters MW and 69 by transposing them vertically (that is, reading them
upside down), leading us to believe that polarity is not as clear a percep¬
tual issue tactually as it is visually. For a blind reader, up and down are
relative to the orientation of the tip of the finger. In fact, Braille users
sometimes read a book upside down, while it is facing away from them
and propped on a cushion. At The Lighthouse this up-down reversal led us
to install the stairwell Braille markers indicating floor levels upside down
on the back of the handrails, which is right-side-up to the fingertips of

Braille readers.
We were made aware of another important issue during the tactile-
letterform test. Users who were blind from birth, or at least from early
118 Whitehouse

childhood, had such highly developed finger sensitivity that they raced
through this test with a very high degree of accuracy. Interestingly, these
were the same users who read Braille and therefore did not normally need
to read tactile letters. The commentary about recognition of a tactile 5
quoted above, on the other hand, was typical of users who had lost their
sight later in life. Although several of them were attempting to learn
Braille, they often found it very difficult and, having a memory of visual
letterforms, preferred the tactile letters. Some of them had lost their sight
as a result of diabetes and had also experienced a loss of fingertip sensi¬
tivity, a typical consequence of this disease. It is often very difficult for
those who have lost their sight after childhood to develop the tactile sen¬
sitivity and seventh sense to understand Braille, whereas those whose basic
knowledge of written language comes through this medium from the
beginning have far greater tactile fluency. Once again, we found much
greater perceptual diversity than we might have imagined. The blind are
not just a single group, but, like everyone else, are individuals with a wide
spectrum of perceptual abilities and needs.
It was because of what we learned in these tests that I decided to de¬
velop some alphabets specifically tailored to the needs of tactile readers.
We designed two separate alphabets, one for tactile reading only and one
intended to be read both visually and tactually. The key difference between
the two faces is something we discovered by testing: the ideal "weight” for
tactile-only reading is a very thin profile, similar to the cross section of a
Braille dot, or about 4 percent of the height of a half-inch character. This
would have been too thin for the alphabet to be read visually; in the latter
instance, we settled on a stroke thickness of 10 percent of the character
height (figure 6.3b). We named the typefaces Haptic Light (intended
for tactile reading) and Haptic Bold (intended for both tactile and visual
reading).
The bottom row of characters in figure 6.3c illustrates some of the char¬
acteristics of Haptic compared to the more conventional letterforms shown
in the upper row. Because tactile recognition of letterforms is so difficult,
simple open forms work best. We made open shapes such as the S as open
119 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

as possible. For characters readers often transposed, such as A and 4, we

used an open form for the numeral to distinguish it from the letter. In the
case of the letter O and the numeral 0, a short diagonal line was borrowed
from computer display technology to distinguish the numeral (0). The
frequent vertical transposition of M and W was solved by listening to one
subject's commentary: "Is this an M or a W? I don't know. It seems like
an M, but it's got slanty sides. Ws have slanty sides, Ms have straight
sides.” We therefore used this differentiation to design these two charac¬
ters, and, through ongoing testing, confirmed that most users felt com¬
fortable with this convention.
Determining an appropriate size for tactile letters was another interesting
issue. Through testing, we eventually settled on half-inch-high characters
instead of five-eighths of an inch. Our subjects' preferences were evenly
divided between the two sizes, but it was generally agreed that the smaller
size was preferable because, in several instances where space was limited, it
made the difference between having the information in the smaller size or
not having it at all.
The tests of letter size led us to yet another important perceptual issue
about tactile information. Whereas visual size is always relative (i.e., the
image on the retina is constantly changing with the viewing distance,
which can be adjusted by the user), tactile size is constant. As a conse¬
quence, a standard size for raised lettering should perhaps be established.
It may also be advisable to have a standard typeface, for the same reason
that Braille letters are always constant in both size and form.
Because we carried out our tests in realistic situations (e.g., by mounting
letterform samples, like conventional signs, on vertical walls), we learned
that tactile readers had difficulty positioning themselves to read the letter¬
ing. Because Braille is read with the pads of the fingertips, they had to
hold the palm of the hand flat against the wall, a position they found
both uncomfortable and conspicuous. In response, we developed a slanted
tactile ledge, which presents Braille and raised lettering at a forty-five degree
angle. Most blind users much preferred this solution. The only drawback is
120 Whitehouse

that because the plaque is no longer vertical, it more easily collects dust
and dirt and could become unpleasant to touch if not properly cleaned.
Probably the most interesting part of our research involved tactile map¬
ping. From the very beginning, tactile maps were considered a very im¬
portant part of the program. We hoped they would assist us in solving the
problem of providing users both general orientation within the building
and helping them locate signs identifying specific rooms. In discussions
with The Lighthouse staff, we decided that the maps should be both tactile
and visual, so that sighted and blind users could use and discuss features
of the map together when assisting one another to find their way around.
For the same reason, we decided to locate the map so that the reception¬
ists on each level could use the map to explain the layout of the building
to visitors. In consultation with Mitchell/Giurgola-Architects—who in¬
corporated many unique accessible architectural features into the new
facility—we decided to integrate the map with the reception desk on each
floor.
In our research we discovered and studied several types of tactile maps,
but found none that bore directly on our task at The Lighthouse. Knowing
that developing the maps would be a very complex task, we developed a
series of repeated test cycles during which we created a prototype, tested it,
revised it, tested it again, and so on. In this manner, we eventually pro¬
gressed through six iterations before arriving at the final design. Our tests
involved four alternative concepts for mapping space tactually (figure 6.4).

■ A full spatial map—in essence a complete floor plan made dimensional

■ A partial spatial map, which only delineated corridors and other major
circulation spaces

■ A route- and event-diagram—in essence, a diagram of the major routes

on each floor and the "events” (doorways to rooms, stairways, and the
like) that users would encounter when navigating this route

■ A directional diagram that simply indicated what could be found in any

direction from the user's present location
121 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

Figure 6.4
Four Alternative Concepts for Mapping Space Tactually. Top left: A full spatial map, in
essence a complete floor plan made dimensional. Top right: A partial spatial map, delin¬
eating only corridors and other major circulation spaces. Bottom left: A route-and event-
diagram showing the major routes on each floor and the sequential “events" (doorways,
stairways, etc.) users would encounter along the route. Bottom right: A directional
diagram indicating simply what users could find in any direction from their present

location.

These tests, like the tactile-lettering tests, provided us with a wealth of

information. By observation, we discovered that our subjects used the
same "kneading” process they employed for the lettering to read the map.
The Braille readers surpassed others in both speed and accuracy, again, by
a considerable margin. Subjects invariably began at the top left-hand cor¬
ner and took from ten to twenty minutes to read the full spatial map. The
partial spatial map took about half that time, and the route-and-event di¬
agram about a third of the time. The directional diagram took a very short
time to read but, because it contained so little information, was not con¬
sidered appropriate for this project. It is important to realize here that, in
many cases, this was the first experience subjects had had with tactile
722 Whitehouse

maps of any description; consequently, they probably read the maps much
more slowly than they would have after training and practical experience.
Moreover, many blind individuals—particularly those who were con¬
genitally blind—found the whole notion of a map very mystifying. Some
congenitally blind users were particularly interested in the route-and-event
diagram, which made us aware of a dramatic perceptual difference in the
way sighted and congenitally blind individuals take in and interpret the
environment around them. Sighted individuals can scan their surround¬
ings and simultaneously become aware of the multiple possible structures
and destinations within their purview; theirs is a complex and three-
dimensional spatial understanding of the relationships of all of these
things. The blind individual, on the other hand, experiences the environ¬
ment sequentially, discovering first the door handle, then the door, then
the frame, then the wall, then the wastebasket, then the chair, and so on.
From these multiple experiences, he or she forms a cognitive image of
interrelated "events," though what form this cognitive image takes is dif¬
ficult for a sighted individual to conceive. I doubt that there is any clear
interrelationship of objects that are not in the immediate vicinity of each
other. The experience of Virgil, cited earlier, suggests that the image is
almost certainly nothing like that of an individual who is, or at least
once was, sighted. There are documented cases of individuals who have
had their sight restored but could not distinguish between a sphere and a
pyramid by sight, even though they were familiar with the objects by
touch.
We had included "You-are-here" tactile arrows on all versions of the
map. Observing the users' response to this feature was a revelation that
led me to the notion of what I came to call visual prejudice. As a sighted
person, I was so accustomed to the notion that I could randomly scan the
map, locate the point on the map where I was standing, and begin to
form a cognitive image of destinations and features in relationship to that
location that it did not occur to me that blind individuals would not do
the same thing. In fact, it took the average blind user ten minutes or so to
find the arrow. When they did, they could not distinguish what it was.
123 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

When we explained it to them, they were even more mystified and could
not easily, or sometimes at all, grasp the concept of their relationship to
the spot on the map. Once again, unless blind individuals had lost their
sight later in life and had a clear memory of using maps, they appeared to
have a very difficult time creating any kind of cognitive image based on
the map's information. In fact, some of the users translated the informa¬
tion on the map, when they began to understand it, into sequential
instructions: "O.K., so if I'm here, then I need to turn left, go past this
door, then past this other door, then turn right down this corridor, and
the classroom is at the end, on the left." It was for this reason that we
developed the route-and-event diagram—which effectively provides se¬
quential information—as an alternative to the full spatial map.
In developing the full spatial map, we started by indicating doors with a
diagonal line, like the half-open door seen on building plans. Users found
this extremely confusing. In one instance, the subject could only satis¬
factorily explain the meaning to herself by reinterpreting it as "a line
leading you toward the doorway." Other issues became evident as well; for
example, the need to adequately separate tactile components and to select
symbols carefully so that they could be easily distinguished from one
another by touch. On the basis of this feedback, we proceeded to prepare
the next sets of test maps, which evolved through six iterations before we
designed the maps finally installed (figure 6.5).
In the succeeding tests, we continued to develop and test new features.
We simplified doors into openings in the line representing the walls. To
indicate the "you are here" location, we created a "super tactile pip" that
could be easily located by "scanning" the map with the hand. We thick¬
ened the wall lines to distinguish them better from tactile letters. Discov¬
ering that cane users counted doors as a key part of their sequential
wayfinding , we indicated doors to inaccessible spaces such as mechanical

rooms as a shallow recess in the wall.

The tests showed no clear preference for either the full spatial map or
the route-and-event diagram. Ultimately, The Lighthouse decided to install
the full spatial map, because it contained information about the configu-
7 24 Whitehouse

50

iij
HI
56

58

Figure 6.5
Detail of the Full Spatial Map. This final version incorporated simplified door openings,
thicker wall lines, and a "super tactile pip" to indicate the "you are here" location.

Figure 6.6
The Final Full Spatial Map. This installed version contained information about the con¬
figuration of the rooms and could be used effectively by both blind and sighted users.

ration of rooms useful to, especially, staff members and frequent visitors.
The full spatial map also had the advantage of being an effective visual
map that could be used by both blind and sighted users, which was not
the case with the route-and-event diagram. Nevertheless, at our suggestion,
a route-and-event diagram was installed on one floor so that we could
gather, over time, some user feedback to evaluate and compare the forms
(figures 6.6 and 6.7).
At an early stage of developing the maps we realized that symbols could
act as a kind of tactile shorthand to reduce the time it took users to rec¬
ognize certain commonly used designations, such as bathrooms and stair¬
wells. We soon discovered, however, that tactile symbols had to be very
carefully selected. Many users, for example, could not easily distinguish
between a tactile square and a triangle; several of them described both
125 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

40 ,J9 14
1
42., j„17 13 J.
44., 38 36 34 32 R ...21 ;„15 11 ,.j JO
46,. i i . .!.!... ........ i ..;
"”i.i.• * i i-i ? "i.
|| * • E_I_E 02 03_j
48.. 52 54 56
M W !
T X 05_i
50 E J_E

Figure 6.7
Final Version of the Route-and-Event Diagram. This diagram was installed on one floor in
order to gather user feedback for evaluation and comparison with the full spatial map.

shapes as "bumps with sharp bits." They could, however, easily distinguish
them from a circle, a "smooth bump." Again, visual prejudice was at work
here. Sighted readers can so easily distinguish between different shapes
that they find it hard to believe blind readers cannot do so too. An easy
way to discover this for yourself, if you are sighted, is to try to read some
tactile symbols. To be an effective test, it should be arranged so that you
don't see the symbols first; it's surprising how easy recognition becomes
when you know what they are beforehand.
Among many visual tests we conducted were studies to see what, if any,
preference users had for messages presented as light symbols on dark
backgrounds or vice versa. Here there was, as anticipated, a unanimous
preference for the former, for two likely reasons. First, because there is
considerably more area of background than message, the amount of glare
is much reduced with a dark background. Second, out-of-focus or diffused
light spreads into any adjacent dark space. Thus, a light message on a dark
background makes the message appear bolder, whereas a dark message on
a light background appears lighter.
We were also interested in identifying an acceptable degree of contrast
between a message and its background. We tested the same message in
white on black, white on 85-percent gray, white on 70-percent gray, and
white on 55-percent gray. We expected that a reasonably high contrast-
say, 70 percent—would be acceptable to most people, but we were mis¬
taken: everyone we tested not only preferred the strongest contrast pos-
126 Whitehouse

sible but was vehement about it. Observing several individuals struggling
to read even the white-on-black sample from just a few inches away gave
us a vivid understanding of why contrast is so important for anyone with
any kind of clouded or obscured vision—for example, a cataract, a not-
infrequent part of the natural aging process. Consequently, we cannot
stress too strongly the importance of contrast as a key factor in legibility.
Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to test color contrast,
which is probably of considerable value for it's aesthetic potential as well
as its ability to provide contrast between message and field.
At an early stage of the project, The Lighthouse staff decided to investi¬
gate using audible "signs” to provide environmental information to those
with no effective vision. Two potential solutions were available: a push-
and-play system, which speaks to the user when a room-identification
plaque is touched, or a spoken message transmitted by infrared light
beams in or near a door, which can be picked up with a hand-held re¬
ceiver. The infrared system was chosen because it allows the user to "scan”
the environment with the hand-held device for any potential destinations
and then determine the precise direction of the desired destination. This
system, in effect, gives the blind user some of a sighted user's ability to
scan the environment. In our final design solution, we made use of the
underside of the "tactile ledge” to house the infrared LED transmitters and
to angle them in a way that provides the most effective directional signal.
As we explored all of these aspects of differing individual perception, an
interesting philosophical issue arose. When should designers adopt a one-
size-fits-all solution and when should they consider separate and, in some
cases, redundant systems? We discovered at The Lighthouse that the needs
of sighted and blind users demand very different solutions with regard to
letterforms. In addition, the separate needs of congenitally and adventi¬
tiously blind users required us to include both raised lettering and Braille.
While the conventional solution would have assumed a one-size-fits-all
scenario, we believed that in this situation "one size fits nobody” and that
separating visual and tactile information on the plaques identifying room
functions was the most helpful response. Furthermore, we decided that it
727 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

Figure 6.8
Talking Signs. The room-identification plaques installed combined audible, visual, and
tactile components useful to blind, deaf, and sighted visitors.

was appropriate to incorporate some degree of redundancy—in the form

of audible components or talking signs—into each of the room plaques
(figure 6.8). In addition to giving blind users the option of choosing either
the tactile or auditory system, the two systems permit users with hearing
impairments to take advantage of the tactile components and users who
lack fingertip sensitivity (such as diabetics) to utilize the talking signs.
With the tactile maps, however, we decided that a one-size-fits-all
approach was most appropriate, so that blind and sighted users could
simultaneously read and discuss the information displayed on them. A
sighted user could, for instance, place a blind user's fingers on the correct
part of the map, the tactile equivalent of pointing. Although this is not
necessary for room signs, it is important that the visual, raised lettering,
Braille, and auditory messages be consistent with each other so that verbal
discussions of the messages—including directions one individual gives to
another—are not confusing.

In thinking about the implications of this project, readers should remem¬

ber that our objective was to undertake specific research, with actual users,
and with a specific goal in mind—gathering information to create a way¬
finding system for The Lighthouse. Consequently, the tests we designed
128 Whitehouse

and the conclusions we drew from them focused specifically on that end.
We expected to gain, and did in fact gain, some general understanding
of the direction in which designers of information systems should be
heading, as well as some insights into specific issues that might be impor¬
tant in the design of similar projects. Nonetheless, it is important to
caution readers that we were able to survey only a relatively small sample
of users and, although the results were invaluable to our work, care should
be taken not to inappropriately extrapolate from these results and con¬
clusions or attempt to apply them universally.
Nonetheless, the results of our testing of the maps and typefaces alone
convinced us of the extraordinary value of the design process we had
developed. By simple testing and observation, we not only gathered a
wealth of information that had previously been unavailable, but we also
became aware of some of the practical implications of individual percep¬
tual differences. Most importantly, we began to understand how easy it is
to disenfranchise individuals simply by not perceiving and correctly inter¬
preting the most basic facts about their needs.
As designers, we need to be conscious of, accept, and embrace the
notion of unique perceptual abilities and respond generously to the needs
it implies. Although this notion is entirely analogous to multiculturalism,
it is more difficult to defend, because it operates on a much more indi¬
vidual level. But it is important to defend it, because the consequences of
ignorance, avoidance, and exclusion are serious. It is tragic when dyslexic
children are made to feel stupid, defective, and inferior just because we are
uncomfortable with the idea of allowing our "standards" of performance
to be bent enough to include them. It is tragic when the prevailing atti¬
tude avoids or ignores the fact that aging persons with failing eyesight
may have needs we can respond to with more effective lighting; larger,
higher-contrast print; or larger and clearer controls on their VCRs and
washing machines.
Because we blithely assume ourselves to be the standard or norm, we
often tend to think of the differences between others and ourselves as
aberrations of normality, rather than accepting others as just a different
129 The Uniqueness of Individual Perception

kind of normal. They become "them," different from and no longer the
concern of "us." In more extreme cases, we see them as "disabled," inca¬
pable of playing an active part in our culture. At best, we tend to tolerate
them, when what they require, and deserve, is active inclusion.
It is time to realize that, precisely because we are all so different, there
are no "them" and "us." We are all us. There is as much reason to em¬
brace and celebrate our perceptual differences as our cultural and ethnic
distinctions. If that embrace is expansive and generous enough, we can all
be a part of one truly common humanity.

References

Oliver W Sacks. 1985. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat And Other Clinical Tales.
New York: Summit Books.

Oliver W Sacks. 1995. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Alfred

A. Knopf.
7 Information Design in Informal Settings:
Museums and Other Public Spaces

C. C. Screven

The psychology of human learning, attention, and behavior—as well as

recent findings in how the brain learns—provide an array of empirical
data and principles with important implications for the design of signage,
thematic exhibitions, and self-directed learning in public environments.
Perhaps the most challenging application is communicating knowledge,
ideas, and concepts in public spaces like museums, zoos, science centers,
botanical gardens, and shopping malls. Messages delivered in such settings
require the voluntary cooperation of potential "receivers” while they are
surrounded by distractions and choices. Visitors do not have to pay at¬
tention but are free to attend, ignore, or distort the messages being
communicated. In such situations, it is immensely important to design
information systems that not only reflect the needs and characteristics of
audiences but also attract and hold their attention.
Since the late 1960s interest in studying the behavior and learning that
takes place in informal settings—museums, neighborhoods, recreational
centers, and so forth—has grown steadily. While much of this work has
focused on measuring visitor behavior and factual learning in museum-
type environments and recreational areas, current efforts are searching for
ways to anchor museum learning to underlying principles and theories of
learning, instruction, and motivational processes; memory; perception;
thinking; and social factors.1
132 Screven

Communicating new ideas to the unguided public in quasi-educational

settings like museums presents many obstacles—visitors' uncertainties
about what to see and how to get there, a poor knowledge base for exhibit
content, negative attitudes and pervasive misconceptions, wide variations
in thinking styles, physical and psychological fatigue, social and visual
distractions, the lack of tangible goals, and the pressures of time.2 Infor¬
mation design, therefore, must be responsive to all these factors, as well as
to underlying biological and cognitive processes.
Unless unguided viewers are already knowledgeable about the exhibit
topic, the interpretive materials must connect the unfamiliar with the
familiar and suggest useful things the viewer can do with the information.
Unfortunately, few of those who plan and design exhibit content give
serious attention to developing effective interpretive materials (as reflected
by such arguments as "Rembrandt speaks for himself" “Explanatory materials
distract viewers from experiencing the objects," and “Visitors don't want
labels"). Thus, little effort or money is budgeted for pretesting interpretive
(explanatory) text, graphics, and formats to determine whether they are
meaningful to targeted audiences. So visitors are often on their own to
make sense of what they see. Even exhibits designed for easy interpreta¬
tion may still—given viewers' limited time, fatigue, and other distractions
—discourage the selective attention and effort needed for learning.
In the 1920s and 1930s, and again more recently, various researchers
studied visitor behavior and learning, investigating such questions as: How
do people behave and move about in exhibit spaces? What do they learn?
Do they learn what the exhibitors aimed to convey? Do they learn other
things? Even though freely moving visitors who were the subjects of these
studies did learn some useful information (Shettel 1968; Screven 1969), the
results were generally disappointing. While their movement patterns
mostly followed the physical layout of exhibit galleries and areas, visitors
of most ages and background absorbed little or nothing of the exhibits'
intended messages (E. Robinson 1928; Melton 1933, 1935; Lakota 1976),
except when displays were modified to improve viewer attention and
exhibit communication (Miles 1987; P. Robinson 1960; Shettel 1968;
133 Information Design in Informal Settings

Screven 1969). As the average viewing time at individual displays was

only 10 to 25 seconds, this result should not surprise us. Visitors stopped
at some exhibits, often looking at random, then went on, making few
comments and not examining materials. ''Hands-on'' and ''interactive''
exhibits elicited more active attention, but, again, it was mostly random
and centered on trivial elements unconnected with the substantive con¬
tent of the exhibit. In general, before and after testing showed that visitors
knew little more about their subjects after viewing exhibits than they had
before. Sometimes, in fact, they interpreted exhibit content as support
for misconceptions the displays were designed to correct! Such findings
may reflect inadequate exhibit objectives, invalid measures of learning, or
exhibitors' inexperience at meeting visitors' needs.
Perhaps viewers would do better, researchers speculated, if they were
more motivated to learn. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, several studies
examined how rewards affect the motivation of the general public (Nedzel
1952; Shettel et al. 1968; Screven 1969). Shettel offered to donate money
to a charity if visitors would carefully study an exhibit's content. Screven
gave rewards (sometimes cash) to visitors themselves in exchange for cor¬
rectly answering a few basic questions about an exhibit's content. Both
reported that visitors who worked for rewards indeed spent more time
than usual looking at the exhibits but that the majority of them still did
not grasp the intended messages—as measured by post-tests devised by the
exhibits' curators. Some researchers suggested that the poor results were
misleading, because the tests reflected too narrow a view of what visitors
were supposed to learn; useful learning may have taken place, they argued,
but the tests did not measure whether, for example, the presentation
increased visitors' interest in the topic, gave them personally useful infor¬
mation, or added to their self-esteem. Subsequent work indicated that
visitors did indeed learn other things, although they were often counter¬
productive; for example, they ''learned'' that science is boring, that modern
art is a scam, and so on. Some visitors could not paraphrase the ideas
presented or even follow exhibit instructions.
134 Screven

Of course, not all visitors show such poor learning. People generally gain
useful information from an exhibit when they are already somewhat
knowledgeable about its subject. Background and familiarity often enable
them to link unfamiliar information with existing knowledge, resulting in
a rewarding educational experience. But for those lacking such back¬
ground, exhibit content may not be of much value.
One might argue that what an exhibition communicates has more to do
with visitors' entering attitudes, moods, and preconceptions than with its
content and design. Personal beliefs and other baggage often play impor¬
tant roles in how messages are perceived and processed, what visitors tell
their friends, and so on (Borun 1992). But the impact of public displays
is more complex than that. Ultimately, a display's ability to convey new
knowledge and understanding is shaped by the interface between visitor
dispositions and preconceptions and the exhibit's content, delivery media,
and format. If so, being informed about this interface is essential to
designers hoping to communicate effectively with their publics.
Encouraging steps toward improving this communication have been
taken in recent years. Museums appear to be shifting toward visitor-
centered approaches, in which target audiences play an equal part with
staff members in developing planning protocols (Screven 1993, 1999). In
contrast to top-down planning by experts, visitor-centered (bottom-up)
approaches focus on behavioral, motivational, and learning variables and
how they influence users' responses to an exhibit's media, message design,
and interactive elements.3
In this paper I address visitor-centered approaches and exhibit features,
focusing on methods that improve a display's ability to deliver useful
information and ideas to freely moving, voluntary, leisure-oriented people
in public environments. The applications of these approaches, however, go
beyond museums and include the planning and design of directional sig¬
nage, wayfinding, trade shows, malls, job-retraining programs, brochures,
guidebooks, and software documentation. The main tasks in all of these
areas are essentially the same—to affect people's actions, attitudes, pre¬
conceptions, and/or comprehension. Their purpose is to encourage self-
135 Information Design in Informal Settings

directed people to focus on and retain messages in which they may or may
not be interested initially.

The Public as an Editor of Information Design

The complexity of human behavior and learning in open settings makes it

difficult to predict—without advance evidence about a given audience-
how a design will affect behavior and learning. The same display, sign,
headline, or placement can have different effects in different settings for
different users or with different messages. Information designs need to be
pretested in real settings with real people early in planning—the earlier the
better. In recent years, exhibit evaluators have developed cost-effective
methods of pretesting to identify and adjust features that could adversely
affect attention, behavior, and/or communication. These procedures allow
them to observe and test the effect of specific graphics, text formats,
interactive displays, and placement on their human "receivers,” and then
make adjustments. This approach (called formative evaluation) is a practical
tool for detecting and correcting behavioral and communication problems
before an exhibit is installed (Griggs and Manning 1983, Miles et al. 1988).
The approach is not the same as testing late-stage prototype text and
graphics for communication effectiveness, reliability, or human factors;
until recently, the use of formative evaluation during each stage of exhibit
design was rare. Evaluation, when it occurred, often employed overly
complex materials that were tested too late in the design process to effec¬
tively spot and modify problem elements.
The operative term here is evaluation. Most planners, graphics designers,
and communication specialists are familiar with socioeconomic surveys
that provide data on the demographic attributes of visitors (e.g., age,
income, education) and their visitation habits and attitudes. While these
surveys can be very useful, knowledge of the effect of other attributes
such as, among those mentioned earlier, fatigue, distractedness, precon¬
ceptions, motivation—have more direct relevance to early decisions about
exhibit elements and formats.
136 Screven

The post-1970s research literature describes four kinds and stages of vis¬
itor evaluation: front-end evaluation, formative evaluation, summative
evaluation, and remedial evaluation. All four types go beyond the familiar
visitor survey and broaden the meaning of the term visitor research.4 The
first two types are described in the following brief sections.

Front-end Evaluation

This form of testing identifies an audience's entering knowledge, biases,

attitudes, and preconceptions about prospective exhibit topics before actual
exhibit design begins. It also examines the time constraints, perceptual
sets, curiosity levels, thinking styles, and other activities or characteristics
likely to affect visitors' responses and ability to learn from a given design.
Finally, it looks for the particular elements likely to make an exhibit
rewarding to specific groups of visitors. Designers can then carefully ana¬
lyze prospective messages and goals and establish exhibit priorities that
take these viewer characteristics into account. Such information can also
guide choice of language and text formats and help designers avoid easily
misconstrued presentations that could distort visitors' processing of exhibit
information.

Formative Evaluation

In this type of evaluation, used during exhibit development, investigators

observe and pretest visitors' behavior, attention, and learning with mock-
up panels containing sample layouts and labels, and formats; they then
make the needed adjustments in formats and strategies during planning
and design.5 This process includes measuring how visitors react to and/or
are motivated (or "turned off") by specific features and how well they
comprehend the mocked-up messages: the interpretations of artifacts
through illustrations, texts, placement of elements, and instructions. Prob¬
lems that emerge at this early stage can then be addressed by rewrites and
format adjustments.6
737 Information Design in Informal Settings

The same tools can be employed to improve already-installed exhibits

and graphics that are functioning poorly and to fine-tune newly installed
exhibits, a process called remedial evaluation (Bitgood and Shettel 1994,
Screven 1990a: 53-59).

Communication ii Museums

Communications with unguided museum or zoo visitors cannot usefully

be related to one-way communication models, such as Shannon and
Weaver's: source —► transmitter —> channel —> receiver —> destination
(McQuail and Windahl 1993: 17). Two-way "feedback" models are better,
because they incorporate the role of successive message-altering feedback
(Shannon and Weaver 1949, Knez and Wright 1970). Yet these too are
unsuitable for the dynamic and interdependent nature of most communi¬
cation situations, including those between people and displays in a public
environment (Miles 1986). Instead of discussing formal communication
models in detail, therefore, we summarize some of the primary compo¬
nents of the communication process that apply to exhibits, signs, posters,
and so on as they are used in museums, malls, and parks aimed at
unguided leisure visitors.7
Figure 7.1 illustrates some of the specific aspects of these components in
the museum context. Six primary components appear to be involved.

Information
Field
Other
Behavior
Objectives, Perceived
Messages & -^Viewer—► Action
Message
Priorities

Objects Motivation Outcome

Text/Graphics for
Formats Attention
Feedbac k Loops and Effort
Organization
Delivery media

Figure 7.1
Elements of Communication in Interpretive Exhibits
138 Screven

• The information field. All the information within an immediate

environment.

■ The message or messages to be derived from the information field. These

are the objectives of the communication—that is, the knowledge, con¬
cepts, behavior, and feelings developers want viewers to receive, in accor¬
dance with the priorities for these messages established for particular
audiences and resources.

■ The exhibit or display. The objects, paintings, plants, animals, or other

content that are the message-related resources of the information field.

■ Delivery media. Channels through which messages are delivered

(text, film, graphics, figures, sound, docents, format, layout, interactive
components).8

■ Perceived message. The message as received by the viewer (Ashcraft 1989).

■ Viewer action (if any). Viewer behaviors at the exhibit (ranging from
selective to random), including time spent at the exhibit, involvement
level, play, and tasks performed.

The exchange between viewer attention and observation and an exhib¬

it's content form a loop that ultimately determines what message, if any,
the visitor receives. The message is imbedded in the larger information
field that—given planning, organization, and evaluation—should enable
viewers to receive and process the elements and relationships that com¬
prise the message.
Visitors identify, encode, organize, reorganize, interpret, and perhaps act
on exhibit information through their attention, perception, memory, and
cognitive processes. Though these are complex interactive systems, recent
views indicate that the brain's learning system is more than just a complex
system. Within the physical structure of the brain, learning is not a “hard¬
wired" interactive system like a linear computer but a process constantly
changing and adapting to incoming information (Kaufman 1993, Gell-
Mann 1994). If so, changes taking place during learning are nonlinear,
self-organizing systems that take in and interpret information non-
sequentially, constantly identifying, classifying, interpreting, and adjusting
139 Information Design in Informal Settings

rules and cognitive maps (schemas) in accordance with actual experience.

In other words, learning and communication involve ongoing changes in
the rules making up our cognitive maps of the world as they adapt to new
information from the environment. How we detect and change these rules
also reflects biological programming that, from birth through adolescence,
determines the incremental development of capabilities for attending and
thinking in successive stages (Lowery 1989, 1990).
But the message received may or may not be the intended message. It
may be distorted, or it may be an entirely different message. Any exhibi¬
tion (or mall, park, zoo, highway sign, poster, lobby art) contains a great
deal of information. Theoretically, designers create and organize that in¬
formation so as to channel viewers' attention to features that create the
story or message (e.g., they may focus attention on the textures and colors
of pottery rather than on its shape, cultural provenance, history, etc.).
Motivating features or elements associated with the exhibition environ¬
ment (e.g., lighting, text legibility, crowding, sight lines, terminology,
visual overload) facilitate or inhibit information processing, because they
affect the time viewers spend and their effort, psychological fatigue, selec¬
tive focus, and enjoyment (if any). An exhibit's organization, relevance,
clarity, and attractiveness and viewers' perceptions of its potential value
are also motivational influences, in that they affect viewer attention, allo¬
cation of time, level of effort, and, ultimately, learning.

Museums as Learning Environments

People can learn little, if anything, if they do not pay attention. Even
when they do attend, most visitors view objects, paintings, texts, signs,
animals, exotic plants, and computers without benefit of someone or
something to direct their attention to the salient points and explain what
they are seeing. If and how visitors interpret an exhibit depends on its
content; the effectiveness of its labels, graphics, and interactive elements;
the knowledge, attitudes, and preconceptions they bring with them; and
the motivational variables (fatigue, confusion, stimulus overload, etc.) that
140 Screven

affect time spent, level of involvement, and focus (Csikszentmihalyi 1990;

Csikszentmihalyi and Hermanson 1995; Hooper- Greenhill 1992, 1994;
Miles 1987; Screven 1969, 1993).
In informal settings, viewers pay attention on their own terms and at
their own pace. Decisions to attend or not to attend to a display reflect a
host of personal and social agendas that interact with exhibit content and
other features. A few of the factors that can influence viewers to focus on a
display include:

■ How quickly they can relate display content to their familiar, everyday
world

■ Whether they can find answers to common questions raised by display

content (How did they make that? What's that painting worth?)

■ Whether the exhibit's information has a personal use or value for them.
(Where do I start? That will be fun to tell fane. That helps me remember where I
parked the car.)

■ Is the "action" to be taken at a display well matched with their knowl¬

edge or skills? (Could I understand this if I try?)

■ Does the display's message connect to their immediate personal agenda?

(This may help me deal with my crabgrass! Maybe I could be like her! I'd like to
do my hair like that! My brother will be impressed when I tell him this! I wonder
if I could use this for tomorrow's class?)

While there is still much to be learned about communication under

informal conditions, knowledge of the factors that play important roles in
what unguided people do at an exhibition are emerging: what they read or
attend to, how they move through exhibit spaces (Melton 1933), how
much time they spend at a display or how long they remain in an exhibit
hall (Shettel et al. 1968, Lakota 1976), what exhibit halls they choose
(Dakota 1976), and what they like and don't like about exhibit displays
(Griggs 1990). These findings include the following:9

■ The majority of museum visitors explore museums and zoos on their

own, voluntarily, on their own time and on their own terms, usually in
groups of two or three.
141 Information Design in Informal Settings

• Because attention is self-directed, an exhibit's content, organization, and

presentation must (a) provide positive reasons for paying attention to
them by creating personal connections, supplying sharable information,
and presenting challenging tasks; and (b) minimize such negative reasons
for avoiding exhibits as impersonal tone, passive formats, unfamiliar ter¬
minology, information overload, and confusing presentations.

■ Attention varies from passive (casual) to active involvement; in the

latter, visitors compare things, ask questions, look for connections, and
so on. Better learning occurs with active attention.

■ The more time visitors expect an exhibit or text to require, the less likely
they are to attend to it without compelling reasons for doing so (e.g.,
personal interest, an exciting challenge, expectations of success, an imme¬
diate use for the information, or opportunities for participation).

■ Initially, many visitors without significant background in an exhibit's

subject find its visual, social, emotional, action, and sensory aspects
(objects, colors, shapes, movement, buttons, touch, smell, texture) more
interesting and more fun than abstract information in text form. When
written materials are necessary to understand an exhibit, they must be not
only informative but also readily understood, enjoyable, succinct, and, if
possible, contain information viewers can share with others.

These characteristics, among others, form the context in which communi¬

cation systems, graphics, and exhibits function. Both the positive and
negative impressions that viewers take away with them depend, in part, on
the extent to which information and delivery formats address these char¬
acteristics. In turn, they affect whether visitors come back, bring friends,
and encourage others to visit (or not to visit) a museum.

Visitor Attention

One of the most important factors influencing whether or not communi¬

cation occurs is how exhibit design affects viewers' observation behavior
(attention); that is, whether they notice relevant objects, relationships,
142 Screven

textures, and features that may have personal meaning for them. A critical
issue is the quality of observation—active or passive, focused or scattered.
Museum research on attention often uses objective measures of (1) the
frequency of approaches to a display (attraction power), (2) time spent in
front of a display (holding time), and (3) the ratio of time spent to the time
required to take in the message (holding power) (Shettel et al. 1968; Shettel
1973; Screven 1986). But these gross measures of attention say little, by
themselves, about what visitors are actually paying attention to, what
information is encoded and later recalled, or how it is interpreted or
related to existing knowledge. In other words, they say little about the
quality of attention.
Perception researchers Gibson and Gibson (1952) emphasize that while
objects are rich in information, making contact with this information
requires selective attention, which design features like organization, media,
and presentation modes can facilitate or inhibit. Obviously, overcoming
whatever misconceptions or biases visitors bring to a topic requires them
to pay attention to certain aspects of the exhibit. Designs therefore need to
be pretested and adjusted during the planning stage to improve the possi¬
bility that they encourage, not discourage, selective attention. Research by
Barnard and Loomis (1994) has confirmed that the more time people
spend attending to something, the more they recall about it. In addition,
recall and recognition of visual information decline as the number of items
on display increases, whereas combining audio labels with visual modes
enhances visual learning and produces better recall than either method
used alone.10
Dazzling graphics, participatory components, and scholarly accuracy are
not as important as the ability to connect exhibit experiences (especially
initial experiences) to visitors' worlds or to suggest that exhibit content
has personal value for them. While mindless activities at razzle-dazzle dis¬
plays are often amusing, this kind of fun is usually transient and is likely
to diffuse attention rather than focus it. Only selective attention can lead
to meaningful connections. When it does, learning activities and their
outcomes are likely to sustain the learning activity, which will generally be
143 Information Design in Informal Settings

more fun and more sustainable than the ephemeral enjoyment of casual
attention.

The Role of Attention in Learning

The basic communication (learning) process involves “rules'' for encoding

and processing information (Gell-Mann 1994). These rules are themselves
complex adaptive processes influenced by the self-organizing cognitive
maps that result from previous experience and from the viewer's ability to

■ Detect patterns in the stream of incoming information,

■ Interpret (classify, organize, connect) these patterns, and

■ Act on these interpretations.

Obviously, attention plays a crucial role in all three steps. As used here,
therefore, the term attention (and attending to) includes the various pro¬
cesses involved in detecting, interpreting, and acting on existing schemas
and new incoming information. I use the word communication to describe
the overall impact of these processes on cognitive schemas (maps, rules)
and on actions. Communication can break down or be distorted at any of
the three stages: detecting patterns requires active, focused attention;
interpreting information requires matching existing schemas with new in¬
formation, symbols, and rules for classifying, organizing, and integrating
new information; and taking action requires a set of tasks and goals that
test and apply new information and schemas to the real world.
Attention varies in how long it is sustained, how efficiently it scans
exhibit content, and how well it separates meaningful from peripheral data
and focuses on interrelationships among information elements. To under¬
stand conceptual messages, the viewer's attention must last long enough
to detect the information and relationships that comprise such messages,
be selective enough to bring key information into focus so it can be en¬
coded, and be active enough to engage cognitive schemas and adaptations.
People's processing of a conceptual exhibit message is improved by en¬
gaging them in activities that place them in direct, conscious contact with
1 44 Screven

the interrelationships that make up the concept. Some types of attention

are more efficient than others at facilitating this process, and certain kinds
of experience are more likely than others to be encoded and recalled. Over
half the memories visitors reported six months after a museum visit
involved objects or things; 23 percent involved specific episodes (e.g.,
doing things, using masks, and writing in comment books); and 15 per¬
cent were about feelings aroused by the exhibit (McManus 1993).
Three aspects of attention that underlie how information is processed
will be considered below: the information field, perceptual filters, and
exhibit efficiency.

Information Field

Figure 7.2 illustrates the relations among the information field, the infor¬
mation elements that make up a given message, the elements that make

Desired Impact

1
Attitudes, Actions, Concepts

Figure 7.2
Information Field, Perceptual Filters, and Messages (©1998, all rights reserved, Screven &
Associates)
145 Information Design in Informal Settings

up other, potentially competing messages, and the perceptual filters that

may distort incoming information. We can envision an exhibition as con¬
sisting of a field of many information elements (large gray oval), only
some of which are essential for conveying the intended messages (center
oval). Nontargeted messages (small overlapping oval) share some elements
with the target messages and some with various irrelevant elements
(crowds, companions, etc.). Information passes through various perceptual
filters (outer ring) that may reorganize, distort, inhibit, or in other ways
modify perception of the target message, thus affecting the viewer's cog¬
nitive schemas, attitudes, and actions. The degree of distortion reflects how
well (or poorly) message elements are organized, as well as how efficiently
a given format delivers information (e.g., through feedback loops, leading
-questions, appropriate vocabulary, graphics, etc.).

Perceptual Filters

A visitor's prior knowledge, attitudes, preconceptions, and beliefs about a

given topic may influence the degree and kinds of distortion that can
occur. As visitors vary widely in these respects, the challenge for designers
is to minimize such distortions. The fact that some design features operat¬
ing in public environments affect most viewers' attention and behavior in
the same way makes this task easier. Table 7.1 lists some common viewer
predispositions. Two studies report on visitor likes and dislikes of specific
exhibit features (Alt and Shaw 1984, Griggs 1990). They found that visitors
strongly liked exhibits that “come to life," make their points quickly, help
them learn, and use familiar things and experiences to explain something.
They strongly disliked exhibits and text that do not give enough in¬
formation, do not relate to the real world, are confusing, or lack personal
connections. Surprisingly, the study indicated that visitors were neutral
toward participatory displays and toward exhibits artistic or aesthetic

features.11
Visitors with limited knowledge of a topic, or those whose learning
styles predispose them to resist “big-picture” interpretations of information,
146 Screven

Table 7.1
Common visitor dispositions in museums

Linear disposition Visitor resists moving through the exhibit as arranged; efforts
to direct visitor movement needed (e.g., “Obtain the most from
this exhibit: follow the orange line!’’)

Exploratory disposition Exploration of informal and novel spaces may include

attention to exhibit content and meaning but also to places to
eat, random play, and other features unrelated to planners'
educational goals.

Visual orientation Visual media (objects, movement, graphics, film, colors, etc.)
readily gain visitor's attention; movement and living things
generally more attractive than static, inanimate objects.

Action orientation Visitor predisposed to touch and manipulate exhibits and take
part in activities involving control, goal achievement,
competition, and challenge to skills.

Social orientation Visitors, usually in groups of two or three, like to talk,

perform, and share social context that may directly or
indirectly compete with exhibit activities. Single visitors are
less frequent.

Time orientation Average museum visit lasts one to two hours, is limited by
physical and psychological fatigue, hunger, other
commitments, parking meters, etc. Visitor may anticipate
becoming tired and explore exhibits before this happens.
Decisions to approach exhibits, read text, etc., depend on time
visitor expects to spend. Time expectations increase with
cluttered, visually complex, inefficient, and unfriendly formats.

are likely to resist conceptually oriented materials unless they are given
good reasons for paying careful attention to them. One such good reason
is the potential relevance of the information to achieving a personally
important goal. Interest in the exhibit topic per se may not be enough.

Exhibit Efficiency

The time and effort it takes to process a display's content are affected by a
number of factors, including personal circumstances (children, time limi-
147 Information Design in Informal Settings

tations, hunger, fatigue, attitudes, etc.), and the viewer's interest (incen¬
tives) in seeking out and learning something new from the displays.
However, the time it takes to examine exhibit content is not based solely
on personal and motivational interests; it is also affected by the physical
design of layouts, organization of content, formats, labels, lighting, termi¬
nology, and media, as well as the content itself. The ways exhibit compo¬
nents are chosen, prepared, formatted, arranged, and organized affect how
easy or hard it is to find and utilize their information and, thus, the time
viewers must spend to receive important messages.
We will refer to the average time it takes viewers to find and process
message-related exhibit information as design efficiency. Efficient exhibit
designs conserve the time and effort needed for viewers to find, respond
to, and understand, messages. The greater the design efficiency, the greater
is the potential for viewers to absorb the content within a given time.
Conversely, inefficient designs require viewers to spend more time and
effort to process the same information, increasing the chances that they
will quit before learning the exhibit message. If it takes viewers longer
than they are willing to spend to learn or experience something new from
a display or exhibit, designers need to either increase its efficiency through
improvements to its physical design or provide incentives for spending the
additional time needed. A few of the physical attributes that reduce an
exhibit's efficiency are

■ Label texts that are hard to read or find: tiny type and designer fonts;
poor contrast, lighting, and placement; unfamiliar vocabulary; “see
through” labels on glass.

■ Long, poorly spaced paragraphs: lack of “chunking” and white space.

■ Ambiguous and abstract headings: titles or labels that do not refer to the
actual objects or other features on display or to interests viewers may bring
to the exhibit.
■ Information overload and visual clutter, which scatter attention and

increase fatigue.

■ Labels and graphics disconnected from exhibit content.

148 Screven

■ A low ratio of needed to unneeded information.

■ Lack of information-free spaces: "cognitive rest areas" that separate the¬

matic areas and help visitors absorb what they have seen. This lack may
increase psychological fatigue and viewers' ability to process data.

■ Carelessly designed interactive formats, questions, graphics, or colors

that focus on trivial, secondary, or inappropriate exhibit elements.

The design efficiency of thematic exhibitions is especially important.

Many members of the general public have limited exposure to the con¬
cepts underlying the themes of popular exhibitions, so special effort is
needed to encourage visitors to increase effort and holding time. In addi¬
tion to careful front-end audience evaluations of potential formats, pre¬
testing of delivery media, layouts, and other physical features with targeted
audiences should be used to ensure that the exhibit's central concepts are
as time-efficient and motivationally engaging as is possible within practical
limits. Factors contributing to the low design efficiency of thematic exhi¬
bitions are often easily corrected by reducing information density, remov¬
ing distracting visuals, improving thematic orientation at entrances,
removing or relocating secondary and nonessential information, topics,
and media, and so on. Although some large-scale thematic exhibitions
attract much public interest, the process of sorting out the wheat from the
chaff of their displays too often consumes more time than visitors can
practically devote to it.
The nature of the incentive needed to induce viewers to spend more
time depends not only on the benefits they expect to receive for their
effort but also on the potential "costs" (e.g., lost time, stressful effort,
fatigue, a possible parking ticket, missing another exhibit, or a delayed
lunch). For simple messages, attention usually can be sustained for a short
time by the naturally rewarding consequences that accompany attending
to the exhibit (e.g., satisfying curiosity, sensory-motor involvement, shar¬
ing the experience with a companion, or responding to a child's question).
Sustained attention to complex messages demand more time and may
require stronger incentives—perhaps access to another activity that is de-
149 Information Design in Informal Settings

Incentive Level (Motivation)

1 2 3 4
—I
High

Level
3

Concept Level
Level 2 Learning

Level
1

Low

2 5 10 15 20

Mean Holding Time (Minutes)

Figure 7.3
Theoretical Model for Interrelations Between Design Efficiency, Viewer Motivation, and
Learning (C 1998, all rights reserved, Screven & Associates)

pendent on knowing information in the display; a concrete goal achieved

by carefully attending to display content (e.g., take-home prizes as rewards
for demonstrating knowledge of key exhibit information). In short, visitors
holding time usually can be increased when viewers are aware that objects,
data, relationships, ideas, or other exhibit information has some applica¬
tion to their social, emotional, or utilitarian lives.
Figure 7.3 illustrates the relationships among efficiency, message com¬
plexity, viewer motivation, and learning. The gray line represents the rate
of learning we would expect for an inefficient exhibit design, while the
black line assumes a more efficient design and, hence, better learning. The
two learning curves for three levels of concept complexity are shown on
the left-hand vertical axis, and the horizontal axis represents the average
time viewers are likely to remain engaged with exhibit content. The slopes
of the two curves reflect different rates of learning based on the time visi¬
tors need to find and process relevant exhibit content under the two levels
of design efficiency. Broken vertical lines indicate hypothetical times and
150 Screven

degrees of effort that visitors would need in order to find and process
(understand) the exhibit's message or messages; these levels of motivation
represent the potential for understanding a concept of a given complexity
at the two levels of design efficiency. As shown, when the incentive level
increases, viewers devote more focused time and effort to the exhibit. With
low-efficiency displays, they need higher levels of incentive to attain the
time threshold for understanding a given message, and vice versa. Com¬
munication (i.e., understanding) is limited when either interest is not great
enough or design efficiency is not high enough to motivate a viewer to
spend the time necessary to receive a message of a given complexity.
When a conceptual message is not communicated because of excessive
time requirements, several options are available to exhibit designers.

■ Provide visitors with more incentives to spend extra time (dotted lines).
This option is not practical when time needed exceeds practical limits.

■ Improve the efficiency of delivery media and content to increase the rate
(slope) of learning.

■ Improve both options 1 and 2, or

■ Divide the thematic message into several messages of lower complexity

that allow them to be approached, processed, and rewarded separately.

Assuming an exhibit to have an incentive level of 1 and a low rate of

learning because of an inefficient design (gray curve), the holding time
would be five minutes. Given this low rate of learning, visitors would
receive messages with a concept level of 0.3 (probably trivial). How might
the four options above be applied to improve these results?

Option 1 Raise incentive level to 2, thus doubling holding time to ten

minutes, which would enable the viewer to receive a message at a concept
level of 1.0. Given the exhibit's low efficiency, communicating a level-2
concept would require a twenty-minute holding time and raising the in¬
centive level to 4.0 (e.g., by adding a goal-directed task that requires the
visitor to actively seek and use exhibit or label information).

Option 2 Keep incentives at level 1.0 but improve design efficiency: by

reorganizing layout; adding leading questions to attract and focus atten-
151 Information Design in Informal Settings

tion; making key information easier to find; improving the match between
interpretive media and forms and the teaching, motivational, and audience
needs they are supposed to serve; relocating or layering secondary and
technical information for the minority of visitors who need it; and reduc¬
ing or eliminating visual clutter that serves no measurable function. Such
adjustments should enable visitors to process information faster, which
should increase the rate of the learning curve (i.e., slope of the black
curve).
Option 3 Combine options 1 and 2 by improving both efficiency and
holding power (motivation) to enable delivery of concept level-2 messages
(up from level 1) over the same period of visitor's time (ten minutes).

Option 4 Break up the primary thematic message into several messages of

lower complexity that require lower levels of motivation and so can be
approached and processed independently. Some, more complex themes
might require more than one visit for viewers to understand them
thoroughly.

Mindful versus Mindless Attention

Because so much routine daily behavior, including social behavior, occurs

with minimal conscious effort, the gross measures of holding time and
holding power described earlier probably reflect variations in the level of
conscious involvement but tell us little about how the time spent facili¬
tates reception of intended messages. Levels of attention range from
focused and active to casual and unsystematic. Some researchers have
referred to this continuum as mindful at one end and mindless at the other
(Langer 1989; Moscardo 1992; Carlson 1993; Griinig 1979, 1980; Screven
1990b) and have used involvement to refer to generally the same phenom¬
ena.12 In this paper, both involvement and mindful attention are used to
describe systematic selective attention, in contrast to casual, random

attention.
In the midst of an array of information elements in public displays, the
identifying feature of mindful attention is its selectivity; that is, the viewer
152 Screven

focuses on some elements while ignoring others. The level of attention

may range from highly focused and active to casual and unsystematic
(Grunig 1979; Langer et al. 1978; Saloman 1983; Screven 1990a). The im¬
portance of the mindful-mindless (or involvement) concept is the evi¬
dence that higher involvement levels may facilitate transfer to long-term
memory and enhance the quality of "observing" behavior and thus the
communication of conceptual messages (Ashcraft 1989; Langer 1989;
Moscardo 1992; Moscardo and Pearce 1986; Saloman and Globerson 1987).
If so, the practical issue for conveying priority conceptual messages is how
to design interpretive content and formats that generate and sustain
mindful attention and discourage casual attention.
In mindful modes, the scanning of the information field is systematic
and is characterized by the following kinds of behavior:

■ Making comparisons

■ Raising questions (How is the object made? Why is it there? Why is the eye
in the middle of the forehead? Why are some bodies painted purple?)

■ Looking for interdependent relationships (Predators of deer improve deer

populations.)

• Making connections to personal knowledge or experience

■ Noting contradictions (If whales live in water, why aren't they fish?)

■ Searching for particular information or categories of information

■ Looking back and forth between text and reference objects; carrying out
actions

■ Pointing out features to companions

■ Moving closer for a better view, lifting hinged labels to read text beneath
them

Sometimes such mindfulness is encouraged with text or graphics that

employ challenging questions or puzzles that focus attention on important
display elements.13
Mindless Attention ("casual attention")—at the other end of the contin¬
uum—is scattered more or less randomly over a variety of items without
153 Information Design in Informal Settings

apparent purpose or direction until something "catches the eye." It is thus

analogous to window shopping. Several researchers use the term mindless
because attention appears automatic, lacking in much, if any, conscious
involvement (Langer 1989, Moscardo and Pearce 1986). Viewers attention
to objects or text is brief and erratic. Moderate levels of casual attention
often center on sensory/motor activity, or on social agendas, or on novelty
or movement, rather than on topics or messages. Visitors show little if
any deliberate or systematic attention, frequently looking away from
exhibits and being easily distracted. Conversation with companions has
little or no relationship to the exhibit, and questions are trivial and
disconnected.
In addition to the need to enhance quality of learning—when they are
giving priority to a specific conceptual outcome—designers are faced with
the practical question of how to generate and sustain mindful attention
and inhibit or discourage casual attention. Two processes are fundamental
to this issue: learning and motivation.

Learning

As described above, the degree to which attention is scattered, selective,

mindful or mindless, and sustainable is affected by attitudes and pre¬
conceptions (perceptual filters), entering knowledge, display content,
exhibit efficiency, and such motivational factors as challenge, enjoyment,
and goal-directed activities that accompany attention to the exhibit. All
contribute to whatever learning may or may not take place and, ulti¬
mately, to what is communicated. So, what is learning?
Learning is not something we can observe directly. It must be inferred
from what people do under given conditions. Thus, the impact of infor¬
mation design on learning can only be evaluated in terms of what persons
are supposed to do when they receive a given message. Researchers measure
the learning impact of exhibit content and formats (interactive formats,
labels and graphics, entrance headlines, signs, brochures, interpretive
multimedia, etc.) indirectly, in terms of viewer behaviors. But the task is
154 Screven

more complicated than that. For example, the effectiveness of a typing

program for improving typing skill cannot be measured simply by count¬
ing a person's typing errors before and after training, because a reduction
in errors could reflect changes in at least five factors: (a) fatigue, (b) dis¬
tractions, (c) hunger, (d) amount of practice, or (e) training. Only d and e
would reflect actual learning. Errors from a would decline after rest; errors
from b would decrease when distractions are removed; and errors from c
would disappear after the subject eats a meal. Only d and e would reflect
learning, because changes in the person's typing skill would persist over
time.
While behavioral measures vary, four frequently used approaches to
evaluating exhibit learning employ

• Observation: Of visitors' use of exhibit instructions, exhibit materials,

wayfinding cues, etc.

■ Objective tests: Multiple-choice questions, sorting and matching tasks,

discrimination tasks, fill in questions

■ Behavioral indices: Can visitor paraphrase a display's message, list key

points, identify key message from a list, recall key-message elements,
identify implications, describe connections, engage in spontaneous activity
that reflects understanding of the message? Borun et al (1996, 1997) pro¬
pose a three-point rating scale of behaviors that reflect level of learning.14
These levels are
Level 1 Can give one-word statements/answers but makes few associations
with appropriate content; remarks about content but misses the point
Level 2 Can give multiple-word answers that connect to exhibit's main
point; connects display's content to life experiences (not concepts)
Level 2 Can give multiple-word answers; connects content to concepts
behind exhibit; connects concepts to life experiences

■ Naturalistic observation: Data obtained from visitors in open-ended

conversation, semi-structured interviews, video/audio tapings, etc. These
records—of attitudes, feelings, perceptions, misconceptions, and so on—
155 Information Design in Informal Settings

are transcribed and categorized according to how well they reflect learning
outcomes (Wolf 1980).

In terms of motivation and learning, design details can have different

effects and serve different purposes. Some features (e.g., moving elements)
attract attention but may not hold it—a motivational issue. Interactive
components may increase the quality of attention but not of communica¬
tion—another motivational issue. Visitors may understand a conceptual
label or graphic if asked to read it but may not read it without being asked
to do so. Some messages require high attraction, such as billboards and
television advertising, but do not require sustained attention. Getting
viewers to paraphrase the main point of a conceptual display not only
requires high attraction but also formats that induce them to focus and
sustain their attention.

Thinking Styles
Different people learn, or prefer to receive, organize, and implement in¬
formation in different ways. Some prefer lectures or reading, working with
peers, using learning games, discussing the pros and cons of a question,
studying independently, doing concrete tasks, and so on. Sternberg (1988,
1991, 1994) calls these preferences for seeking, organizing, and using in¬
formation thinking styles. Learning styles (Meyers and McCaulley 1985) and
cognitive styles (Witkin 1990) are other terms for this process.15
Sternberg's categories are built around the metaphor of U.S. branches of
government.

■ Legislative style. Prefers planning, problem solving, and so forth

■ Executive style. Likes to implement, follow established mles, and so on
• Judicial style. Prefers judging others, evaluating existing ideas
• Sternberg also describes four subcategories of thinking styles found
within each of the overall styles
■ Monarchic. Prefers focusing on one need or goal at a time; ignores
obstacles
156 Screven

■ Hierarchical. Prefers to work with multiple goals with different assigned

priorities

■ Oligarchic. Works with multiple goals but no priorities. (Thus, goals often
are not met.)

■ Anarchic. Avoids rules, guidelines, and regulations; resists authority;

employs random approaches and insight rather than working within
existing frameworks for solutions

There are no right or wrong styles. Each has advantages and dis¬
advantages, depending on the context, the task undertaken, and what is
required to perform it. In educational settings like classrooms and muse¬
ums, students' or museum visitors' different thinking styles mean that they
are likely to process the same message differently, or, when free to do so,
will approach learning it along different paths. Some teachers (and stu¬
dents) are most comfortable with global approaches that involve abstract
understanding of broad issues, preferring to leave details to others. These
teachers (and designers, artists) work best in the world of ideas. But others
prefer to work on concrete tasks, detail work, and precise data. Some
studies (e.g., Sternberg 1994) have demonstrated that differences in stu¬
dents' classroom performance reflect the degree of match between the
thinking styles of the teacher and individual students. Teachers in the
study taught through lectures and textbook assignments and evaluated
student learning with objective exams. Students who preferred this style of
pedagogy got better grades than those who did not. When the teacher
shifted his or her style toward use of a variety of resources for examining
and explaining the pros and cons of conceptual problems, formerly ''poor''
students started doing better and some formerly "good" students did
worse.
In a related study, Vance and Schroeder (1992) gave the Meyers-Briggs
Type Indicator (MBTI; Meyers and McCaulley 1985) to four hundred ran¬
domly selected adult visitors to a rain forest exhibition at the Milwaukee
Public Museum. Visitors' scores were based on MBTI indices for (a) sensing-
type learners, who prefer lack of ambiguity and concrete, practical uses of
757 Information Design in Informal Settings

things and devices; and (b) intuitive-type learners, who prefer creative
problem solving, self- learning, and relationships rather than details or
practical uses. The exhibit labels used differed in their appeal to sensing-
type learners (e.g., “All living things are made up of cells”) or to intuitive-
type learners (e.g., "How are you like the tamarin and the morning
glory?”). Intuitive learners performed better, both in terms of stops made
and time spent, when intuitive labels were in place; sensing learners
stopped more often and spent more time at exhibits when sensing labels
were used.
In summary, educational materials, formats, and strategies affect behav¬
ior and learning in both formal and informal environments. Their effec¬
tiveness, however, depends on the conditions under which learning takes
place and on their match with the needs and predispositions—including
dominant thinking styles—of targeted audiences.

Motivation

The term motivation is often employed by exhibit planners during exhibit

and graphics planning—but with limited understanding. The usual
approach to motivating unguided visitors is to use appealing exhibit titles,
signs, or visual media that engage them in action. But, too often, these
approaches do little more than generate a mindless manipulation of
hands-on activities with flip labels, games, and computers. The idea seems
to be that if you can get visitors fiddling, flipping, stroking, gawking,
pressing and—in the process—expose them to some message-related in¬
formation, then the real message lurking beneath all this activity will seep
through. Motivating visitors, at least in museums, is seen as something
you do to make exhibits enough "fun” to attract and hold their atten¬
tion for a short period, then let the logically organized and documented
dioramas, paintings, objects, aesthetics, texts, and graphics do the rest
(Bearman 1995). In reality, little meaningful interpretation takes place
in these "fun” formats without the presence of educators or docents to
provide direct interpretations.
158 Screven

Measuring motivation's impact on learning centers around the time

people spend pursuing actions (approaching an exhibit, spending time in
front of it, etc.) that can place them, potentially, in contact with exhibit
content. Most measures of motivation do not, however, measure what
visitors have learned, only whether they have come into contact with
some of the content. Popular instruments of motivational impact measure

• Attraction: The response of a passing visitor who stops at a display for

two seconds or less and looks in its general direction

■ Holding time: Time spent looking at one or more segments of the display

■ Holding power: The ratio of holding time to the minimum time required
for targeted viewers to pay attention to the main elements of the intended
message

■ Frequency: Of appropriate use of display materials and spaces; for exam¬

ple, viewer proceeds in proper sequence, uses audio device, looks at display
objects described in label or under flip label, and so on

■ Involvement scale: Rating (on three-point scale) of the level of focused or

systematic attention to message-related display content

■ Affective response scales: Independent rating of adjective-pairs, affective

rankings, interview remarks, frequency of positive or negative emotional
reactions to display (e.g., laughter, grimaces, body language)

Because of their leisure orientation, most visitors, young and old, are
looking for ways of spending time that will result in enjoyable value-added
experiences. This applies to the instrumental (goal-directed) activities of
humans and of most other living organisms (Ferster and Culbertson 1982,
Banyard and Hayes 1994). We can distinguish two aspects of motivational
factors:

■ Reinforcers and punishers. Technically, these terms refer to experiences or

events that increase or decrease the frequency (strength) of the behavior
that precedes them.

■ Contingencies: Dependent relationships between specific behaviors and

their immediate consequences, such as when a reinforcer or a punisher is
759 Information Design in Informal Settings

associated with a prior behavior or achievement—for example, the plea¬

sure gained from solving a puzzle results from giving mindful attention to
it over time.

Reinforcers and Punishers

Several assumptions underlie the practice of applying motivational con¬

cepts to communication in informal settings.

■ The information field (e.g., exhibit) contains the content needed to make
teaching points or generate other desired messages.

• Mindful attention to displays is more reinforcing than mindless

attention.

■ Redundancy, confusion, poor lighting, stimulus overload, useless infor¬

mation, user failure, and other aversive factors and experiences are mini¬
mized or countered by such reinforcing experiences as pattern resolution,
progress toward a goal, useful information, and social recognition.

Using everyday words like reward, fun, and enjoyment can be misleading,
because they imply meanings different from those of the carefully defined
term reinforcer (see definition above). Technically, rewards are called positive
reinforcers, because they are presented rather than removed after a given
behavior or response occurs, whereas some reinforcers strengthen behavior
when they are removed—because their removal reduces or eliminates aver¬
sive stimuli like pain, failure, boredom, confusion, and so forth.
Because aversive stimuli weaken (i.e., reduce the frequency of) associated
behaviors when they are presented (e.g., drinking wine that produces a
headache, ignoring a whining child, studying a boring textbook), they are
called punishers. Therefore, behavior that reduces, removes, or avoids aver¬
sive stimuli is strengthened, just as taking an aspirin for a headache, giving
in to a whining child, or leaving a boring display results in strengthening
these escape behaviors. Actions to reduce or escape from punishers
strengthen these actions and are called negative reinforcers, to distinguish
them from positive reinforcers. Thus, the same stimulus (e.g., a headache)
7 60 Screven

both strengthens escape or avoidance behavior (taking the aspirin) and

weakens behavior that ignores the problem. This is why visitors learn to
ignore or avoid text they find confusing, poorly lighted, boring, useless, or
hard to read; their avoidance is expressed as inattention, distractibility,
departure from the area, and similar responses. Mindless attention and low
involvement may therefore simply reflect escape or avoidance behavior
resulting from poor exhibit planning and design. The sort of front-end and
formative evaluations described earlier (p. 136) can uncover and minimize
such potentially negative features of exhibit components. Taking defensive
action may be prudent, as escape/avoidance learning at one display can
generalize and transfer to other exhibit topics and ideas—even to the
museum itself!
The visitor's level of mindful attention reflects the impact of concurrent
sources of positive and negative reinforcers—for example, positive rein¬
forcers associated with mindfulness competing with negative reinforcers
and punishers related to time and effort, or positive reinforcers from casual,
sensory/motor or social activities reinforcing casual and random attention.
Except among the very young, casual attention and random guessing pro¬
duce only short-lived positive reinforcement that is manifested as frequent
changes in direction and focus (e.g., the frantic activity seen in science
centers). In contrast, goal-centered activity reinforces and sustains mindful
attention, because progress toward goals is fun and is not possible without
mindfulness.
We can distinguish two kinds of positive reinforcers: intrinsic and
external.
Intrinsic reinforcers are natural parts of many human activities, including
freely exploring an open environment, meeting challenges, having con¬
versations, and so forth. Table 7.2 lists some specific activities and events
that are rich sources of intrinsic positive reinforcers that encourage mind¬
ful activities in the absence of external benefits. Such reinforcers shape and
sustain many aspects of play, work, and learning in our everyday world.
They also shape learning, because they are contingent on mindful atten¬
tion, not on mindless attention. The considerable time and effort people
161 Information Design in informal Settings

Table 7.2
Examples of intrinsic (natural) positive reinforcers

Day dreaming Receiving counter-intuitive information

Watching people Vigorous activity

Exploring a new environment, novel events Experiencing achievement

Playing Sharing information and activities

Pursuing goals Completing a defined task

Predicting an event Social recognition

A memorable experience Acquiring (or improving) a skill

Discovering useful new information Discovering new connections

Making something work Measuring self against a standard;

competing with others

Solving a challenging problem Receiving feedback, evidence of progress

give, without external rewards, to sports, music, climbing mountains,

hobbies, chess, research, crossword puzzles, and other nonwork activities
reflect the pervasive influence of these natural incentives (Csikszentmihalyi
1975, 1990). A taxonomy of intrinsic reward may be found in Malone and
Lepper (1987). Underlying this taxonomy is the brain architecture descri¬
bed earlier, which detects, interprets, and adapts information into con¬
tinuously emerging, self-organizing schemas that encourage (reinforce)
change (Gell-Mann 1994).
Given the diversity in visitor backgrounds, interests, and goals, attempts
to effectively motivate the majority of visitors in open settings may seem
bound to fail. Fortunately, this diversity reflects not differences in the
underlying reinforcers themselves but only different methods that people
use to meet their individual needs, obtain enjoyable consequences, and
avoid negative ones. As table 7.2 demonstrates, the desires to meet chal¬
lenges successfully; gain self-esteem, social approval, or power; and reduce
fear and anxiety are common to most people and underlie the diversity of
positive and negative consequences that shape individual behavior and
personality (Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 1990; Malone 1981).
162 Screven

External reinforcers do not directly result from the learner's activities and
are often symbols of achievement and access to opportunities (money,
privilege, lapel pins, vouchers, shop discounts, etc.). They are under the
control of someone or something outside the self. Because taking in
complex concepts and giving up long-held misconceptions require time-
consuming, focused attention, exhibit designers may have to combine
external incentives with intrinsic reinforcers to increase the time and effort
expended by novice visitors (Screven 1993: 8-9). Visitors already familiar
with a display topic can often link new information with existing knowl¬
edge, which is usually more reinforcing than learning something entirely
new. There may therefore be little need for extra incentives or external
reinforcers to attract and sustain the mindful attention of such visitors.
Whether intrinsic or external, viewers must perceive the consequences of
paying attention to have personal value. The greater this value, the more
time and effort they are likely to give to a display.

The Role of Contingencies in Shaping Attention

A contingency is a one-way, dependent relationship between a given

behavior (A) and its consequence (b); that is, behavior A must occur before
event b (a reinforcer) can occur. Behavior A need not produce event b
every time, but event b must be correlated with A in accordance with
some rule (e.g., average number of responses or a predictable passage of
time). For example, a student whose homework assignment is to learn to
solve a quadratic equation may be offered one hour of television viewing
(b) for solving the equation (behavior A). Here, television time (b) is made
contingent on the product of the student's efforts (A)—not on the time
spent. Figure 7.4 illustrates contingencies between exhibit information,
attention modes, and the common behavioral consequences of focused
and unfocused modes of attention.
Similar contingencies between behavior and its consequences are integral
parts of the learning that takes place in natural environments; these natu¬
ral consequences generally favor focused attention, not casual or random
7 63 Information Design in Informal Settings

Potential
Consequences
Behavior

Discovers Connections
Challenges
Progress toward goal Persistence
Focused_ Questioning
Achieves goal
Attention Return to exhibit,
Completion of Task
Confidence, Experctations
Viewer of success
Action
Boredom Distorted messages
Poorly Slow progress Competing activities
Focused - Fatigue Random attention
Confusion Disruptive play
Attention
Cognitive dissonance Distractibility
Transient excitement Leaves area
Novelty, suprise

Figure 7.4
Action, Attention, Mode, and Consequences (©1998, all rights reserved, Screven &
Associates)

attention. There are many examples of how people are changed by the
natural consequences of their behavior, including museum experiences.16
To quote Csikszentmihalyi: "The absence of conventional incentives does
not imply an absence of rewards. Clearly, people are motivated to pursue
activities because they derive some satisfaction from them, and this satis¬
faction itself acts as a reward" (1975: 13).
The quality of outcomes varies widely. But in one way or another, both
desirable and undesirable behaviors, skills, interests, knowledge, and atti¬
tudes are shaped by natural contingencies operating within the environ¬
ment. Consider, for example, how

• Gravity shapes what we learn about bouncing balls.

■ Sensory and physiological structures mold how we see and how we learn
(to jump, dance, play ball, talk, socialize, etc.).

■ The daily actions and reactions of others develop the way we relate to
and communicate with each other.
164 Screven

■ Composing music is supported by the enjoyment of the composing

experience.

■ Jazz improvisation and sustained practice are influenced by unexpected

and exciting musical phrases or rhythms.

Everyday activities like these "provide little worlds of their own which
are intrinsically enjoyable" (Csikszentmihalyi 1975: 14). A closer look at
how natural contingencies shape what we learn and how we feel in our
everyday work and play can provide designers with blueprints for creating
contingencies to bring about attention and learning in our contrived edu¬
cational environments, as well as in our everyday natural environments.
Think about the contingencies at work as a young child plays with a
rubber ball.

■ Throwing or rolling the ball encourages active, focused attention to the

ball's movements.

■ The ball's movements focus and sustain the child's attention over time.

■ The different ways the ball moves encourage the child to process differ¬
ent ways of throwing or bouncing the ball that produce different effects.

The child's growing ability to predict (and control) the ball is a contingent
natural reinforcer that encourages and sustains the repeated practice that
leads to increased ability and success, and to more practice, more success,
and so on.
The point is that in museums, zoos, parks, aquariums as well as in
classrooms and shopping malls, natural and contrived contingencies gen¬
erate behavioral chains that, in fact, shape attention, attitudes, and learn¬
ing. The principles that affect attention and learning in all these settings
are essentially the same as those applied in learning to predict and control
the ball: people scan the information in their surrounding environment
and discover new patterns and uses, which reinforce further exploration,
and so on. Thus, the fun associated with these activities supports the same
kinds of attention that lead to understanding the messages in museum
exhibits.
165 Information Design in Informal Settings

Mixing Entertainment with Education

In recent years, numerous museums in the North America, Europe, and

Australia, recognizing the importance of entertainment, have made efforts
to, combine entertainment with education without compromising sub¬
stantive educational messages. The Natural History Museum in London has
done so successfully in many exhibitions that have stimulated other
museums sensitive to the needs of their publics. In many cases, however,
efforts to add ''bin'' to educational exhibits have come at the expense of
educational content, probably because, in part, of exhibit planners' perva¬
sive misconceptions about the conditions and costs of making exhibits
both educationally productive and enjoyable.
Yet, as Cikzsentmihalyi (1990) and Gardner (1991), among others, have
shown, there is hard evidence that viewer enjoyment need not impede
education. For example, experimental studies of what makes computer
games fun identified design features that not only sustained focused
attention but also facilitated learning, including self-directed learning
(Malone 1981). Perhaps the most common reason for the failure of viewers
to learn much from participatory and entertaining displays is that their
entertaining qualities are available to viewers whether or not they carefully
attend to or understand the display messages (figure 7.4). If such amuse¬
ment is available with little mindful attention or understanding of key
messages, it should not surprise us to learn that viewers do not pay close
attention and, therefore, often understand little about a display's content.
Judging by the thousands of ineffective applications of flip labels and
computers found in public areas, many designers apparently have not
grasped the importance of making the "fun” aspects of educational dis¬
plays contingent on understanding or using the information they contain.
Many participatory exhibits suffer from the same problem—visitors can
operate them without paying attention to or understanding the point of
their exhibit messages.
What visitors learn depends on the interplay between the specific exhibit
elements they focus on and how they interpret them. This issue is well
166 Screven

illustrated by popularity of participatory displays, whose components—

buttons, flip labels, mechanical or electronic controls, bicycles to pedal,
or wheels to turn—are presumed to provide the necessary focus. Yet,
although such displays attract and engage visitors, that engagement may
or may not add to viewers' awareness of relationships and other attributes
needed to understand the message but may simply reflect the intrinsic
enjoyment of the activities (Langer et al. 1978, Borun 1992).
We can distinguish two contrasting participatory situations that dif¬
fer according to whether or not visitors can use exhibit experiences to
choose among several ideas and actions, answer questions about a dis¬
play, make predictions, and so on. Figure 7.5 illustrates these different
situations.
On the left (passive participation), visitors press, lift, flip, turn, and
manipulate but do not have to make choices—they may activate a dem¬
onstration, roll a marble down an incline, turn a wheel exposing data

No Choices
Alternative Required
Choices Feedback
Depends
on Choice

PASSIVE
ATTENTION |
I ^teractIveb|
ATTENTION j

“7
Poorly
\
Focused on
Focused on Message
Message Elements
Elements

No
V

Little or
1
Unpredictable Predictable
Attention and Attention and
Learning Learning Learning

Figure 7.5
Passive versus Interactive Participation (©1998, all rights reserved, Screven & Associates)
167 Information Design in Informal Settings

to match with birds, or press a button that lights up a text panel. Such
participation is one-way. The visitor may observe an effect or read an
explanation or definition, but the feedback is the same for all responses.
In passive participation, novice visitors can do little or nothing with the
information; nor can they make decisions about it that would help encode
and transfer it to long-term memory.17
By contrast, in interactive participation (on the right), visitors can
choose between two or more actions that each yield a different result. As
long as they do not simply guess the answers, what they see or read
depends on their own interpretation of the information, which in turn
determines the action they choose to take—hence the term interactive. For
them to learn really well, visitors' prior information, logic, principles, and
personal experiences—which form a basis for their interpretations and
actions—must engage the higher cognitive processes before (or simulta¬
neous with) making a choice. A well-designed leading question with, for
example, a choice of three answers, can encourage visitors to seek solu¬
tions from a display if its information appears relevant and accessible;
under these conditions, it is more fun to find solutions by themselves than
to guess or be given the answer by lifting a panel or pressing a button.
In such an exhibit, therefore, many visitors seek out display information
before making their choices.
While feedback about incorrect choices can encourage visitors to con¬
tinue their efforts, it should not provide a direct answer; whenever possi¬
ble, the answer should come from exhibit content.
To sum up, what is learned from participatory situations depends on
what viewers attend to, how they interpret this, and what they do with the
information.

Goals

Providing visitors with an achievable, tangible goal accomplishes several

things: (a) it can initiate focused attention to unfamiliar information, even
168 Screven

when the topic appears uninteresting; and (b) it can help them integrate
new information with existing knowledge, attitudes, and dispositions.
Successful use of a tangible goal depends on a viewer's ability to act on
or apply message-based information to achieve the goal, especially if the
actions depend on the proper use of the information. Application of in¬
formation is an overt action that requires both information and action. For
example, practicing the piano, taking a class, seeing a doctor, or listening
to a traffic report are intermediate actions (goals) that must precede per¬
forming for a group, obtaining a degree, overcoming a medical problem, or
avoiding traffic snarls.
Many everyday personal goals stimulate us to seek and use information
that may help us attain them—even “boring" information that could not
otherwise compete with more intrinsically interesting activities. Even for
accomplishing rather trivial tasks, having a goal can sometimes be very
effective. So why is having a goal effective?
A tangible goal has the advantage of having a clear beginning, a middle,
and a definable end. Commitment to a goal initiates a chain of actions
such as information seeking, organizing, and selective (focused) attend¬
ing—reading, observing, interpreting, planning, comparing, asking, con¬
necting, trying out, experimenting, and so on. Information sources can
include almost anything—peers, teachers, encyclopedias, CDs, television
programs, books, magazines—even public exhibits. A goal creates a frame¬
work, a “stage setting” in which its various activities generate intrinsically
enjoyable feedback that sustains the effort and time spent reaching the
goal.
Human beings are biologically predisposed to look for patterns and ex¬
plore the novel and unknown. Initiating and sustaining pattern-seeking
behavior usually requires a clearly defined goal that seems potentially
achievable. In early childhood, sensory exploration of unfamiliar objects is
dominant—through feel, touch, sound, smell and other sensory properties.
After objects have become familiar (i.e., predictable), exploration of other
characteristics and objects is more likely. In later human development,
769 Information Design in Informal Settings

goals are more complex but still provide the motivation and context in
which searches for information and patterns are initiated and sustained.
Because a prerequisite to learning anything new is paying attention to
information, goal-based activities must put viewers into contact with
message-related information that, without a goal, might be abandoned
too soon. Interestingly, the goal itself is probably less important than the
fact that there is a goal. As long as required tasks have an acceptable time
frame and are suited to users' abilities and thinking styles, almost any
goal—even an arbitrary one—might help, although goals that incorporate
target messages are preferable for educational purposes. Many kinds of
goals are applicable to most museum audiences and exhibit conditions; for
example,

■ Earning an achievement symbol (lapel tag, token, “diploma," reprint,

poster, souvenir, etc.)

■ Gaining access to working models (of a habitat, a power plant's load

controls, space capsule, etc.) that allow users to control or execute an
operation

■ Receiving a ticket to a behind-the-scenes tour or a seat in an IMAX

theater

■ Earning an opportunity to participate in a second task, game, goal, and

so on

■ Solving a mystery

■ Receiving verbal compliments, positive feedback, or evidence of progress

■ Obtaining closure for an activity (completing a puzzle, finishing a paper,

attaining a score)

A goal need not involve an external prize as long as it is specific and

definable. (But, as stated earlier, complex messages consume extra time
that may require external rewards.) Four of the above goals do not involve
take-home items but are specific enough to be definable. While many of
the intrinsic reinforcers that normally accompany learning and problem
solving help sustain goal-directed activity (table 7.2), they are often not
170 Screven

as effective for initiating the activity as more tangible goals—especially if

visitors are not yet aware that gathering information is itself a rewarding
experience. Because a definable goal can initiate a chain of goal-directed
activity, it provides the opportunity for novice visitors to discover the
intrinsically rewarding properties of learning. For some visitors, in fact,
gathering and using information may become more rewarding than the
goal itself.
Because new messages may not at first be integrated with existing
knowledge, attitudes, and dispositions, they may have only a minor impact
on existing cognitive schemas (Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 1990; Langer 1989;
Moscardo and Pearce 1986). Over time, however, goal-directed activity that
stimulates action, decisions, and the application of information increases
involvement and facilitates the transfer of new information to, and inte¬
gration with, existing schemas.

Goal-Centered Strategies

A goal-centered exhibition strategy might be described as follows: A visitor

selects a definable goal (e.g., solving a puzzle) that requires understanding
and using certain exhibit information. Progress toward the goal is con¬
tingent on focused attention to those aspects of exhibit information
that constitute a targeted message or messages. If sustained, a process of
searching for and applying exhibit information that is challenging and
relevant to a visible goal (puzzle, poster, or other product) should facilitate
learning and transfer of messages to long-term memory and/or lead to
changes in cognitive schemas.
Although not all exhibits need goal-centered systems to generate mind¬
ful attention and learning, such designs are needed when an exhibition's
content contains many topics, layers and branches of concepts, models,
demos, and facts that novice visitors cannot absorb in a single visit—as is
the case for thematic exhibitions. Even well-organized and logically pre¬
sented high-density exhibits can produce information and sensory overload
in visitors; the resultant psychological fatigue and cognitive dissonance
777 Information Design in Informal Settings

Figure 7.6
Goal-centered Sequence (©1998, all rights reserved, Screven & Associates)

may then invite inattention, distraction, and other escape behaviors. Such
exhibitions become something like three-dimensional encyclopedias con¬
taining too many possible messages, topics, layers of interpretation, and
implications for the general public to absorb. Goal-centered designs can
overcome or at least reduce these aversive factors by encouraging visitors
to navigate within a smaller information field centered around goal-related
topic elements.
Figures 7.6 and 7.7 illustrate two facets of goal-centered exhibits in terms
of a hypothetical goal-centered activity in a thematic exhibition.
In figure 7.6 a goal-centered sequence is initiated when a visitor or
visitor group selects a goal (A) and becomes aware of one or more inter¬
mediate tasks (X, Y, Z) that require them to use exhibit information (B) to
advance toward their goal (C). The specific task(s) focuses visitors' atten¬
tion on appropriate topics and content within the larger exhibition field
and helps them avoid irrelevant information. Subtopics and levels within
the thematic exhibition are also reduced to manageable proportions suited
to different goals, topics, ages, entry levels, interests, time frames, and
learning styles. Visitors selectively engage in collecting and applying in¬
formation to specific narrower aspects of the larger concepts, processes,
772 Screven

Reinforcers Congratulation

Figure 7.7
Goal-centered Communication Model (©1998, all rights reserved, Screven & Associates)

and questions addressed by the exhibition. At another time, or during

other visits, visitors can pursue another goal through the same exhibition
on another topic, at another level, for another outcome (D). They may
also return to A to select another more appropriate goal or exit the exhibit
area entirely.
A more detailed schematic of the six primary components of a goal-
centered system is shown in figure 7.7. Visitors or small groups

■ Select a goal from a range of choices at entry point A.

■ At B, choose the task or tasks to be completed or mastered to attain the

selected goal.
7 73 Information Design in Informal Settings

■ At C, carry out the selected task(s) X, Y, Z, using exhibit content (D)

and/or other information sources needed to do so. (Tasks consist of one or
more actions, such as solving a mystery, interpreting data, completing a
puzzle, sorting information, matching art styles, or identifying an emotion
expressed by a sculpture.)

■ On completing the task(s), go to stage E to demonstrate or test them¬

selves on their understanding or mastery of the message or messages; if
unsuccessful, return to C via return-loop F to review the exhibit and the
chosen task.

■ Continue via C and F until their understanding of message(s) has been

successfully demonstrated. They may also return to B or to A to select a
different task or goal or to exit the exhibit area entirely.

■ If and when performance at E is satisfactory, proceed to G, where success

is acknowledged and attainment of goal is confirmed with some form of
intrinsic and/or external reinforcer.

Exhibit designers must be careful to slant goals and associated tasks in a

way that makes it likely that visitors who pay mindful attention will in
fact succeed; that is, designers need to organize, format, and code exhibit
materials for easy navigation, providing frequent evidence of progress and
suggestions (not answers) during stages C, D, and E. In other words, goal-
centered designs should be as efficient as possible. In the author's experi¬
ence, some visitors initially move too quickly, without making thoughtful
use of exhibit content. Interviews have suggested that visitors often assume
that they can be successful without paying attention to exhibit content
(see Example 2 below). After one or two returns through the F loop, how¬
ever, most find it quicker and more rewarding to use exhibit content than
to ignore it! When necessary, docents or exhibit texts should encourage
visitors to change goals or tasks to those better matched with their age,
ability, or available time. Most visitors adjust quickly, learning to make
better choices of goals or tasks and more systematic use of exhibit content.
Although more research is needed, the author's experience has shown
that the following tasks can be critical to designing a successful goal-
centered framework:
174 Screven

- Developing clear and measurable objectives for each task and message
component (label, map, sign, chart, interactive film, etc.) to motivate
visitors—preferably before detailed planning or mock-up testing.

• Developing goals and subgoals for intermediate tasks and pretesting

them with target visitor(s) to ensure that they can be completed within a
reasonable time frame.

■ Selecting goals that pretested target visitors perceive as having personal

value. The higher this value, the more time and effort they can be
expected to spend pursuing a goal. Visitors' perception of this value
depends on their expectations of what a goal will do for them in terms of
(1) social importance (sharability, recognition); (2) personal significance
(practical uses, cognitive compatibility); (3) support for existing attitudes,
beliefs, and values; and (4) financial advantage (e.g., free admissions, store
discounts).

■ Pretesting and observing visitors attempting each prospective task (C)

and adjusting tasks to be sure that they connect clearly to the target
message(s).

■ Evaluating feedback and correctional loops (E and F) for their effective¬

ness in helping visitors use information, recognize connections, reduce
misconceptions, and so on.

• Regularly observing how visitors search for and use exhibit information
at D and adjusting media, formats, and content as needed.

As figure 7.7 suggests, information sources (D) may include computer

stations, various kinds of interactive displays, quick-time videos, audio
recordings, and other media that deliver information, feedback, and rein¬
forcement efficiently and help viewers separate relevant from irrelevant
content. (For details, see Bateman 1990; Bitgood and Loomis 1993;
Hooper-Greenhill 1992, 1994; and Screven 1990a, 1992: 198-201.)
The following features and formats appear to improve exhibit efficiency.

■ Leading questions, which focus attention on relevant message elements of

the exhibit (e.g., texture, color, categories, relationships, misconceptions)
7 75 Information Design in Informal Settings

• Animated and simulated processes that help visualize complex processes

(e.g., blood-vessel action, interconnections among components of natural
habitats)

■ Directive text and graphics that provide clues by pointing out key in¬
formation elements, suggesting search strategies, and encouraging group
collaboration

■ Matching and sorting tasks that help visitors connect new concepts with
existing knowledge

■ Information maps to help visitors visually conceptualize categories of

print information, functions, interconnections, and other print content
(Horn et al. 1969; Horn 1976; Fields 1981; MacDonald-Ross and Waller
1976)

What About Failure?

A danger in any goal-directed activity is the potential negative effect of

making mistakes. Frequent failures are aversive. They disrupt (punish) at¬
tention and may lead visitors to abandon an exhibit activity and acquire a
generalized dislike of the topic, or even the museum. Visitors may increase
their error rates and sense of failure if they guess the answers to the tasks
(C), either don't consult or make careless use of information resources (D),
or simply misunderstand the information provided. Because information
resources are open-ended, visitors must decide for themselves what is rele¬
vant, what to ignore, how to interpret what they see or read, which for¬
mats and modes they find most helpful, and so on. Even at best, therefore,
visitors' efforts to explore and apply new information will result in some
errors, setbacks, misunderstandings, or confusion. During early stages,
scattered and random attention, guessing, and other shortcuts that in¬
crease errors are common. At this point, too, prior misconceptions and
limited knowledge, fatigue, and poor observation skills can contribute to
high error rates.
But failures need not disrupt learning. Indeed, occasional errors and lack
of success are a normal part of everyday life and usually do not prevent
176 Screven

us from learning to ski, swim, climb mountains, cook, solve crossword

puzzles, conduct research, or write plays. Errors can also make positive
contributions—by providing feedback that helps overcome misunder¬
standing, improving mindfulness and discouraging carelessness, guessing,
shortcutting, and other unproductive behavior. Though momentarily frus¬
trating, the negative effects of errors are often counteracted by their help
in shaping new skills and signaling progress. Probably the best antidote
to failure is a system that assures frequent successes along with some
failures—that is, one that gradually increases the ratio between success and
failure. The following practices help increase visitor success:

■ Alerting visitors to common misconceptions about the topic by adding

“warning labels" that anticipate potential mistakes. When errors occur
anyway, the display provides corrective feedback.

■ When applying information to a task doesn't work, encouraging visitors

(via feedback) to re-examine their interpretation or look for new
approaches or new information.

■ Suggesting that visitors share information and ideas to find common

solutions.

■ Adding encouraging remarks when a visitor makes an error; e.g.: "You

show lots of promise!—but you didn't look carefully enough." or "You can do it!
Check again." or "I've made that mistake! Take another look."

Examples of Coal-Centered Exhibits

There are, of course, many possible ways of using goals to facilitate atten¬
tion and learning. The following examples conducted by the author and
his students summarize several exhibit applications ranging across different
topics, exhibit settings, and audiences. Each one utilized a goal-centered
strategy to motivate unguided visitors to attend to and use exhibit content
actively.18 In some cases, only intrinsic reinforcers were employed; in
others, intrinsic and external reinforcers were used.
177 Information Design in Informal Settings

Example 1. Paleo-lndian Exhibit (circa 1978)

■ Developer's Objective: To increase the frequency of mindful attention to
adjacent interpretive text-and-graphics information and the visitor's ability
to choose on the first try the Paleo-lndian projectile point from among the
three different points illustrated on a multiple-flip label.

■ Procedure: A mocked-up text-and-graphics label defined and illustrated

the key properties of Paleo-lndian Clovis-points. This label was placed to
the left of a three-choice flip question picturing Paleo, Archaic, and
Woodland Indian projectile points; the lead question is shown in figure
7.8. The visitor's goal was to use the text-and-graphics information to dis¬
tinguish between the Paleo-lndian point and the two other points.

• Results: The action intended was for visitors first to search the text-and-
graphic information at left to find the "answer" and then to make their
choice (i.e., lift the appropriate panel). After revisions during the formative
stage, over 75 percent of the adult individuals and small groups tested did
so; they mindfully examined the label, often several times, before making
their choice. Guessing was minimal. Additional testing at this site and in
other applications with similar materials showed that this result depended
on: (a) a lead question that is unambivalent; (b) labels configured as single
flippable units that clearly look flippable (figure 7.8); and (c) users recog¬
nizing that the information source (label) contains the information needed
for quickly making a good choice. (For details on interactive graphics, see
Screven 1992: 199-203.)

Example 2. TV A Energy Center (Screven 1990b)

• Developer's Objective: To increase and sustain the time visitors spend in
focused attention on surrounding information panels explaining TVA's
methods of producing and controlling energy.

■ Procedure: In the orientation area at the entrance to the exhibition two

robots demonstrate the use of a special card for answering questions on a
self-test computer; answering them correctly earns visitors a take-home
lapel button from the exhibition's Energy Store as acknowledgment of
178 Screven

■H
Me 11111111 WHICH OF THESE COULD,HAVE BEEN
Only Paleo-Indians made USED BY PA&E0-INDIANS?
projectile points with a ’'flute," This
probably simplified attachment to a
shaft.

The "flute" is a wide, shallow groove

beginning at the base. RUN YOUR FINGER
ALONG THE FLUTE •

Is the second projectile pointy also

fluted?

. ■ :

Figure 7.8
The Lead Question of an Exhibit Illustrating the Key Properties of Paleo-Indian Projectile
Points, [photoslide]

their accomplishment. The card contains six cells (one for each topic), all
of which need to be stamped to obtain the lapel button. The visitor's goal
is to earn a lapel button by answering three multiple-choice questions
testing their knowledge or understanding of the conceptual messages of
the exhibits in each of six sequentially arranged rooms: orientation,
hydropower, fossil-fuel generation, nuclear power, power controls, and
solar energy. When the card is first inserted into a self-test computer, the
message on the screen reminds visitors (1) that each question must be
answered before going on to the next one; (2) that if they make more than
one error they will be out of the game and receive the card back; and
(3) that a careful study of the surrounding exhibits will help them win.
Visitors who make a second error see an encouraging screen message,
which varies from room to room, urging them to look at the exhibits more
carefully. Here is one example:

SORRY, YOU JUST MADE SECOND ERROR, SO YOU'RE OUT OF THE GAME! YOU
SHOW A LOT OF PROMISE. DID YOU STUDY EXHIBITS CAREFULLY? LOOK AT
THEM AGAIN AND GOOD LUCK NEXT TIME!

Visitors can freely replay the self-test game, move on to the next room
without answering questions and return later, and collaborate with com-
179 Information Design in Informal Settings

panions. (As all visitors receive a card, they can collaborate in answering
the questions and viewing the exhibit messages.)

■ Results: Most visitors over eight-years-old persisted until their cards were
filled. The number of visitors who tested themselves without visiting the
displays varied. After their initial effort, about 30 percent of the adult
visitors (5 percent of the teenagers) began using the display information
to help them answer the questions. However, the majority of visitors
(including teens) eventually engaged in mindful interaction with the
exhibits until all six card cells were stamped (Screven 1990b: 120-21).

Example 3: Picasso Museum (Screven and Giraudy 1991)

* Developer's Objective: To overcome misconceptions about how simple it
would be to paint and draw like Picasso, and to increase viewers' respect
for the artistic talent involved in creating the simple balances in his
painting The Green Fawn.

• Procedure: Four five-by-six-inch versions of Picasso's The Green Fawn were

mounted on four parallel slanted panels. One was Picasso's own; the
others were identical to the original except that several minor elements
had been rearranged. Each print was mounted on the outside of a hinged
flip label under a headline readable from fifteen feet away:

Which Do You Like Best? (Is Yours the Same as Picasso's?)

The display stood on a stand a in long narrow hall visitors used to

approach the gallery where the painting itself was on exhibition. Each of
the panels could be lifted to provide visitors with feedback about their
choices. The visitors' goal, as defined by the headline, was to compare the
different versions and choose among them according to their own personal
taste, continuing to examine and compare the remaining choices until
they found Picasso's. The effectiveness of the display was evaluated by
(a) the quality of visitor involvement in the display (comparing/studying
choices before making each choice); (b) the time spent in the gallery where
the painting itself hung; and (c) the time spent in the gallery looking at
180 Screven

four other, unaltered fawn paintings by Picasso. Baseline times for b and c
were also obtained prior to installing the flip display.
■ Results: Over 80 percent of gallery visitors became actively engaged with
the display, often working together in small groups. Most people (more
than 75 percent) spent a median of six minutes discussing details of the
four versions and making their choices before finding Picasso's version. A
large majority (more than 90 percent) examined all four choices before
lifting any of the panels for feedback. We observed little random guessing,
even though less than a third of the 130 visitors observed selected Picasso's
painting on their first try. Another third made two choices before finding
Picasso's version. Most visitors spent at least thirty seconds discussing a
version after choosing it. A sample of the visitors who had used the dis¬
play were tracked in the gallery and observed to spend significantly more
time—compared with earlier baseline observations—looking at each of the
five unaltered Picasso fawn paintings in the gallery.

Example 4. Rain Forest Exhibition (circa 1988)

■ Developer's Objective: To communicate to family groups messages about
the interconnections of life forms in certain habitats, using information
from three widely separated displays of a rain forest exhibition at the
Milwaukee Public Museum. The visitor's goal was to earn a “golf-certificate”
at the exit.
■ Procedure: At entry, a life-size cardboard golfer invited visitors to earn the
certificate by answering three questions about each of three rain forest
habitats. Visitors picked up a question booklet to use at three habitat
exhibits identified by the numbers 1, 2, and 3, which were easy to see
from a distance. Each target display contained information that answered
questions focusing on objects, relationships, and texts related to the
teaching objectives for each display. To receive the golf certificate at the
exit, visitors took a three-item self-test based on the three teaching objec¬
tives. Correctly answering all three questions for all three exhibits earned
181 Information Design in Informal Settings

visitors a certificate. If they made errors, they were offered a new booklet
and invited to return to the displays a second time.

■ Results: Most participants (n = 110) were family groups. Tracking visitors

revealed a high 2.2 rating on the involvement scale (described earlier
under “Motivation”), as well as systematic attention to display content,
active intragroup discussions, sharing answers, pointing, and so forth. Over
65 percent of participants visited all three target displays; the median time
spent by groups at each display was 4.2 minutes. Most participants (more
than 65 percent) took the self-tests, and over 70 percent earned a certifi¬
cate on their first or second try.

Example 5. Advance Organizer for Woodlands Exhibition (circa 1996)

• Objective: To design an exhibit to serve as an advance organizer at the
entry to a woodlands exhibition on how forest succession and inter¬
dependent ecological processes create forest diversity and, eventually, old
forests of specific tree species. Front-end studies, however, showed that
visitors (a) believed that, although trees get bigger and older, the same
species are present at all stages of a forest's life; (b) could not recognize tree
species by sight; (c) were unfamiliar with the common names of most
trees; and (d) had little interest in the topic of forest succession. Because of
visitor misconceptions and a low level of interest, the exhibit message was
simplified to promote awareness that forest species change over time.

■ Procedure: Overcoming visitor resistance to spending time at entry to the

forest was approached by providing a goal-directed activity a domino
game using pictures of tree species instead of dots to reinforce the message.
Starting and ending points were established by attaching one domino (an
aspen) at the beginning of the game board and another (a sugar maple) at
the end. The task was to “bridge the gap” by placing the remaining dom¬
inoes in proper sequence between them. The game had only one correct
solution and was simple to execute and easy to understand. Designers
tested a mock-up picturing a Wisconsin forest scene with the title
182 Screven

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

along with a statement: "These trees grow in Wisconsin, but they DON'T
grow side-by-side like this. As woodlands become older, certain trees follow
others." Another panel read:

PLAY SUCCESSION DOMINOES!

• Place tree dominoes in right order to

• Connect the aspen trees to the maple trees.
• (Remember: these changes take hundreds of years.)

■ Results. Most visitors caught on quickly and showed high levels of

involvement and sustained focused attention. After playing the game,
visitors questioned about how a forest changes over time said—in contrast
to those in a pretest—that tree species change according to the age of the
forest. They all acknowledged that this was new information for them.

In all these examples, visitors found gathering, interpreting, and apply¬

ing information more rewarding than simply guessing. They maintained
their attention long enough for the majority of them to (a) attain a goal,
and (b) receive (i.e., comprehend) exhibit messages. Only three of the
examples relied on external incentives.
Using today's technologies, exhibit designers can create a wide range of
formats and modes that give visitors control over information delivery,
pacing, style of presentation, and the consequences that follow their
interactions with the exhibit. These modes include, among others, such
so-called "doing" technologies as games, interactive books and labels, ani¬
mations, CDs, multimedia computer programs, and information sharing.
Debate will continue over the best ways and best technologies for
advancing self-directed learning both inside and outside public settings.
Regardless of which emerging information technologies we ultimately
adopt for facilitating communication, they will have to provide methods
of managing contingencies, eliciting user involvement, and presenting
genuinely meaningful choices.
183 Information Design in Informal Settings

Some Final Words

Designers of exhibit media and delivery strategies for communicating in¬

formation in public environments face a variety of obstacles. Delivering
simple messages and images for relatively limited purposes—as in adver¬
tising, wayfinding, and leisure entertainment—is relatively easy. But com¬
municating more complex educational and cultural messages (i.e., ideas) to
self-directed people in public spaces is much more difficult. On the one
hand, we need entertaining features to gain and sustain the public's vol¬
untary attention and effort. On the other hand, viewers' attention must be
focused and selective if they are to grasp complex and generally unfamiliar
target messages. Communication designers often err on the side of pro¬
viding features that entertain and visually please audiences, in the hope
that messages will be understood because they are associated with appeal¬
ing features. Although designers often concentrate on visuals and aes¬
thetics, at other times they hope to attract viewers by focusing clearly on
valuable content. But too often both approaches impair the audience's
ability to receive or understand the message. Increasingly, however, some
planners and designers are seeking to ensure that the fun of their exhibits
is contingent on users actually receiving (understanding) the message.
In the course of this chapter we have examined some of the psycholog¬
ical and other considerations that can help communication systems to
simultaneously entertain and convey information. We have argued that we
can adapt our knowledge of human curiosity, the challenge of problem
solving, game strategies, and goal-centered tasks—as well as of emerging
scientific understandings of how the brain learns—to the task of connect¬
ing mindful attention with the enjoyable consequences of using exhibit
content. In the future we can expect to see goal-centered strategies and
“brain compatible” games for delivering complex information, not only in
museums and similar facilities but also in leisure playgrounds, shopping
areas, Web pages, multimedia studios, and, even, schools. Blueprints for
adapting such strategies to information systems hide many dangers, but
the kind of front-end and formative evaluation described earlier should
184 Screven

help planners and designers avoid the most serious obstacles to effective
informal communication in public environments.
From an economic standpoint, competition for the discretionary time of
audiences will probably ensure more effective communications in all the
settings we have touched upon. Information designers will have to learn to
link meaningful communication with entertainment and natural learning
processes without sacrificing either gate receipts or educational outcomes.
Over time, competition may advance the design of self-directed learning
habitats until learning and cultural enlightenment—as well as fun—become
by-products of all natural biological, cognitive, and social processes.

Notes

1. Summaries relating museum learning to these underlying principles and theories

can be found in Schauble and Glazer (1996), Choi and Hannafin (1995), Gagne (1974),
Keller (1983), Reigeluth (1983), Resnick (1989), Screven (1969), and Banyard and Hayes
(1994).

2. For information on the effect of these factors, see Alt and Griggs (1989), Dierking and
Falk (1994), Griggs (1990), Hood (1993), Hooper-Greenhill (1994), McManus (1989, 1991,
1994), Miles (1986), Miles and Zavala (1994), and Screven (1986).

3. Representative museums that have made major commitments to visitor-centered

design include the London Natural History Museum, New York Hall of Science, Denver
Art Museum, Denver Museum of Natural History, Phoenix Desert Botanical Garden,
Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, National Museum of Natural History (Smithso¬
nian Institution), Minnesota History Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Science, Quebec's
Museum of Civilization, and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia.

4. For reviews of these types of evaluation, see Bitgood and Shettel (1994), Hooper-
Greenhill (1994), Miles et al. (1988), and Screven (1990). For the overall evaluation pro¬
cess, see Bitgood and Loomis (1993), Miles et al. (1988, chaps. 1 and 16), and Screven
(1990). For introductory information on the front-end assessment of visitor knowledge,
attitudes, misconceptions, and other characteristics, see Hood (1992, 1993) and Shettel
(1990).

5. For description of the use of mock-ups and prototypes, see Loomis (1987, chap. 6) and
Screven (1990a, 1993).

6. Research has shown that if key features found to be effective during formative evalu¬
ations (contrast, colors, fonts, placement, format) are faithfully incorporated into the
7 85 Information Design in Informal Settings

final installed exhibit, visitor responses will be similar to those obtained during formative
testing (Griggs and Manning 1983).

7. For subsequent improvements and variations in this communications model and on

communication theory and practice, see Hooper-Greenhill (1994: 37-53) and McQuail
and Windahl (1993).

8. In the classical communication model, exhibit objects are regarded as media channels
through which messages are "delivered." In museums, malls, and zoos, they are seen as
simply another type of delivery media that conveys messages similar to those delivered
by other means. In this chapter, however, exhibit objects are parts of the information
field that viewers may attend to along with other information.

9. Based on Screven 1986, 1990a.

10. For introductory summaries on semantic memory, procedural memory, episodic

memory, feelings, and encoding processes operating in informal environments, see
Barnard and Loomis (1994); Bitgood and Shettel (1994), Kinch (1994), Hooper-Greenhill
(1995), and McManus (1993).

11. What seemed more important to visitors was whether or not participatory features
and aesthetic appeal helped them understand exhibit concepts.

12. However, involvement sometimes also refers to visitors' general level of activity, inde¬
pendent of the focus of attention, because both focused and unfocused behavior may
show higher levels of activity. High activity at participatory exhibits may or may not
be selective-, for example, visitors often energetically interact with computer tasks while
paying little attention to the intended messages (Moscardo 1992).

13. For example, a challenging question posed in a layered label draws attention to
certain display features. If visitors are then selectively attentive to these features prior to
seeking feedback in the label's next layer, they are using the exhibit interactively in a
mindful mode and their interpretation of the feedback they receive will depend on the
particular features they have paid attention to.

14. This rating scale is not the same as the three-point scale used to measure involve¬

ment (Screven 1990a).

15. The Meyers-Briggs scale (Meyers and McCaulley 1985) is an intuitive measure of
learning styles. More behavioral and systematic methods of assessing differences in
thinking styles have been developed (Sternberg 1994, Renzulli and Smith 1978). These
include a self-report rating measure (Thinking Style Inventory), a Thinking Style Question¬
naire for Teachers, which measures seven styles, and a task-based preference scale in
which students are given a situation and asked to choose their preferred approach. (E.g.,
"When I'm studying literature, I prefer to (a) follow the teacher's advice ..., (b) make up

my own story with..., and so on.")

186 Screven

16. Many examples of natural incentives can be found in publications by Carlson

(1993), Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1983, 1989, 1990), Csikszentmihalyi and Hermanson
(1995), Deci (1985), Gardner (1991), Lepper (1980), Malone (1981), Moscardo and Pearce
(1986), Perry (1992), and Screven (1969, 1986, 1990b, 1992).

17. This does not mean that passive participation cannot result in learning when visitors'
pre-existing interest in a topic stimulates them to pay careful attention to an exhibit.
Novice viewers unfamiliar with the subject, however, are likely to ignore passive infor¬
mation or—at best—pay it only casual attention.

18. Various models have been proposed. A model offered by Perry (1989, 1992) utilizes
intrinsically motivating, goal-centered activities to sustain attention and facilitate exhibit
learning. Borun et al. (1996) and Czikszentmihalyi and Hermanson (1995) offer other
examples and research data on visitors and families involved in goal-centered tasks in
museums.

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8 Visualization for Thinking, Planning, and
Problem Solving

Yvonne M. Hansen

Vision can no longer be employed simply to support verbal and conceptual meanings:
Its potential as a cognitive power in its own right must be exploited.
—Kepes 1965: v

The pace of change continues—swift, unpredictable, and chaotic—and

affects us all. Though we long for simplicity and certainty, complexity,
disorder, and unpredictability are our daily lot. The time has come to
accept that today's problems cannot be solved with yesterday's cause-and-
effect thinking, outdated formulas, or antiquated and inefficient approaches
that lock struggling minds in boxes. Complexity isn't what it used to be.
It's more—and different.
Complex problems are made up of many interrelated elements. They
demand innovative approaches—flexible processes that reveal relationships
among parts—that require us to look at problems from new and varied
points of view merely to understand them, much less to solve them.
Problems are situated in specific contexts and their parts interact con¬
tinuously at many levels and across shifting boundaries.
The problem solvers and innovators in many organizations are groups,
individuals who bring to discussion of any issue a wide spectrum of
opinions. When they meet to explore messy, nonroutine problems that are
often subtly connected to each other, they generate huge volumes of
facts, ideas, and opinions. This plethora of information cannot be recalled
194 Hansen

or managed with such traditional, words-only methods as notes on legal

pads, computer printouts, flip charts, and audio recordings. Confusion and
conflict can result as group members propose their various solutions.
However, if a problem is first defined as a whole in context, the group
is more likely to achieve clarity and agreement and less likely to shoot
down the remedies and solutions proposed by individual members. Graphic
modeling, a method combining simple graphic notation and words in visual
arrangements, can often define an issue and its context more completely
than words alone. Drawing graphic models or diagrams provides a visual,
nonlinear, whole-systems approach to problem solving, planning, innova¬
tion, diagnosis, and envisioning the future.
In this paper I address the diverse sources of information, the inade¬
quacy of verbal language to clearly convey complex matters, the need to
understand and express dynamic complexity, and the rationale for using a
graphical language. I suggest that simple, graphic shapes, the building
blocks of a graphical language, play an instrumental role in cognition,
visual thinking, and the communication of complex, dynamically chang¬
ing realities. I describe in particular Graphic Tools®, a graphical language
for facilitating understanding of problem complexity, and present an array
of applications for using it effectively.

Information Acquisition and Display

Intelligence does not operate in verbal abstractions alone.... Visual thinking is not a
delayed system; information is conveyed directly. The greatest power of visual language lies
in its immediacy, its spontaneous evidence. Visually, you see content and form simul¬
taneously. They must be dealt with as one single force delivering information the same
way.
—Dondis 1973: 106

Information comes to us from three general sources:

■ External—the observable world; what is seen and perceived; printed

texts, verbal accounts, media presentations, and so forth
195 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

• Internal—one's own images, ideas, visualizations, and perceptions

■ Combined external and internal sources informing the cognitions and
perceptions that give rise to new combinations of knowledge and
information

Words, the most common form of communication, are powerful enough

when uttered in the right tone at the right time to move people to great
deeds. As important as words are, however, what people remember is the
gist of a message; words play only a supporting role. The notion that ideas
and words occur simultaneously in the mind, and that thought without
words doesn't exist, is questioned, if not refuted, by the oft-heard phrase,
"I can't find the right words”; that is, an idea exists in some form apart
from words. The idea-word connection is further disproven by the fact that
when professional translators strive to interpret the meaning of a text or
speech, they may not transmit it as precisely as when they translate it
word for word.
It is important for information designers to be fully aware of internal
thinking processes and mental models, for they influence communication
processes and content as ideas take shape. Our thoughts progress through
several unevenly paced phases from less defined to more defined, evolving
in fits and starts. Initially, an idea may be vague and "fuzzy”—impossible
to conceptualize clearly. Then, at the preverbal phase, it can be expressed
graphically without verbal labels. At this stage, Graphic Tools, which em¬
ploy six simple shapes, work well to make the evolution of the thought—
from nebulous to conceptual—visible on paper. Along the way, although
words may be useful in fleshing out details of the thought, verbal descrip¬
tions can narrow emerging concepts too quickly and impede their full de¬
velopment. An individual's recognition of these mental stages is related to
the ability to introspect, to throw light into the shadows of the mind and
even sweep away a cobweb or two.
There are a surprising number of graphical languages and notation
systems, as well as verbal languages that contain graphical and nonverbal
196 Hansen

elements. Although the philosopher Leibnitz dreamed in the early eigh¬

teenth century of a future universal symbolism of pictorial images recog¬
nizable by speakers of all languages, it was Charles K. Bliss who in 1949
devised Semantography, a language of basic symbols now in international
use (Dreyfuss 1972). Another system, ISOTYPE, was devised by Otto
Neurath; the acronym stands for International System of Typographic
Picture Education. Neurath's pictographs show what an observer actually
sees rather than an abstract symbol such as a word or a number associated
with some object or person. In the United States, for example, the abstract
symbols for paper currency and coins are, respectively, the dollar sign (an
upper-case S with two vertical parallel strokes through the center) and the
cents sign (a lower-case c with a vertical stroke in the center). A pictograph
for coins, on the other hand, might be a drawing of a stack of coins with
ridged edges and a president's profile on the face of the top coin.
International travel signage too is graphical information, the purpose of
which is to allow viewers to grasp meanings immediately. Throughout
human history, motivated by a recognition of changing needs and assisted
by the technologies of their eras, professionals and specialists in fields as
diverse as music, choreography, chemistry, geometry, statistics, geography,
cartography, and geology developed nonverbal symbols. Current examples
are found in all kinds of systems design, including programming (Venn
diagrams, object-oriented flow charts), project management (P.E.R.T.),
and organizational development (organization charts, visioning strategies,
mission statements, etc.), as well as in process and production engineering,
architecture and drafting, interior design, maritime communications (signal
flags), and nonverbal signage.
As we have seen, a number of arguments refute the belief that words are
the only and primary means of communicating information and that our
thoughts and ideas are formed first as words and sentences. Moreover,
words can be highly ambiguous. An example of the ambiguity of words
is found in this headline of unknown origin: "Stud tires out." While a
resident of the northern states will understand that there is a new law
7 97 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

forbidding the use of studded tires, a westerner knows that somewhere a

cowboy-type is growing weary.

Graphic exploration and communication begin very early in life. During

preverbal development, children communicate with sounds, gestures, and
images. Using pencils, crayons, and paints, they draw rounded shapes,
scribbles, zigzags, and other nonverbal expressions to express thoughts
their limited vocabulary has no words for. Even in the early school years,
children continue to express ideas by drawing lines, shapes, and curlicues
that their teachers and parents label as "art”—and therefore irrelevant
to the communication of concepts, facts, and ideas. Sadly, children are
usually told to stop "drawing” and put away their crayons and paper when
it is time for reading class. What to the child is nonverbal communication
is "art” to adults. To Rudolf Arnheim, professor emeritus of the psychology
of art at Harvard, this process of nonverbal communication is visual rea¬
soning (1969).
Graphics of all kinds are visible everywhere; they invade our every
moment, attempt to attract our attention, inform us, entice us to act.
Whereas once text was king and the only tool (except mathematics)
available for computer displays, the new easier-to-use computers now
abound in icons, symbols, and graphic metaphors (e.g., the screen as a
desktop) that encourage visual thinking. Graphics, which earlier made only
occasional appearances on the Internet, are now constantly visible on the
World Wide Web.
Edward Tufte (1989) investigated computer screen displays and urged
makers to simplify them for ease of use and better absorption of informa¬
tion. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack, the conceptualizers of the Macintosh,
with its desktop metaphor and elegant use of icons, placed functional
graphics at our fingertips, while the software developed soon afterward
made the design of graphical information an essential feature. Before then,
graphics—compared to words—were generally perceived as less-effective,
after-the-fact conveyors of ideas, mere extras and decorative add-ons. Now
198 Hansen

the elegance and importance of iconic simplicity is increasingly recog¬

nized, accepted, and applied.

Pattern: Phenomena Made Visible

Our sense of pattern is an extremely important part of all intellectual activity, and the
extemalization and representation of pattern in visual communication is ... at the core of
many advances.
—Sless 1981: 148

A multitude of environmental events perceived as chaos, heard as noise,

and read as information overload are continuously present to us, clamor¬
ing for our attention. More information is out there than the mind can
manage and use productively, because it comes to us in a linear mode,
word by word, and is thus difficult to synthesize into new, meaningful
arrangements. Words are not the only means to convey information, to
inform us, to give inner form to something. In fact, words can impede
understanding, because they are often inadequate to deal with the experi¬
ence of information overload, not to mention chaos, disorder, and ran¬
domness. Words and phrases that represent concepts and ideas can,
however, be displayed and stored graphically, in "mind maps." Somehow,
our brains know that there is something of value in what we consciously
perceive as randomness and disorder. It can render phenomena, relation¬
ships, and ideas visible, allowing patterns to emerge from apparent dis¬
order and become detectable, and available, to our senses and intellect.
In the Austin laboratory of the University of Texas Center for Non-linear
Dynamics, its director, Harry Swinney, introduced melted crayons into a
spinning tank of water to simulate the behavior of the jet stream as it
meets mountain ranges. He thus made an invisible phenomenon visible
for the purpose of detecting patterns. In another experiment, Swinney
used tiny plastic beads in a tank of water to form a miniature red spot
showing how Jupiter's atmosphere arranges itself to create the Great Red
Spot, a whirlpool storm. Swinney is a leader in the search for "universal
patterns in seemingly random behavior ... referred to as the study of
199 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

Figure 8.1
A Visual Representation of the Idea "Pushing Forward" (from: Stankowski 1991).

chaos" (Stanley 1996). His work demonstrates that phenomena must be

made visible, not just verbalized, to produce the detectable, observable
patterns in which we discern meaning.
Making invisible phenomena visible is also the work of Anton Stankow¬
ski, who devoted a book to showing how invisible processes can be made
visible (1991). He developed a series of studies showing how ideas might
be visually represented. In the example shown in figure 8.1 he used black
lines to convey the notion of a force (horizontal line) acting on objects (a
group of more-or-less vertical lines of various widths). The vertical lines are
solid black where the push will occur and diffused black at their peripheries.
This abstraction—an arbitrary graphic—demonstrates how a concept—in
this case, pushing forward—can be conveyed clearly without showing any
recognizable objects, such as an arrow aimed toward a sheaf of straw.

Information Overload

Information overload is a stressful condition, perhaps because we don't

know how to organize and categorize the wealth of verbal information we
200 Hansen

receive. It is time-consuming and frustrating to access, reflect on, and store

information and ideas in ways that will let us easily retrieve and apply
them to everyday problems. The task of managing the proliferation of
information and the accompanying complexity is daunting. Yet, addic-
tively, we reach out for more, hoping to discover a secret key hidden
somewhere—or in plain sight but unrecognized—that will bring instant
relief. There is no secret key, but help is available if we are willing to think
in a different mode and use our total mental capacity.
On the Learning Organization Digest (LO Digest), an Internet site for dia¬
logues about organizations as systems and how they learn and change,
recognition of the wealth of good information available to us is a common
thread of discussion. So too are laments about managing and storing it.
Subscribers comment appreciatively on "the breadth of the LO Digest's
coverage and the degree of enthusiastic involvement of its participants,"
but say they have trouble finding time to save, classify, and store each of
the three or four digests—ranging in size from twenty to thirty megabytes
—that are posted daily.
Subscribers to the Digest make frequent reference to graphics as aids
in all manner of applications. Alan Scharf of Creative Leap International
describes how he creates various sorts of models—"physical, analog, sym¬
bolic, graphical, schematic, descriptive and pictorial"—to use in overheads,
flip charts, and handouts (LOD 5/96). He goes on to say that with graphics
the "solution space can be suddenly expanded beyond its apparent physi¬
cal reality (a physical paradigm shift)." In situations where many pages of
explanatory text would otherwise be required, graphics can help us com¬
municate complex matters visually and simply.
Reference is often made in the Digest to Sun Microsystems's World Wide
Web site, "Distributed Objects for Business," which points out that com¬
petitive advantage is achieved by increasing the ability to learn fast and
think in fundamentally new ways, especially systemically. The statement
alludes to Peter Senge's book, The Fifth Discipline (1991), which he illus¬
trates with his original systems graphics (as shown in figure 8.2). Senge
says that "the essence of the discipline of systems thinking lies in a shift
201 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

Figure 8.2
"My System,” a Graphic Representation of the interrelationships and processes involved
in being a beer distributor (From Senge 1991).

of mind: seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains,

and seeing processes of change rather than snapshots” (1991: 73). The
moderator of LO Digest and Senge's business partner, Richard Karash, adds
that "examining our business entities, activities, and processes from an
object-oriented approach can be more effective in capturing and sharing
knowledge” (L06818). An object-oriented approach means, quite simply, a
graphic approach.
The computer systems developer and organizational consultant David
Taylor makes extensive use of rectangles, circles, lines, and arrows in the
model-building process. He applies modeling to "convergent engineering
... [that] offers a new opportunity to create more flexible, adaptive busi¬
ness systems by combining business and software engineering into a
single, integrated discipline” (1995: 3). In figure 8.3, part a illustrates a
basic systems diagram showing relationships among system entities; part b
shows a specific system, "Dylan Distributors," and identifies the internal
entities, external entities, and the places where they interface. Thus busi¬
ness and software engineering, previously separate disciplines, are inte¬
grated. The verbal and the visual are united.
202 Hansen

Figure 8.3
Two Systems Models by David Taylor (1995): (a) A basic systems model; (b) a model of a
specific system.

Managing complexity, disorder, and information overload requires seri¬

ous rethinking and escape from the verbal box that traps the mind in tra¬
ditional linear, sequential thought processes. Re-entering a visual world to
conceptualize a complex state of affairs holistically and systemically—after
relinquishing that world in childhood—calls for an integrative, synthesiz¬
ing dynamic. In a graphical model, data and ideas and even invisible
processes (as Stankowski has shown) can communicate the structure of
complexity.
203 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

Graphics have the capacity to transform our understanding of an issue

and, to some extent, free us from the narrowness of words, labels, and
classification systems. According to Arnheim (1969), perceiving and think¬
ing are "indivisibly intertwined” in a "union of perception and thought.”
The mind can sense an underlying order within apparent chaos by
detecting emerging patterns, noting the repetition of an entity or concept,
and forming a category of something that has not yet been labeled. The
effect of a label is to eliminate and exclude whatever doesn't fit, shut down
creativity, and induce us to apply without hesitation the same solution
that worked with the last problem labeled the same way. We are in too
much of a hurry to take action instead of leisurely and curiously scanning
the environment, with conscious awareness of the search, to see what's
out there. Patterns, the recurrence of graphic, visible arrangements, are
everywhere in the natural and manufactured world—in wallpaper borders,
Oriental rugs, trees, ocean waves, and, sand dunes. Repetitions are con¬
stantly before us, sometimes in variations so subtle they might easily be
dismissed as irrelevant.
Identifying, detecting, and tracking linear trends means that an entity
has been labeled, has a name, and can probably be quantified. Patterns,
however, are different in nature from trends. Perceiving an emerging
pattern is like gazing at clouds, not knowing exactly what you're looking
for and imagining that you see an object. Or it's like seeing your initials
on a license plate, forgetting about it, then seeing them again, and yet
again. You don't look for what you see, but you do note the repetition and
perceive a pattern emerging. Think of it this way: First, you note an
anomaly, perhaps more than one; then you see the anomaly again; it is
not exactly the same but very similar, and you call it a coincidence. The
third occurrence, however, indicates that a pattern of some kind is emerg¬
ing from what you initially perceived as a disordered field. If your mind is
focused on searching for a continuing trend, however, you will discount
the pattern, excluding it as a nonconforming element.
The three stages of observation above enable you to perceive a pattern
you might otherwise not see. Similarly, using graphics to construct
204 Hansen

sketches or models of entities and processes can help us perceive recurrent

elements and detect patterns. The diagram or model is capable of showing
the “big picture"; or, by “zooming in," it can focus on a part of the whole
while we remain fully aware of what is being excluded.

Exploratory Graphics

The diagram can present at a glance what a verbal description can only present in a
sequence of statements. It is the ideal mode for describing relations between things.
—Albarn and Smith 1977: 69

The advantage of using graphics along with words and phrases is being
able to see relationships and structure among the data that are obscured in
a text-only situation. Detecting patterns, which are visual phenomena, in a
field of text is virtually impossible. In addition, reading and analyzing page
upon page of text requires a powerful memory and the ability to absorb,
store, categorize, and retrieve information. However, when information is
presented in graphic form and concepts are given shape, relationships
among the various elements are easier to see. And, as the graphic repre¬
sentation is further enriched with visual information, long-term memory is
triggered and even more information and perceptions can be added, en¬
abling viewers and oneself to detect new patterns, processes, and other
phenomena.
In addition to enhancing the capacity to perceive patterns in situations
of confusion, complexity, disorder, or chaos, a graphical approach encour¬
ages us to think visually. Wherever information is continuously generated,
graphically based information design can help us, as individuals and
groups, bring coherence and order to our external and professional worlds
as well as to the internal worlds of our imagination.
Moreover, it is not only external sources of information that must be
managed. There is also the continuous flow of our own stream of
thoughts, the ideas and connections that come to us at odd times, which
must be noted, written down, or sketched out before they are lost. We
already do this, of course. Who has not jotted down ideas on torn corners
205 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

of envelopes? We are all napkin scribblers when struck by an exciting,

brilliant flash that we want to remember or communicate to someone else.
These expressions are intuitive and informal. Until now, however, there
has been no formalized language for capturing these creative flashes or
synthesizing our exploratory thoughts. Adding images to words somehow
alters how we perceive an object or idea. Graphical displays and idea
sketches often trigger those precious ah-ha experiences that bring about
shifts in perspective. When we see an issue in a new light, the mind
perceives in it different qualities and becomes open to innovation and,
frequently, a paradigm shift. Simple graphic shapes have the capacity
to represent preverbal cognitions and give them concrete form. Even
computer-assisted, outside-the-box approaches fail to tap into the mind's
capacity to perceive the external world with insight and knowledge gained
by thinking visually.
Until now, conceptual graphics, images, and other visual devices have
been relegated to a low status. In the world of information they have
usually been used to support texts or illustrate numerical data in charts
and graphs displaying, for example, demographic information. Yet graph¬
ics are no less a representational language than are words: they too convey
meaning, can concretize abstractions or derive abstract principles from
the concrete. They can add a visual perspective to verbal descriptions and
reveal connections not apparent when only words are used. Patterns, too,
become, discernible.

Need for a Simple Graphical Language

Discussing reality as consisting of "messes,” Russell Ackoff says that a

problem is an abstraction that comes from analyzing a mess. In answer to
the query "Then what is a mess?” he replies, "That's the significant thing:
a mess is a system of problems” (1981: 19). Frequently, subscribers to the
Learning Organization Digest refer to "seeing” systems, new aspects of
systems, and archetypes. In response to the question "What is Systems
Thinking?” one contributor wrote, "I find when I comprehend an arche-
206 Hansen

type, I re-live past experiences that apply and interpret the memory using
the new understanding_It's like replaying a video. I see the scenes ... I
recreate the scene with new dialog, new information” (LOD).
Subscriber Durward Humes, a specialist in meeting management, dis¬
cussed modeling and wrote that, given the challenge of a complex busi¬
ness environment, "class models, object message models are important
because they all help us collect, organize, verify complex, often conflicting
bodies of knowledge” Referring to his own process, Humes says, "During
the primary Conceptual Modeling Phase, we build a domain model, an
event/use case model ... [which] forms the Conceptual Model ... which
addresses the classes and their interconnectivity." (LOD 5/7/96).

Jac Vennix, another person who posts on the LO Digest site, writes: When
working with contributions from individuals or a group, in reflecting, facilitating
mode, we use causal loop diagrams (and system dynamics flow diagrams) to facili¬
tate strategic discussions in management teams. They are great to prevent
miscommunication and to 'integrate' the various viewpoints (mental models) of
participants. Because of this integration process both consensus and commitment
on a strategic issue can be obtained far more easily than with ordinary group dis¬
cussions. (LOD 5/96)

The need to understand complexity and apparent disorder makes it vital

to extend our ability to think visually and systemically and to envision
("see”) systems as whole entities. Thinking systemically enables us to dis¬
regard details and cause-and-effect connections briefly and reach for the
larger whole. People are already using graphic displays in a variety of ways
and for diverse purposes. However, they are not doing so in an organized
fashion, because until now there hasn't been a graphical language that is
easy to learn and use. As Anonymous has said—and this is a key idea—
"everything is a part of something larger." Showing both the part and the
larger whole is vital, and it can't be done by writing words on a flip chart.
It may not even be thought—because strictly linear approaches nip whole-
systems thinking in the bud.
One of my own clients, a design team leader, explained that "the expe¬
rience [of graphic facilitation with Graphic Tools] provided a different
207 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

way of looking at the problem. It allowed me to diagram the problem.”

There is much to be learned about thinking visually and systemically; and
the more we perceive disorder in the external world, the greater is our
need for multiple languages and for ways of communicating and express¬
ing abstract ideas. The diagram in its many forms is, as Keith Albarn and
Jenny Mial Smith, point out, "the instrument of thought.”

The diagram is evidence of an idea being structured—it is not the idea but a model
of it, intended to clarify characteristics of features of that idea. It is a form of com¬
munication which increases the pace of development, or allows an idea to function
and develop for the thinker while offering the possibility of transfer of an idea or
triggering of notions; finally, through appropriate structuring, it may generate dif¬
ferent notions and states of mind in the viewer. (Albarn and Smith 1977: 7)

Thus, a graphic can provide a visual perspective on a verbal description

of a problem. It can expand the context in which the problem is under¬
stood, show how its parts are related to each other, and how they are
related to its environment and the external dynamics of that environment.

Obstacles and Resistance

Virtually any abstraction can be expressed graphically. We can give visible

form to ideas, concepts, and diverse complex matters—not only as a for¬
mal charts or graphs but also as idea sketches and exploratory jottings on
napkins set down as they emerge in rough form and begin to take shape
mentally. However, there are obstacles to the use of graphical displays, and
many people are resistant to this mode of communication, for a number
of reasons. Some believe, for example, that graphics, except for quantified
charts and graphs, are a form of art. Not being artists, they reason, we
have no business expressing ideas graphically and are certain to fail at it.
Others, having been chastised at school for drawing idea sketches during
reading or arithmetic class—as if such visual representations had nothing
to do with thinking—may be reluctant to try again. Yet others, perhaps
the majority, consider words and texts—the language of philosophers,
researchers, theorists, and poets—to be on a higher plane than graphics
208 Hansen

and an intellectually privileged means of communication. But the pre¬

dominant reason for avoiding the use of graphics may be that, until now,
no, simple, easy-to-learn graphical language that is universally applicable
to all subjects has been available. Although there are many nonverbal
languages and notation systems that meet the needs of specific profes¬
sionals, they cannot easily show content, process, and other abstractions—
especially in small groups assembled for specific purposes and comprised of
diverse intellects and experience.
Graphic Tools, which provide the mental and problem-solving aids
needed to generate multiple levels of understanding, can help overcome
this resistance. They can help us see the structure of an entity—no matter
how nonroutine or messy—and move us beyond the belief that strange¬
ness, disorder, and chaos are inevitably incomprehensible. Chaos is the
label we put on things we believe we cannot understand; otherwise, given
our analytic abilities, we would surely be able to comprehend them. Using
Graphic Tools, however, enables us to perceive the essence of an issue and
its structure early on, before it is beclouded by the effects of words and
labels. Much of what appears to be inconceivable lies in its newness and
unfamiliarity, and we encounter more and more new, unexpected, and
nonroutine facts and ideas every day. Our typical linear, cause-and-effect
thinking, as well as the inability to think visually, prevent us from per¬
ceiving wholes and processes and recognizing patterns. Cause-and-effect
reasoning is time-bound and linear, whereas chaos can only be understood
by observing phenomena with total openness, without labeling them. A
graphical language can help us see them with a mentally alert mindset
that is yet relaxed enough to detect subtly emerging patterns.

The Graphic Tools (GT)

Shapes are concepts and concepts are shapes.

—Rudolf Arnheim (1969)

The idea of creating a set of tools for graphical displays came to me from
three sources: (1) the discovery that my own mind is able to conceptualize,
209 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

capture, and convey information graphically; (2) curiosity about this phe¬
nomena; and (3) the work of Rudolf Arnheim, professor emeritus of the
psychology of art at Harvard.
My involvement with the issue began in 1973, when 1 joined a federally
funded program as a facilitator-in-training to help community-based teams
design action plans and programs for substance-abuse problems. During
the training, a curricular specialist spoke extensively to each team about
the whole-systems approach to action planning. During meetings, I, as the
facilitator, recorded the teams' ideas and discussions on a flip chart, using
words and shapes. Seeing their work displayed in this way helped members
integrate information and develop their plans. The action plans they
devised were imminently feasible and were implemented appropriately in
their home communities. I was interested to learn that my teams con¬
tinued to work together long after other facilitators' teams had disbanded.
In terms of group dynamics, graphic facilitation had a positive effect on
the cohesiveness of my teams.
In graduate school I had the opportunity to investigate further the
success of my teams, how my own mind worked, and what current theory
and research said about the subject. I came to see, as David Weismann has
pointed out, that

It appears psychologically sound to say that every shape—the circle, square, trian¬
gle, and every variant and combination—possesses its own inner structure. This
structure, although an inexorable consequence of the visually perceivable qualities
of the particular shape, is not visible. In our acts of visual perception we intuit the
presence and operation of these concealed networks of forces; we do not see them.
When we look at an "empty” square, for instance, we are made aware of more than
just its apparent emptiness. (Weismann 1970: 102)

For my dissertation I wrote and field-tested a handbook, "How To Use

Graphic Tools For Thinking, Planning and Problem Solving." Figure 8.4
illustrates the six Graphic Tools© I developed and shows various applica¬
tions for each of them.
Each of the six GTs has a different shape: circle or curvoid, square with
right angle, square with curved corners, triangle, line, point, and fuzz.
210 Hansen

Circle or Curvoid Square-square corners

expresses a whole; contains text: Informatton
pronouns: it, tdot law, policy, rules, descriptions Q
nouns: tiling, product,
Q Q Cl\ 5cne s Q
item, person, group;
abstractions: idea, Square-round corners
tdougdt,entity, system, contains entitles;
problem, cordition. represents context,
subject, entity, trait v._^ . situation, setting;
social issue: crime, wort? blfi5'D24 environment
Triangle Line
functions:
compare,
aids analysis
A functions:separate,
divide; delineate; sdcw
boundary; connect, linfo Pa rf
clarify 3 aspects timeline; contnuum; ^cxiotJ
structure a 3-part bsue sdow direction: lead to, _
triggering words:
comparable to, similar to,
AS. go towards; indicate
cause-effect Or pre-existing
if.., fden condition; arrows; loops, '—
curves
9
Point lpoviEp. Fuzz or Fuzzy Idea
function: - functions: representemerging
focus, get attention,
emphasize; differentiate a [Link] tdougdt,
incomplete idea; issue needing
items witdin a series, bulllet i __m — clarification and structure; emerging
listed items; info-poster, sued ~r ^ intellectual material
as "open' and ’meeting room' ^ ■*—- triggering words: confusing
triggering words: pdrases unclear, muddled, complex
wild Ide word point deyl and
I006I_
&
Combination(s)
groupings of 2 or more GT
necessary to sdow fde wdoie. complex matter;
f u nefions: sdow wdoles & parts & settings;
diagram, a situation; construct a model or
a mandala; give visible structure; sdow multiple
perspectives: mix concrete & abstract notions

Figure 8.4
The six Graphic Tools. The lower panel shows how two or more tools are combined to
illustrate complex situations and ideas.
211 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

Each shape represents a different basic concept or function. Usually, GTs

are used in combination to express an idea or concept. Just as words make
up sentences, individual GTs used in combination convey more complex
ideas, reveal relationships, and capture the formation of ideas and
thoughts. The possible variations achievable by using different combina¬
tions are virtually infinite. The purpose of GT, and of most graphical lan¬
guages, is to communicate to an audience nonverbally and immediately.

Circle or curvoid
• Characteristics: curvilinear edge with continuous or broken line; starts
and ends at same point

• Represents: wholeness, an element, a system or subsystem, a concept,

possibly something not yet clearly defined or labeled

■ Function: Enclose an area; set a boundary; locate elements as internal,

external, or span a boundary

• Application: an element for constructing a diagram, display, or model

Square with right-angle corners

■ Characteristics: rectangle or square with ninety-degree corners

■ Represents: a container for information, facts, policy, legislation, and so on

• Function: contain text; describe a relationship between elements; is

located between elements

■ Application: an element to construct a diagram, a display, or a model

Square with round corners

• Characteristics: rectangle or square with rounded corners

• Represents: setting, situation, condition, location, environment, context

• Functions: contain or hold the element, system, concept, or unknown in

a place (temporarily or permanently); indicate location

■ Application: an element to construct a diagram, a display or a model

212 Hansen

Triangle
■ Characteristics: three sides that end at the three angles; three sides of
equal length (an equilateral triangle); two sides of equal length (an iso¬
sceles triangle); a triangle created by three intersecting lines that extend
beyond the angles

■ Represents: three aspects of something

■ Functions: as a point of departure for analysis, for thinking, comparing,

and contrasting three aspects of an entity; an extended-sides triangle to
provide structure for analysis, comparison, description

■ Applications: an element to construct a diagram, a display, or a model;

with addition of horizontal lines, indicates hierarchical nature of an entity;
also shorthand for an organization chart

Line
• Characteristics: straight, horizontal, vertical, diagonal, curved, continuous,
broken, loops, spirals, various thicknesses; two or more lines make an
arrow

■ Represents: connection, link, direction, boundary, separation

■ Functions: connect entities, systems, and so on.; link; show feedback or

feedforward path or loop; separate; divide; emphasize

■ Applications: an element to construct a diagram, display, or model. Hori¬

zontal line: underline the category in a list of items; represent a contin¬
uum (quantities, degrees, etc.) or a time line. Vertical line: separate lists;
separate major categories of items; strike a point in time on a horizontal
timeline. Horizontal and vertical lines: timelines, continua, organization
charts, matrices and grids, an axis, vertical plus horizontal lines that are
the basis of a chart; indicate direction in space or time.

Point
• Characteristics: small, medium, large; simple, complex; ornate, decorative,
textured; single or multiples; can be any of the previous GTs used singly or
213 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

in combination; a sign or label enlarged and used with words considered a

point

■ Represents: a point in time

■ Functions: focus, draw attention, make a point, emphasize; code similar

items; a sign or a poster

■ Applications: as bullet for each item in a series or a list; to call attention

to one or more items of a series in text; as a sign or label when the point
contains words (e.g., "stop,” "meet here,” etc.)

Fuzz
• Characteristics: dark, scribbled lines; a blur, blob, or blotch; dark core
with shaded periphery

■ Represents: unknown, unlabeled; emerging concept, idea, or notion;

undeveloped or unexplored entity; obscure, indistinct, dim

■ Functions: a mark for an unknown or emerging entity intended to be

clarified

■ Applications: to externalize an idea, issue, etc., not yet defined, with a

mark or symbol while identifying aspects of an issue

Combinations
■ Characteristics: two or more GTs

■ Represents: Complex entities, many-parted problems; stages or phases;

evolution; changing nature of an issue through time; multiple perspectives,
differing points of view; different relationships; abstracted and simplified
tangibles; concretized abstractions

■ Functions: Describe complex wholes more completely by showing struc¬

ture, connection, and relationships; clarify

■ Applications: mind maps that show graphically how various ideas and
concepts are related; diagrams; models; concept development; organiza¬
tion charts; graphic outliners, and organizers; function maps; project and
planning schemes; mandalas; medicine wheels; decision trees; hierarchical
214 Hansen

diagrams; nested arrangements; idea sketches such as a business concept or

entrepreneurial idea; represent visually structure, order, relationships of
information or knowledge

The Palette
The palette is the surface on which a graphical display is drawn. Unlined
paper, such as a sketch pad, a stack of bond or newsprint, a four- or five-
feet-high sheet of newsprint ten feet or more long hung on the wall (for
group work), or, of course, the ubiquitous napkin—all work well as tabulae
rasae. Sketches using GT can be drawn free form on paper as ideas unfold
or more systematically.

Graphic Models

The Graphic Tools constitute a visual language that can be used to con¬
struct a model or a diagram. The content of the model comes from the
individual's or group's knowledge of the entity to be modeled. That con¬
tent might include, for example, the factors influencing restructuring of a
company, integration of two agencies or departments into one, an entre¬
preneur's vision of a business, or the components of a complex project. An
example of a graphic model incorporating systems concepts is shown in
figure 8.5.
Individuals who are visual thinkers might already have a general image
of the entity in mind and can use GT to reproduce it, adding new pieces
and refining details. Such people—because they can readily accept that a
particular shape represents something or conveys a particular class of in¬
formation (such as a concept)—will probably find it quite easy to learn a
graphical representational language. Others may take some time to become
accustomed to it. Although people who are verbal (i.e., use language flu¬
ently) can recall images from the past—a mother's face, the illustration in
a much-loved children’s book, or a schoolyard—they have a hard time
imagining or visualizing something that hasn't existed before.
215 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

Figure 8.5
An Example of a Systems Model Using Graphic Tools.
216 Hansen

During the meeting or meetings the model will unfold as the individuals
or the group contribute information and ideas. A graphic, conceptual model,
or a meta-model created with GT can indicate a total system, its context,
operations, activities, information pathways, internal or external restraints
or controls, and states (past, present, future, desired). As the model con¬
tinues to develop and is enriched with visual and textual information, the
group (or individual) will recall and better understand subtle aspects of the
content seen earlier but not identified. Words and phrases suggesting ways
to remedy flaws or add components will come to mind as group members
continue to look at the model. And, because the graphic model is non¬
linear, such new or recalled information can be immediately added to the
developing model. A particular model may look like the generic example
in figure 8.5 or take on the dynamic look of graffiti, a work in process.
A model in progress is likely to be a series of approximations, each one
incorporating more relevant information and evolving until the final form
emerges. As the model develops and its structure is made visible, what was
thought to be highly complex and disordered content somehow becomes
manageable, and viewers' understanding deepens. New points of view are
inspired by what has already been added to the diagram, and more of
what is known is integrated into the model. New information is placed
where it fits best, instead of being forced into tiny spaces between the
lines, as in words-only, linear formats. With a visual model thus formed
and available for continuous review, an individual, or a group, can clarify
ideas and order knowledge. Strategies for action arise naturally from being
able to see the whole—its structure, context, internal and external forces,
connections among components, and so on. A group's productivity and
cohesion are enhanced, and members feel satisfied by seeing before them
the visible distillation of their ideas and efforts.

Using Graphic Tools in Groups

Drawings, paintings, and other similar devices serve not simply to translate finished
thoughts into visible models, but are also an aid in the process of working out solutions.
—Arnheim (1969: 129)
217 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

A number of management theorists have studied the ways successful work

groups produce good results. One study by Michael Doyle and David
Straus (1982) emphasizes the roles that are essential for a productive
meeting. Two of their functional roles—facilitator and recorder—are par¬
ticularly relevant to our discussion. I have combined the two functions in
the graphic facilitator, the person who draws information from members of
the group, clarihes concepts and ideas, checks back continuously to ensure
accuracy, provides feedback on the group process, and so on. This person
functions just as other kinds of facilitator do, except for using Graphic
Tools—along with key words—to record what members have to say about
the problem. Wide sheets of paper six to twelve feet long (e.g., a roll of
newsprint or bond paper) hung on a wall in two or three layers accom¬
modate the wealth of information, impressions, thoughts, and experiences
that group members generate. The large sheets probably minimize the
possibility that group members will self-censor their participation. As one
client said, "Seeing my ideas written on extra-large paper prompted my
thinking to expand.” Whether an individual or a group is building a
model, large rolls of paper works best.
In meetings that do not use Graphic Tools or another system of
nonlinear graphic facilitation, the comments or perceptions of group
members that are expressed out of sequence can easily be lost. A graphic
information-management and design process, however, can accommodate
members' inputs whenever they come and place them on the model where
they seem to fit best at the moment. It can also use graphical notation to
integrate an array of diverse perspectives that enrich and expand the
group's understanding of a problem.
It is important to begin notations for the model well to the right of the
sheet, to allow for the addition of information that comes to mind out of
sequence. Another helpful technique for recording ideas and information
without knowing exactly where they belong is to use 3x5 index cards
or Post-It Notes. For example, if the group has not yet determined the ul¬
timate location of a particular entity or subsystem, writing it on a card or
small note and sticking it tentatively where it seems to belong adds flexi-
218 Hansen

gfJ3 3-d model

sculpture
relief
concrete

pictorial
photograph symbols

illustration
drawing

image
related
graphic

concept graphic
related symools
graphic

A
arbitrary
graphic

a durable
covering definition
for the description
human foot
verbal
symbols

shoe noun
label

abstract

Figure 8.6
Abstract and Concrete Ways to Represent Objects (from Wileman 1980).
279 Graphic Tools for Thinking, Planning, and Problem Solving

bility to the model and prevents loss of the idea. In a graphic, nonlinear
process of continuous insights, thinking sequentially is neither required
nor desired. Ideas should flow freely, bouncing in any direction and land¬
ing on the model wherever the group thinks they belong. The graphic
notation technique can be seen, in effect, as a form of visual brain¬
storming—or mental graffiti!

Summary and Conclusions

You can observe a lot by just watching.

—Yogi Berra

The obvious paradox of this paper is that in it I attempt to describe in

words the essence of a graphical language and the techniques of creating
visual displays that can serve a variety of purposes. Because we ordinarily
think of words as describing concrete reality more accurately than visual
symbols, the idea represented in figure 8.6, may surprise some readers. The
chart ranks pictorial, graphic, and verbal symbols on a concrete-to-abstract
scale (from top to bottom). It indicates that words are themselves abstract
symbols. In fact, it shows that graphic images are really less abstract and
more concrete than words.
My hope for this essay, therefore, is threefold: (1) to show that, while
words are valuable tools, graphic information is also good information; (2)
to introduce an easy-to-learn system of incorporating simple graphic shapes
into thinking and planning processes; and (3), perhaps most important, to
convince the reader that we need to end the separation between verbal
and graphic ways of thinking.

Note

1. Graphic Tools is a registered trademark of Yvonne Hansen.

References

Ackoff, Russell L. 1981. The second industrial revolution. Paper presented at a seminar on
the new age of systems thinking at San Jose State University School of Business.
220 Hansen

Albarn, Keith, and Smith, Jenny Mial. 1977. Diagram: The Instalment of Thought. London:
Thames and Hudson.

Alexander, Christopher. 1964. A Pattern Language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Arnheim, Rudolf. 1969. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California. Press.

Boulding, Kenneth E. 1969. The Image. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Dondis, Donis A. 1973. A Primer of Visual Literacy. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Doyle, Michael, and Straus, David. 1982. How To Make Meetings Work—The New Inter¬
action Method. New York: Jove Books.

Dreyfuss, Henry. 1972. Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic

Symbols. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hansen, Yvonne M. 1989. A formative evaluation study: Development of a graphic

handbook to promote visual thinking in adults. Unpubl. Ph.D. diss. Santa Barbara: The
Fielding Institute.

Kepes, Gyorgy. 1965. Introduction. In Education of Vision, G. Kepes, ed. New York:
George Brazillier.

Learning Organization Digest (LOD). (For information, send e-mail to majordomo@

[Link] with the message INFO LEARNING-ORG.)

Norman, Donald A. 1983. Some observations on mental models. In Mental Models, Dedre
Gentner and Albert L. Stevens, eds. Hillsdale, N.J: Erlbaum Associates.

Senge, Peter M. 1991. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.
New York: Doubleday.

Sless, David. 1981. Learning and Visual Communication. New York: John Wiley.

Stankowski, Anton. 1991. Visual Presentation of Invisible Processes. Teufen, Switzerland:

Arthur Verlag.

Stanley, Dick. 1996. Finding order in the midst of chaos. Austin American-Statesman, June
9, Bl: 4.

Taylor, David A. 1995. Business Engineering with Object Technology. New York: John Wiley.

Tufte, Edward R. 1989. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, Conn.:
Graphics Press.

Weismann, David L. 1970. The Visual Arts as Human Experience. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall.

White, Jan. 1980. Graphic Idea Notebook: Inventing Techniques for Designing Printed Pages.
New York: Watson-Guptill.
9 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

Hal Thwaites

In this chapter I describe a biocybernetic approach to information design

that can be applied to such emerging high-density, three-dimensional
visual communications media as three-dimensional high-definition televi¬
sion (3-D HTV), virtual reality (VR), virtual worlds, 3-D IMAX and SOLIDO
films, and holography. The methodology of information design presented
here was originated by Dr. Miroslav Malik (1976) and developed over a
twenty-year period of research and teaching. It incorporates theories
from the fields of neurocybernetics, artificial intelligence, and expert
systems and embodies some of the first guidelines for developing three-
dimensional systems software. I point to the inherent dangers of informa¬
tion overload, information-cascade break-up, and interruptions that are
likely to occur if we simply transfer the information design practices of
traditional media to 3-D design. In conclusion, I discuss 3-D information
design practices we need to follow over the next decade.

From earliest times human artists have sought to capture the notion of
space in two-dimensional images. The creators of the cave paintings at
Lascaux and Altamira used a primitive method of portraying distance: they
drew figures in different sizes, making the nearest animals larger and
showing those in the distance as smaller. In one painting, the animal
fleeing from the hunting scene is drawn over and over again in smaller
222 Thwaites

and smaller versions to illustrate its increasing distance from the hunters.
Sometimes dimensions of space are suggested by overlapping one figure
over another. These techniques or spatial cues appear in the art of many
civilizations—for example, the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Mayan—some¬
times creating added spatial effects with different colors (for example,
reserving black for backgrounds and gold for the foreground). Greek and
Roman art reveals that artists had a vague notion of perspective, which
they used not as a spatial cue in flat art but as an architectural tool for
planning structures and for sculpting. In Chinese culture, a long contin¬
uum of tonal spatial cues expresses the space in a picture through different
shades of ink or watercolors.
Thus our 1990s fascination with creating the third dimension in two-
dimensional space is nothing new. It extends from the prehistory of
painting, to the time of early stereoscopes, into the developing new realm
of virtual reality (VR). The notion of 3-D has always implied more "real"
or "lifelike" representations of the world, because human perceptions are
oriented within the three-dimensional space that surrounds our bodies
(Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982, De Jonge 1967). Today's efforts to
heighten our mediated experiences by perfecting spatial-imaging systems
continue an ancient quest.
In the 1990s 3-D is the current buzz-word, even though not all that's
promoted as 3-D is actually stereoscopic in nature. Three-dimensional com¬
puter graphics abound on television; 3-D modeling is used in environ¬
mental design and is applied in many technical and scientific fields—such
as the medical imaging techniques that give physicians a "more real" look
inside the body. The concept of 3-D is even utilized in a theory of human
memory (Pribram 1991). Three-dimensional models of human thinking are
indeed ubiquitous. However, we should also regard them with a certain
caution. The current 3-D media vogue could be just another temporary
surge if, as has happened in the past, information design concepts are not
applied to the software and content of three-dimensional artworks and
productions.
223 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

The widespread acceptance and application of three-dimensional media

technologies (3Dmt) in the mass media have always presented a challenge
to researchers and producers. Whereas 3-D was first seen as a gimmick
added to conventional media to thrill and excite the public, it has since
been applied to create more accurate representations of reality. Many
current 3-D technologies add critical information cues to actual images to
form meta-realities that make visible phenomena or experiences we cannot
perceive naturally. More recently, innovators in the field of virtual reality
have learned to create artificial environments and worlds that may exist
only in our imaginations.

Information Design

There is a substantial difference between the technological, psychophysio-

logical, and semantic (content-related) factors that create 3-D media art
pieces or programs and the factors that elicit viewers' perceptions of three
dimensions. What sometimes amounts to a small, or negligible cue from
the point of view of the author/producer (i.e., the cinematographer, artist,
or holographer) may be the paramount reason why a piece delivers a
high or low 3-D information impact to viewers, or fails to affect them at
all. The scale of importance of 3-D cues from the viewpoint of artists or
producers and viewers may, therefore, be entirely different; moreover, the
specific technological requirements of each 3-D medium may result in yet
a third hierarchy of importance. These differences necessitate an informa¬
tion design approach specifically geared to the 3-D visual technologies that
produce media artworks.
Our information design approach was first developed for programming
film and television programs and holographic shows in 1973, after a series
of professional development seminars Dr. Malik gave at the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation in Montreal. It was subsequently published as a
handbook, first in French (Malik 1976) and more recently in English (Malik
and Thwaites 1993). The seminars were later given at various research and
broadcasting centers in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
224 Thwaites

The approach defines information design as the organization of informa¬

tion to achieve preconceived goals; it uses principles and theories from
biocybernetics and psychophysiology and combines them with the tradi¬
tional protocols of communications-media production (Malik and Thwaites
1987). As a discipline, information design is a systemic approach that
results in a framework (or skeleton) of the contents to be expressed
through the particular 3-D medium. The systematization of the content is
the design, which the author of the software brings into being through a
creative process very similar to that employed by novelists, composers,
filmmakers, videographers, or painters. Essentially, what we are describing
here is artistic expression.
The design may be the output of the hardware and the accompanying
program, in which case the software is really an extension of the machine.
It may also result from the requirements of the environment (educational,
military, industrial) and follow the strict discipline or procedures normal to
those environments. Or it may be the creation of the user, which requires
an information design that accommodates a high level of interactivity and
is very user-friendly.
Information is defined as energy and as a process with catalytic charac¬
teristics. The emphasis should be on the process and on the catalytic
characteristics rather than on energy, since information is not pure energy.
It has a material core in the information source, the transmission con¬
ditions (technology), and the receiver (a biological entity), and it behaves
during the process partially as physical matter and partially as a stress
wave. Understanding information in this sense helps us see that the factor
of time can be extremely important: stretching or condensing the process
may completely change the semantics of the information (meaning/
content), and different time scales (geological, biological, electronic) may
have an immense influence on the information chain and its effect on
the receiver. The notion of trajectory also requires us to think in terms of
navigation or streaming, which in human terms is hodology (i.e., the study
of spatial orientation within real or imagined virtual space).
225 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

Information ^ Transmission Responding

Source ^ Conditions —^ Receiver/s

3DTV, film room, cinema individual,

hologram, VR theater, exhibit group, audiences

Figure 9.1
The Three-dimensional Information Chain in its Simplest Form.

Our research at the 3Dmt Center in Montreal has centered on this

systems approach to three-dimensional media from a biocybemetic view¬
point. The field of biocybernetics focuses on how the human sensory
system responds to and processes information and on the impact of
information on the receiver/audience. Our principal concern is the indi¬
vidual, either the observer or the creator of the media program. The in¬
formation process or information chain has, in its simplest form, three parts
(as shown in figure 9.1): an information source, transmission conditions,
and the receiver and his or her response.
Each part of the 3-D media event (the program itself, the space and
conditions by which it is perceived, and the person(s) perceiving it) may
contain pieces of the final message. If any part of the information chain is
altered, the information itself is changed. The incoming information acts
as a catalyst to other mental processes, which occur in the receiver's brain
as a result of the processing and storage of earlier information and can
thus affect the overall impact of the presentation. As 3-D media become
more sophisticated and interactive, paying attention to the information
chain and the information design of the software/hardware interfaces will
become more important and have a major influence on their success
(Malik and Thwaites 1990). The increased time and budgetary constraints
often placed on 3-D media projects leave little room for costly experiments
and wasted resources.
An information chain exists in a certain time and space, but the times in
which information is produced and perceived have very different axes.
People working in traditional media are very aware of production time (the
time needed to plan, organize or structure, and produce certain segments
226 Thwaites

of a complex of information), as well as of transmission time (the air time

in television, screening time for film). The least-known time element is
perceptual time. The intervals between biological information input and
information perception are in the millisecond range. In the past, these
tiny segments of time had little or no meaning. However, in the develop¬
ment of large successive complexes of information—particularly in three-
dimensional media works (film, television programs, VR)—the audience's
perceptual delays can cause a good deal of overlapping of information.
While one piece of information is being processed, the brain cannot pro¬
cess new information of the same range or intensity. Even though short¬
term memory provides for a certain processing delay, a constant stream of
incoming information results in more and more overlapping and less
accurate processing.
Overlaps in information processing are the typical result of an informa¬
tion complex, also called an information cascade. There are two different
kinds of information cascades. In one, receivers (people) are free to attend
to and perceive each piece or part of the information complex one after
another at their own pace (as at a gallery exhibit or when reading a book
or newspaper). This is called a horizontal or linear cascade. Usually viewers
have a great deal of freedom in both their individual speed of perception
and in the order in which they attend to the pieces presented to them.
The second kind of information cascade, called a vertical or structural
cascade, is typified by a fixed succession of pieces of information and a
limited time in which to perceive them. These are the conditions in which
a viewer is presented with the information in a film, television program,
play, or concert). High degrees of overlapping are typical of vertical infor¬
mation cascades. Each piece of information (scene, shot, sequence) is per¬
ceived in a period called perceptual time, which varies across different
people, cultural contexts, and historical periods. In the following sections,
I outline how these differences affect information design practices for vari¬
ous 3-D media and discuss the considerations we need to take into account
to produce successful information designs.
227 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

Three-dimensional Cinematography and Television

Three-dimensional film technology has been in use since its first demon¬
stration at the Paris Exposition of 1890. In the present century, there were
two brief periods of 3-D film boom—the first in 1953 and the second
in 1982—before the recent development of technologies allowing us to
experience 3-D movies that are very different from conventional films.
Widespread public exposure to high-quality 3-D films occurs at the Disney
theme parks—with films such as Magic Journeys, Captain EO, and Muppet
Vision 3D—at special screenings, and at all recent international expositions.
In the summer of 1990, Science North, a museum outside Sudbury,
Ontario, premiered a three-dimensional 70-millimeter film-and-laser ad¬
venture entitled Shooting Star. The film incorporates special in-theater
laser effects that are synchronized with the 3-D scenes to create a unique
viewing experience.
The Imax Corporation of Canada, the world leader in ultra-large screen,
3-D productions, uses IMAX® 3-D and the SOLIDO three-dimensional
system with a domed screen (Naimark 1992). Their films are evidence of
the meta-reality aspect of today's 3-D film experience, for they take us far
beyond the reality of our physical world into totally new experiences. It is
certain that 3-D film technology in its many forms will continue to be a
prominent form of mass entertainment well into the next century.
Significant research on 3-D has also been undertaken in both conven¬
tional television and video-display technology (VDT) and in specialized
applications (Smith 1989). Japanese researchers are developing several 3-D
high-definition systems that may ultimately find their way into our
homes. HDTV technology doubles the video scanning lines from approxi¬
mately 525 to 1050-plus lines, greatly enhancing image definition. (For a
comprehensive historical overview of three-dimensional film and video
systems, see Lipton 1982.)
Three-dimensional cinema and television production use 3-D cues (con¬
vergence, retinal disparity, accommodation, and motion parallax), which
are projected onto an essentially flat surface by manipulating the z-spatial
228 Thwaites

(i.e., the third axis in a three-dimensional rectangular coordinate system).

To perceive 3-D, viewers must overcome their very firm learned response
to flat pictures, in which three-dimensional space is only imagined, that is,
reprocessed from the cerebellum through the hypothalamic region of the
brain to the parietal lobes. This processing is largely an interior process in
which the 3-D cues in the picture are overlaid with our learned responses
to conventional two-dimensional pictures. It is extremely important to co¬
ordinate the size of the picture very closely with the distance of the viewer
from the screen. In these conditions, the increasing depth of the picture's
z-axis will proportionally augment the impact of the spatial information,
especially when it is enhanced by a three-dimensional sound system.

Visual Physiology

Physiological research (Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982; Leventhal 1988;

Derrington 1988) points to the fact that signals from the retinal networks
of the human eye are already highly processed by the time they reach the
cerebellum region of the brain. This preprocessing takes place in the retina
and in the lateral geniculate nucleus, where the exchange of signals leads
to stereoscopic vision, which in turn produces a perception of distance
within a two- or three-dimensional picture (Leventhal 1988, Searle 1984).
Electroencephalograph (EEG) analysis of activity from test subjects' visual
cortex shows that the stereopsis (3-D) signal is not processed separately
from other spatial cues of color, texture, pattern, motion, and shape but is
interwoven into those signals as a part of an information matrix in the
brain (Schiller et al. 1990). Within this matrix, three-dimensional pictorial
space cues activate, at numerous points, larger or smaller indiscriminate
neuron-circuit firings or stress waves (Jubak 1992); because these firings are
indiscriminate, we perceive the impact of 3-D, in psychological terminol¬
ogy, as an emotion. Such cues cause rich and repeated feedback searches
(identifiable within the EEG signal by Fourrier transform analysis) as the
brain continuously struggles to recognize the various z-axes in the scene.
This phenomenon is well known to cinematographers and TV cameramen
229 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

who shoot 3-D as 3-D overkill, that is, overuse of z-axis shots. Because of
some fault in the 3-D image design , or because of the editing, the viewer's
brain "gives up" the notion of three-dimensional reality and perceives the
3-D images only in a sequential, semantic mode.
Electroencephalograph recording also shows that brightness, color, or
shape co-act with the spatial stereopsis signal to produce the perception of
three dimensions. Producers of 3-D have recognized for some time that
reduced image brightness, for example, decreases the effectiveness of a 3-D
image.

Picture Definition

The human eye, working in conjunction with the visual cortex of the
brain, perceives an image not in the symmetrical fashion of the scanning
lines of a TV image but according to certain preferences influenced by the
contrast and visual densities of the image. The eye repeatedly scans an
image in an asymmetrical fashion as the visual cortex of the brain influ¬
ences eye movements to provide a complete series of visual signals of the
image (Alkon 1992). If a two-dimensional picture has strong spatial char¬
acteristics (i.e., z-axis coordinates), the eye immediately spots them and
scans this part of the picture more often. In this way the human visual
system strives to make sense of the added information provided by dis¬
tance cues, shapes, overlaps, and so on. The activity of the brain's visual
cortex (as measured by EEG) increases when such details are present but
decreases as the definition of the picture declines, as it does when a holo¬
graphic image or conventional television or film image is viewed on a large

screen.
Because 3-D pictures are rich in feedback responses from the visual cor¬
tex to the eye—they produce approximately three times as many responses
as two-dimensional pictures do—we need to create a certain minimal level
of definition to ensure that a three-dimensional picture is perceived as an
effective spatial transformation. Viewers' ability to experience transforma¬
tional realism (Pribram 1990) is always somewhat doubtful, because the
230 Thwaites

picture attributes of conventional television work against the perception

that what they are seeing in a 3-D image is indeed three-dimensional. The
perception of realism is a process that grows out of cues such as texture,
polish, and sharp edges (Nagata 1984), along with feedback from the visual
and motor cortexes back to the eye. This results not only in muscular
ocular motions and contractions but also in feedback from the retina to
the columns of cells in the visual cortex that recognize the picture as
“real'' and three-dimensional. Therefore, an image of high definition, in
both film and video media, is a significant factor affecting the viewer's
sensation of realism (Nagata 1984, Kusaka 1990). Both HDTV and 70-
millimeter film formats like Imax and Omnimax have the added definition
and larger image size needed to make them effective three-dimensional
tools for information design.

Image Size

The impact of visual information on the fovea of the human eye (the area
of highest visual acuity) is greatest in a rectangle covering roughly 10 to 15
percent of the retina, an area approximately 6 mm2 to 8 mm2 wide in the
typical viewing distances for a television screen. Seventy percent of the
retinal input and most of the cortical feedback to the eye occurs within
that area of the fovea (Malik and Thwaites 1990, Alkon 1992). Because
cells in the area are so concentrated, the viewer rarely needs to moves his
or her head or eye muscles to see an image from a different point of view.
Quite a different situation exists if the image is three-dimensional. In
this case moving the eyes or changing the viewpoint is essential to spatial
verification of the image. This is a one cause of fatigue for viewers of 3-D
media. In anaglyph three-dimensional (NTSC) TV systems (which use red/
green glasses) or lenticular three-dimensional TV systems, it is not easy for
the user to visually fuse moving images with a large parallax. The wider
picture area of three-dimensional HDTV (16:9 aspect ratio compared to
4:3 for NTSC television) will increase the fusional limits (dynamic range)
of the stereoscopic picture (Nagata 1990, 1989).
231 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

In reality, what happens when we "see” in three dimensions is a coop¬

erative mechanism of the peripheral vision area of the retina and the area
of greatest acuity of fovea. This mechanism mostly channels feedback from
the brain to the retinal area and does not enrich the incoming visual in¬
formation, although in many cases it causes an increase in signal trans¬
mission within the brain (perceived as a stress wave or "emotional effect").
A similar situation occurs when a viewer is exposed to large or domed
film screens (Imax, Omnimax, Solido), whose images occupy more than 30
percent of the retinal area. A large 3-D picture compels the eye to scan not
only many z-axis coordinates but also the corresponding x and y coor¬
dinates and their connections with the z-axes. The apparent size and
depth of a three-dimensional picture or screen therefore play an important
role, not only for scanning the x-y coordinates in an image but also for
combining them with the z coordinates (Ebenholtz 1992). Factors of par¬
ticular importance to image size are movement of the pictorial elements,
especially movements toward the pictorial frame. In these shots, the
peripheral vision field can explore the_image very successfully (Low 1984).
The effectiveness of the large-screen stereoscopic cinematography formats
of Imax, Omnimax, and Solido is largely due to the dynamic fashion in
which they combine three-dimensional cues within areas scanned by the
peripheral-vision—for example, through shots taken from aircraft, camera
dollies, and cranes.
It is important when designing 3-D images to distinguish between
signals from the fovea and signal transmissions to the brain from the area
of peripheral vision. The fovea signal travels directly to the visual cortex of
the brain. The peripheral retinal-vision signal, however, goes through the
corpus calossum to both the visual cortex and the hypothalamus; in the
latter it can cause specific neuron firings or stress waves that could start
emotional reactions. Very often there is also a feedback connection with
the vestibular mechanism, which can cause the viewer physical discomfort
in the form of motion sickness, dizziness, fainting, or nausea. If the picture
contains too many contradictory visual cues for optimal three-dimensional
image perception, the viewer's conflicting emotional responses create a
232 Thwaites

general inhibition of neuron functioning experienced as fatigue. This is

quite a typical response to three-dimensional media productions (Malik
and Thwaites 1990).

Three-dimensional Sound

Human spatial perception is not, of course, limited to one sensory channel

but is a combined effect of cues gained through the perception of audio
and visual information (Martens 1990). The use of a digital sound track
and three-dimensional multiple sound sources can create a total viewing
and listening experience.
The Imax Corporation opened a six-hundred-seat, 3-D-capable theater in
New York City in November of 1994. In the spring of 1995 the company
premiered new film, Wings of Courage, to initiate the theater's Personal
Sound Environment (PSE) system. The PSE provides each member of the
audience a special 3-D viewing headset, which includes liquid-crystal
shutter glasses and stereo audio. The system precisely tailors spatial audio
cues to each location within the 3-D Imax film space, creating a com¬
pletely novel and very visceral effect. However, because spatial sound in¬
formation is processed in the neocortex in different ways than other
stimuli, it can easily conflict with other a sensory effects or cause a viewer
information overload if it is not carefully incorporated into the overall 3-D
information design.

Holography

The spectacular growth of holography, particularly display holography, is

far beyond what Dennis Gabor imagined in 1948 when he sought to
obtain sharper images in electron microscopy. Once its potential was rec¬
ognized, researchers throughout the world began producing impressive
three-dimensional visual images and artworks (Hariharan 1992). The last
two decades have seen a variety of holographic applications, including the
rainbow hologram, multicolor images, white-light holographic stereograms,
233 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

I. Frame Axis II Orthogonals ^"ter'ior[z axisl

interior
III. Diagonals IV. Diagonals[. z'axis 1
exterior a interior

Figure 9.2
The Twenty-eight Axes of a Necker cube That Inscribe Holographic Space.

large format holograms (sizes up to 4 by 6 feet), computer-generated

holograms, holographic video, and a proliferation of embossed holograms.
Holography's method of communication is radically different from that
of 3-D media presented on a flat surface. Because there is no screen or
frame effect, the absence of spatial cues other than those presented within
the holographed scene or object makes a very strong information impact
on the viewer. This medium is principally governed by the laws of scenog-
raphy—the spatial organization and orchestration of an event or medium
(Polieri 1971)—and is realized within the twenty-eight axes of a Necker
cube (figure 9.2). Because the viewer is not seated in a fixed position, and
is often able to move through the holographic space, many of the spatial
cues laboriously created on a two-dimensional flat screen are unneces¬
sary; the viewer experiences 3-D in a hodologic (i.e., way-finding, navi¬
gational) fashion among the separate spatial elements that create the

image.
234 Thwaites

The creator of the image must acknowledge the special role of negative
space (or black background) and use it functionally. The appearance and
disappearance of the object in a holographic space is an integral part of
the perception process (and not a "mistake” as in two-dimensional flat-
screen media). The medium also presents viewers with the opportunity to
interact with the image or three-dimensional object. Because of this
unusual feature, the narrative continuum (story or plot) in a holographic
space is less important than in other 3-D media and may well be an
obstacle to interaction. Nor are realistic images and true colors necessary
within the holographic space; in fact they sometimes decrease the spatial-
information impact, whereas abstract images and artificial colors of high,
precise spectral values can enhance it. Images and objects should flow
easily into and out of the viewers' perceptual field, allowing them to
immerse themselves in the holographic experience to create their own
story and their own interactive relationships.
From a biocybernetic viewpoint, holographic spatial impact can be
created instantly—and lost instantly. Information processing in the brain
consists not of an information cascade (as in the other 3-D media) but of a
series of unconnected information domains and information details that are
important catalysts for memory retrieval. The fact that each of these
domains can be stored in long-term memory separately makes a holo¬
graphic narrative of little use.
What is the neurophysiological basis of the impact of holograms?
Holography is a typical example of the use of projective geometry to create
a moveable horizon in which the viewer's own eyes are a vanishing point,
or camera. The most striking impact of a hologram comes from the fact
that each time the viewer moves his or her eyes or head, the whole picture
slightly changes its projective geometry (Pepper 1989). The picture starts to
be "attached” to the viewer's eyes, a situation that demands a high level of
perceptual participation and feedback from the viewer (moving, turning
the head, etc.).
The consequences of such a perceptual reversal are astonishing. The im¬
age is no longer a carrier of the information impact but instead acts as a
235 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

powerful catalyst. Because the spatial information of the image exists

mostly in the viewer's mind, the pictorial representation can be strikingly
simple but still have a significant visual impact. The brain no longer
demands a fast succession of images or great richness of detail. The size of
the image, however, is enormously important, especially when measured
against the viewer's own (anthropomorphic) size.
Holography also has its limitations, although they are not related to
three dimensionality. One troublesome problem is its wholeness: it is dif¬
ficult to segment the picture, formally or semantically, into several smaller
images. Even a simple story told by a succession of holograms may be
somewhat lacking in structure and continuity. As a medium of informa¬
tion transmission, holography is more like the theater or architecture than
it is like film and television. These considerations will become more im¬
portant as we move toward real-time holographic video. At the present
time, holograms of fairly complex scenes can be computed and motion
sequences can be precomputed and stored on a hard-disc array of a super¬
computer such as the Connection Machine at MIT. About three minutes
of animation can then be played back at about six frames per second.
Although the images are small, they are bright, have high resolution, and
exhibit all the depth cues found in other holograms (St. Hilaire et al.
1990).

Stereoscopic Computer Graphics: Virtual Reality/Virtual Worlds

We can describe the environment of a virtual world as pure information

that the user is able to see, hear, and touch (Bricken 1991). “The differ¬
ence,'' as Bricken says, “is in the design."
At the present time, 3-D computer graphics and virtual reality can best
be compared to the information impact and design of two-dimensional
graphics or animated films. Viewers can perceive a computer-generated
graphical image as an information symbol (or cascade of symbols) much
more easily and quickly than they can perceive the images in realistic
films, still photographs, and videos. Because they can also elicit faster and
236 Thwaites

more numerous visual and spatial responses from viewers—more eye scans,
more numerous and more extensive specific neural firings—these media
can carry a higher density of information and deliver it faster. But, like
other symbols, the information in stereoscopic computer graphics is pro¬
cessed, in large part, in the cerebellum, and viewers' retention of such
symbols is often incomplete or deformed. The information should be
delivered in short batches so as not to overtax the short-term memory
capacity of approximately forty seconds and should provide for ample
perceptual recovery time between segments. As the “space” of computer
graphics systems can be interactive, viewers (users) should have enough
time to verify or complete the spatial cues according to their individual
perceptual ability.
Another advantage of VR is the ease with which viewers can move
between scenes of the virtual worlds, and choose to program their own
worlds and move through them—to whatever degree the software allows.
It is too early to predict that every user of a VR system will artfully create
his or her own software package or usage trajectories, but the concept is
very promising.
Currently most virtual reality systems (and users) are limited to the
processing and graphic-rendering power of the particular computer tech¬
nology employed. Nonetheless, some simulator systems—like those used
for The Loch Ness Expedition created by the Iwerks and Evans and Suther¬
land companies (Robertson 1994) and such advanced special-venue appli¬
cations as the Aladdin attraction at the Epcot Center at Disney World
(Reveaux 1995)—are already able to create the sensation of a more-or-less-
realistic environment. The major critical limitation of virtual reality is the
difficulty of synchronizing the movements of the image and the viewer.
Such synchronization has always strengthened the overall impact of 3-D,
even of primitive 3-D simulations like Laterna Magica and Polyecrans
(Polieri 1963). It is even more desirable in virtual reality systems.
By the early 1990s most information designers understood that virtual
reality was a surrogate metaphysical environment created by communica¬
tions and computing systems (Wright 1990; Rheingold 1991; Heim 1992).
237 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

Since then, the quality of the interactivity in communications media has

improved to the point where virtual realities have become 3-D environ¬
ments in which individual users and audiences can create their own
experiences.
In the research literature on virtual reality/virtual worlds (Bricken 1991;
Brill 1995; Ellis 1991; Heim 1993; Jacobson 1994; Laurel 1991, among
others), an overwhelming consensus has developed about the need to
define and describe the theory and practice of information design for VR.
From our biocybernetic information-design perspective, each art piece
realized as a virtual reality (VR) represents an information complex. How¬
ever, most of its parts (i.e., the information source, transmission condi¬
tions, and the individual receivers and their responses) are provided or
heavily influenced by the users. In a traditional information complex, by
contrast, most of the information load (the information source), is the result
of the individual author's or artist's work; the receiver of the information
has little or no power to alter the syntax and/or form of the information
chain. Virtual reality, however, often combines both types of information
cascades into a meta-complex of horizontal and vertical components (i.e.,
program-provided and user-chosen information). An information design
approach for VR, therefore, can best be compared to the scenographic
mode of thinking employed in creating a multimedia production (Polieri
1971, Laurel 1991).
Within a VR production, the consumer (receiver) becomes an important
part of the art piece and his or her role within the VR domain is that of a
co-creator. The information source does not, of course, disappear; it is
there on a disk or in the computer's memory, but the information in it
becomes specific to every viewer who interacts with it (Jacobson 1994).
Thus a virtual reality experience is highly individual, highly private. In
contrast to the media of mass communications that have given the name
"information age” to the society of the late twentieth century, VR has the
potential to bring people personal creative fulfillment in the twenty-first
century.
238 Thwaites

Modeling the Information Design

The basic assumption of this section is that the information design for
virtual reality must accommodate the biocybernetic framework of the
human user. This calls for the designer to accept the nature and the time-
space axis of the information chain. It also points to the need for a proce¬
dure to evaluate the information domains, bridges, and details of the
software program designed. The biocybernetic approach also requires that
the designer provide a certain degree of structure for the procedures by
which the user progresses interactively within the VR program. The last
point is a delicate one, since it must somehow blend the desire of the
author-artist to lead the user on a previously determined path and the user's
wish to freely explore the different views, avenues, and niches of the program
on his or her own.
For creators it becomes very important to understand the basic design
considerations and cues that will serve as effective building blocks of
virtual reality. These will be far different from the knowledge of traditional
arts (painting, music, film, photography, or television), even though most
virtual reality will use some of the compositional structures of these two-
dimensional, noninteractive media. Moreover, VR designers are unlikely to
be established experts in those artistic disciplines. Their mental framework
is far more likely to be influenced by analog and, especially, digital modes
of thinking.
It is important to remember that digital logic and nonbiological time
sequencing, which are both dominant in writing software, will clash with
the biological capacities of the VR user. Human users will judge the impact
and pleasure of a VR production solely on the basis of their own percep¬
tual systems (Heim 1994). Therefore, the first basic guideline for the artistic
creation of virtual realities is to design the percephial ramifications of space,
tone, distance, spectrum, x-y-z coordinates, and divisions according to the basic
measures of the human body.
In the pioneering exercises of computer graphics, fractals, and video art,
designers often found that the most effective shots were those that
239 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

exploited a single cue to dimension (e.g., distance in the endless spiral of

digital artist Ron Hayes's Tristan and Isolde, spatial proportion in Norman
McLarren's animated film Spheres, and the audio tonal scale in Murray
Schafer's 1977 exploration of the nonbiological domains of digital logic,
World).
From the neuropsychological viewpoint, those exploitations of a single
cue very often created an unusual emotional impact on the brain's neuron
transfers, which makes it appropriate to label them “aesthetic surprises''
(Clynes 1974). On the other hand, an overload of information on the
software side can cause viewers to experience fatigue early in the pre¬
sentation if they are not allowed to pace the program to their own bio¬
logical time frame. This self-pacing attribute can easily be included in VR
programs.
A second consideration for the software designer of VR art pieces is
accommodation of the user. This is most important when creating steps, or
blocks, through which the user must pass in order to continue. Although
there is an easy analogy with the editing schemes of film or television
(film language, television language), virtual reality differs from those media
in possessing two specific facets: multidimensionality and a transhuman
nature. It is a structure that merges computerized and human entities
(Heim 1994). Within a VR experience, the individual user can make the
story flow forward or backward, speed up or slow down. He or she can
reshape time and space, focus on them, stop them, or jump over them at
will. For such a program to be effective, the creator/author must take into
account the rich sequencing possibilities of the design for representing
different directions, times, and proportions. The most effective virtual
reality is like a fluid hologram; it is not frozen in one moment of time
but uses time as a multidimensional element.
The third area of creative consideration stems from the fact that VR is a
private mind space. Its numerous contents, themes, puzzles, fantasies, and
so on can be exploited without censorship, societal evaluation, or moral
and ethical ramifications. Virtual reality can be as wild as the user wants it
to be, as gentle and discreet, as violent, as full of beauty. Since users often
240 Thwaites

do not know in advance where they may be led by the progress of the
program, there is a possibility that more sophisticated VR programs may
influence their health (Traub 1991, Cartwright 1994), patterns of thought,
or associated motor and metabolic behavior. Without a very careful infor¬
mation design strategy, there is no way to evaluate whether these possibilities
will come to pass and whether such influences will be beneficial or harmful.
For the first time, the technologies of virtual reality allow media
designers to externalize the processes of human thought. What was for
thousands of years hidden within the realm of the mind is now exposed
to the laws of digital and analog processing. If a machine can create virtual
landscapes and environments that are similar to the real world and pro¬
duce clones of human beings, the impact of such "neurotemporary"
imaginings will certainly alter human thinking and influence the shape of
new human values.
A final consideration to be aware of is the fact that VR acts as a powerful
catalyst for associated thinking processes. The person and his or her extended
body (DataGlove, DataSuit, VIEWstation) becomes a synchronized hybrid
and will probably eagerly repeat experiences found to be pleasurable. Rep¬
etitions of such states may lead to physiological exhaustion, on one side,
and uncontrollable behavior, on the other. They could also lead to the sort
of addiction or dependence often seen in children who are high users of
video arcade games (Viirre 1994). On the benefit side, the art created by
virtual reality has a strong potential to expand its influence beyond that of
the traditional arts media and, ultimately, become a very important part of
the life of a twenty-first-century person.

Influences of the Information Environment

In most industrial societies the information environment is full of visual

stereotypes and symbols, but spatial cues are relatively few. Nonetheless,
the amount of cortical feedback within people's brains is quite high
(Breitenberg 1973). This cortical feedback is the result of imagining the
spatial information that the environment fails to provide. This situation
241 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

contributes significantly to the large number of barriers and prejudices

mass audiences encounter in three-dimensional film or television system,
especially older anaglyph (red/green filters) technologies. It also explains
why some people feel uneasy when viewing holographic displays. Such
responses are typical of audiences who have been exposed to the sophisti¬
cated “virtual space" of contemporary two-dimensional film and television
programs. It is therefore important for designers of 3-D media not only to
provide clear cues to perspective and spectral density but also to design
movement parallax in a way that allows viewers to easily and quickly
imagine real and deep space within the flat, two-dimensional television or
film screen.
A mass audience exposed to the vast amount of information in a
“virtual" three-dimensional information cascade (e.g., traditional film and
TV) over years or decades develops a very firm and durable perceptual
stereotype that is not easily changed when they see a stereoscopic film or
television presentation. In fact, quite the opposite: audiences seem to pre¬
fer traditional two-dimensional television displays that employ space cues
designed in the usual manner.
Figure 9.3 provides an overview of the diversity of possible three-
dimensional media applications. Although it is not extensive or
technology-specific, the figure outlines the scope and complexity that
three-dimensional information design will need to deal with. Each appli¬
cation of a three-dimensional medium brings with it specific information
design considerations that are dependent on the technology employed. To
communicate effectively with their audiences producers of the software
will need to understand not just how to apply the technology—as was
often the case in the past—but the overall information design process as
well. In all 3-D media the information chain must be respected and taken
fully into account.

Conclusion

The information impact of three-dimensional media on the viewer is dif¬

ferent from that of conventional two-dimensional media. Because they
242 Thwaites

3=0 ftfedfe AppISm^om

Communication Packaged Presentations & Visual Digital Data
TC Databases Processing
Broadcasting Programs Exhibitions

Mass & Specific Mass & Specific Specific & Public Specialized Users
R Mass Audience
Audiences Audience/Users Users

Home-Theater Video Games Right Simulation Gallery CAD/CAM

&
Sports Events Videodiscs Virtual Realities Museum Architecture
Collections
IS Still Pictures Electronic Public Displays Auto Design
Cinema Catalogues
Computer Education Satellite
Graphics Movies International data imaging
Environmental Treasures
Multi-vision Images Medical Imaging

Advertising

Figure 9.3
Current and Potential Applications of Three-dimensional Media. (TC = transmission
conditions; R = receiver; IS = information source)

create more activity in the brain cortex, which is perceived as emotion,

audiences report finding 3-D experiences “enchanting," more exciting
than 2-D presentations, or “nauseating"—depending on the style, form,
and content of the information design. The negative response can result
from feedback to the vestibular mechanism (behind the inner ear), which
is involved in the brain's processing of three-dimensional pictures, espe¬
cially when the peripheral field of vision is employed.
The information impact of three-dimensional computer graphics and
virtual realities is enriched by the addition of interactivity, giving rise to
both neural and spinal information processing that creates a "true life"
hodologic experience in the receiver. With three-dimensional communica¬
tion media presented on two-dimensional surfaces, the major information
impact stems from the careful manipulation of pictorial and aural z-axes,
in which definition (i.e., sharpness) of the image is the paramount factor.
Holographic 3-D information impact, on the other hand, is essentially a
scenographic, theatrical experience in which viewers can experience and
process a number of situations and objects without the inhibition of two-
dimensional space cues.
243 Visual Design in Three Dimensions

In the next decade, as 3-D media become more ubiquitous and the per¬
ceptual stereotypes of the general public created by traditional media
weaken, the role of the three-dimensional information designer will be
increasingly important. Perhaps in the distant future that follows the
shift toward spatial media, someone will look back on the history of the
twentieth century and find that, like the fourteenth, it marked a major
transition. We now sit on the cusp between the old and new media.
Perhaps it is ushering in a 3-D renaissance.

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70 Collaborative Information Design: Seattle's
Modern Odyssey

Judy Anderson

PPv tells people what needs to be done. Ads tell people what to do. Art gives people the
energy and inspiration to do something, based on their own ideas.
—John Koval, “Modern Odysseys"

The question the authors in this book are asking, in various forms, is
What does information design do? And, more importantly, what role do
designers play in the process of communicating information? Do they
simply act as broadcasters of particular information, or can they design
information in a way that actively facilitates the process of communication
and the sharing of knowledge, ideas, and emotions?
In the communication process, when a given source has a message to
convey to other individuals or to the general public, the message is first
encoded and then transmitted to a receiver. In the design profession, this
process usually translates into the client, who defines the message; the
designer, who elaborates on (encodes) the message by giving it form; and
the audience, which receives it and interacts with it. Thus communication
is an interactive process in which each participant informs the others, in
varying degrees, about the problem in order to create appropriate and
workable solutions. These solutions can be manifested in a variety of
forms, from two- and three-dimensional objects (posters, books, infor¬
mation kiosks, etc.) to time-based works (media works for radio television,
live performances, interactive multimedia events, etc.).
248 Anderson

Figure 10.1
The Logo of ARTp, the Artists' Regional Transit project.

In private business settings the information designer's voice and public

responsibility are limited, because the needs and message of the client
predominate. Within a public context, however—where the client is also,
to a great extent, the audience, and vice versa—mightn't the role of the
information designer be much broader and more collaborative?
Collaboration between client and designer, designer and creative team,
audience and client, or audience and designer can take many forms and be
present to different degrees. Collaboration is dynamic, often messy, con¬
frontational, uncomfortable, and chaotic. In the best case, it enriches the
creative process and promotes synergistic work patterns and a product that
is improved by each participant's contribution. In the worst case, it is an
irritant and an obstacle to achievement. Many times, collaboration creates
solutions that reinforce the old adage, “the camel is a horse designed by a
committee.''
Can we design the collaborative process to support the synergistic
aspects of a relationship among participants and avoid the irritating
obstacles? What might be the information designer's role and responsibil-
249 Collaborative Information Design

ity in such a process? Can we structure the collaboration in a way that

supports each individual's expertise while integrating it with the whole?
How can we hear simultaneously the individual's and the group's voices?
As designers we are accustomed to think of collaboration in a business
context, where professionals from related disciplines work together crea¬
tively to solve the client's needs. Several books celebrating the usefulness
of collaboration as a problem-solving process—often between architect and
artist—describe the methods used and document the solutions arrived at.
In the public sector, this kind of creative collaboration is supported (and to
a large degree mandated) around the country by "1% for Art'' programs,
which specify that all publicly funded capital-improvement projects must
include and fund the participation of art and artists. The mandate thus
provides opportunities to integrate the informational and communications
insights of artists and designers at an early stage of planning.
In the Northwest in particular, design teams have developed a useful
format for these collaborations. The core of the team—artists, architects,
urban designers, planners, engineers, and others—collaborate with mem¬
bers of the community, as well as with representatives from the public
agency involved, to produce solutions that are then integrated into a
project's design. In this context, the designer, first as an artist, and sec¬
ondly as a citizen, enjoys a greater sense of autonomy—and perhaps a
deeper sense of responsibility to the community—than when working
in the private milieu. The notion of design in this context is expanded in
the direction of art• and, although this is an artificial distinction, using it
expands the role of the "designer/artist" in the eyes of the public and
government planners.
Although at times team design is an unwieldy process, it often results in
workable and imaginative solutions. It is easy to see the effectiveness of
such solutions, and the contribution each team member has made to
them, when they are embodied in tangible, physical objects (e.g., build¬
ings, parks, public sculptures). But what about information, which com¬
municates knowledge, ideas, and feelings, which don't exist in physical
space? Of course, once defined, information—encoded in words, images,
250 Anderson

Figure 10.2
The Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quarter. The quartet performed its Bus Horn
Concerto at the opening festivities of Modern Odysseys.

symbols, sounds, and so on—is broadcast in some printed, electronic, or

three-dimensional form. The information designer thus plays a role in
defining those informational components and integrating them into such
physical products as signs, environmental graphics, printed materials,
electronic kiosks, and so forth.
Are there also other ways for the informational designer to contribute to
the collaborative process? Ways that create more process-based, less
product-oriented solutions that both invite people to interact with the
information and to share their own knowledge, ideas, and feelings? The
Modern Odysseys, a public art project in the Seattle region, is one model
for expanding the role of the information designer in a way that encour¬
ages collaboration with members of the public.
251 Collaborative Information Design

Modern Odysseys: Heroic Journeys We Make Every Day

A collective work designed to stimulate thinking and discussion about transportation issues among
the public.

In the fall of 1991 1 was chosen by Metro, Seattle's transportation agency,

as the first artist member of the Regional Transit Project, a three-county
plan for creating a faster, more efficient, more reliable regional transit
system. The project, if realized, would become one of the largest public
works systems in the United States. My commission was funded by Metro's
public art program, which designated 1 percent of project expenditures for
work by artists. As an artist who also works as a graphic/information de¬
signer, I was expected to help Metro communicate issues relating to trans¬
portation and the transit project to the general public. At the time, Metro's
managers were having a difficult time translating their complex physical
plans into understandable images, charts, and diagrams; they hoped that
an artist might be able to accomplish what Metro's own design, planning,
and communications teams had not been able to do. Funds were set aside
to produce a "product” that would achieve this specific objective.
After spending several months meeting with the architects, planners,
communication teams, and administrators, I realized that what Metro
thought they wanted me to do—create images that could be incorporated
into advertising and informational brochures—made little sense. Other
designers and illustrators were already doing this. The kinds of pub¬
lications used by Metro to communicate the issues related to the Regional
Transit Project were very technical, containing vast quantities of maps,
charts, graphs, and statistics. Dry in tone and produced in an unadorned
official format, readers not accustomed to technical information found
them difficult to understand and not very interesting. The work coming
out of Metro's advertising agencies, on the other hand, was slickly pro¬
duced and tried to entertain and persuade the public to take particular
actions (e.g., ride the bus or carpool).
My idea was more radical. It was to use artists to translate to the public
the experience of transportation in our lives in a way that encouraged
2S2 Anderson

people to take part in discussions of related issues. Could we, I asked

myself, create solutions that would incorporate citizens into the work, not
just tell them what we wanted them to hear?
The underlying premise about the impact of transportation was that we
are all connected by the way we travel. We argued that, because our indi¬
vidual decisions about getting to work—whether to drive a car, take a bus,
or ride a bicycle—affect everyone else, we need to work together to find
appropriate solutions for the region's future transportation system. The
challenge for me was to find ways to incorporate a wide variety of indi¬
vidual thoughts, ideas, and information and present them in a format that
invited public interaction and discussion. Further, I wanted to interview
people as they interacted with the artworks and use their responses as the
subject matter of a second series of works. The project would then become
a dynamic, ongoing process that reinforced the premise that the choice
of transportation was a basic element of our interconnectiveness as a
community.
From the outset, it was clear to me that artists should not simply dupli¬
cate in a different form what Metro's communication and public relations
specialists and paid advertising professionals were already doing. Instead
they should work at the fringes of art, using its communication potential
in a more suggestive, experiential way. The artists' works should be inte¬
grated into Metro's public relations and advertising efforts but also be sep¬
arate from them, in order to create different kinds of associations. Instead
of being officious and technical or slick, the art works would be high in
content, low in production quality, and diverse in nature, with all the
authenticity inherent in art. Moreover, because our funding was from the
1% for Art mandate, the project itself should be a work of art—not applied
design or ''propaganda'' from Metro. It was a formidable challenge. It
meant getting the public to first think about the issues in a broad way and
then become involved in carrying out the work.
I presented the preliminary idea to Metro with a request that the tar¬
geted funds be used to develop a comprehensive plan for the project that,
253 Collaborative Information Design

tU puyi VClMpUVH V*. "T sJXf\J

TDD Users 684-1855

Custom Bus Service 604-1743
Employer Subsidy Program 684-1716
I^Emf 'ovment Hotline 684-1313
iOD Users 684-1738

Modern
Odysseys:
Heroic
Journeys
We Moke
Everyday

"Usee! to be, ya hadda lake o canoe.

A canoe!" He poked his bony finger into my
[Link] for effect. A sign flashed past: "124
miles." He sucked in o big, rattling breath
"You couldn't walk Everythin' was bush
Brambles Coupla bear trails, that's it. It'd
lake days to fight yer way ten feel. Evert the
Indians didn't wolk But in a canoe, you'd
gltiiiiide over the water like you was flying
So easy, so quiet, so slip'ry .. * He slammed his
fist art my thigh. "A CANOE5

Call the Voice Box

5482787
B'owgNf K\ you by Arnm' Tr om*t

Figure 10.3
Bus Stop with Telephone Number of the ARTp Voice Box. Stories and limericks about
travel were posted at all bus stops.
254 Anderson

if realized, would necessitate additional funding. With their approval,

I assembled a lead team—a writer, a composer, and a video artist—to work
with me in planning the budget, scope, and objectives of ARTp, the
Artists' Regional Transit project. This lead team, called the Mass Trans¬
formers, later served as curators of the collective work, overseeing and
coordinating collaborations among artists, distributing the works to a mass
audience, and creating additional works that integrated public responses.
The team developed a theme, "Modern Odysseys: Heroic Journeys We
Make Every Day"; a visual identity, in the form of a logo (figure 10.1) and
animated figure; and a musical score. Each participating artist would "tag"
his or her work with these visual and audio tags in order to give additional
identity and cohesiveness to the project as a whole.
The transit authority, the mayor, and the commissioners approved and
funded the plan at a wild planning session attended by the media. We
presented our proposal as a performance, incorporating video, radio, print,
and live improvisational elements in the style we hoped the final piece
would assume. In hindsight, I think our idea was approved, in part, because
public officials were swept up in the experience of the performance. And,
because it was funded by 1% for Art funds, they might have been more
forgiving of this nebulous thing called art than of a comparable idea pre¬
sented as advertising—which it wasn't—or public relations—which it
wasn't. They didn't know quite what it was but knew that the plan, and
its relationship to the other, more traditional efforts of public outreach,
were well thought through. Most of all, they realized that they needed to
get the public more actively involved in the transit project.

The organization of ARTp integrated the individual work of approximately

fifty writers, dramatists, poets, videographers, and other artists working in
a variety of media. Some were National Endowment for the Arts fellows;
some were just beginning their careers; and still others were children. The
Mass Transformers combined the individual works and distributed them to
the public as a collective work.
255 Collaborative Information Design

The Mass Transformers collaborated in a number of ways: helping create

artworks, coordinating the distribution of work publicly, and facilitating
collaborative opportunities between artists and members of the public.
Each member of the lead team had a clearly defined role that drew on his
or her individual skill as a visual designer, writer, composer, or video-
grapher. Throughout the nine months of creating the work, weekly meet¬
ings were held; during the performance and distribution phases, meetings
were held two or three times a week. As the lead artist, I directed the col¬
laboration, making sure that each individual was clear about his or her role
and taking overall responsibility during every phase of the project. The
collaborative process seemed to work best when each member had a clearly
defined role that maintained its separateness within the whole. Where
lines of responsibility became blurred, tensions arose.
The Mass Transformers also created numerous opportunities for col¬
laborations among the individual artists. They held meetings at which
individual artists presented sketches of their work in progress; several col¬
laborations between artists resulted from ideas presented at these meetings.
At one meeting the Documentarians (the archives unit) showed a video
work called "ARTp at Midterm," a twenty-minute collage of interviews
with the ARTp artists that was a very powerful expression of the creative
process among writers, visual artists, and performance artists.
During the fall of 1992, ARTp presented live performances throughout
the region at street corners, shopping malls, and schools. Each perfor¬
mance was an ensemble of individual presentations related to the themes.
Books of stories about transportation were distributed at coffee-houses,
laundromats, beauty parlors, community centers, grocery stores, libraries,
and schools. Videographers and journalists interviewed the public. Chil¬
dren were commissioned to work with adult artists and musicians to create
collaborative works, and short stories were posted at all bus stops. Simul¬
taneously, radio stations and commercial and cable television channels,
particularly the sports network, aired audio and video artworks as public
service spots. Radio stations interviewed the artists about their work, tele¬
vision stations and newspapers covered the performances.
256 Anderson

We shocked shoppers at suburban malls by bringing in dancers dressed

and body-painted in blue; they moved slowly through each performance
space interpreting the notion of travel as kinetic sculpture. We opened
Modern Odysseys at the Westlake Center, Seattle's downtown outdoor
gathering place with a bus-horn concerto utilizing four saxophones and
two buses (figure 10.2). We put writers on buses at opposite edges of the
region and had them travel to meet at the center and write stories about
their adventures en route. We videotaped and interviewed the audiences
during the performances to get their input and responses to the ideas
about transportation and the Modern Odysseys project.
Stories and limericks about travel were posted at all bus stops with the
telephone number of the Voice Box, a free interactive art piece (figure
10.3). The artists creating their work in public spaces wore badges and
distributed stickers featuring the Voice Box telephone number, and the
Mass Transformers placed teaser ads giving the number in the personal
sections of the daily and weekly newspapers. The Voice Box provided
callers with three choices: they could listen to messages from the artists,
leave a message, or listen to messages left by other callers. The Voice Box,
which was constantly revised and updated during the nine months the
work was created and performed, allowed the public to become active and
ongoing participants in the work.
The Mass Transformers concluded the work with two pieces: a printed
tabloid insert for the evening newspapers and a video for broadcast on
television (figure 10.4). These final pieces, a collage of artists' works and
public responses, created one final, grand collective work. In addition, the
Documentarians produced a half-hour documentary film about ARTp. This
film, which was premiered at the Seattle Art Museum, continues to be
broadcast on television and shown in various public venues. It communi¬
cates the powerful experience—for individuals and for the public as a
whole—of this collaborative project. ARTp succeeded in creating a work of
art that reached and interacted with a large and diverse audience and
helped facilitate discussion of the very complex issues involved in urban
regional transportation planning.
257 Collaborative Information Design

Figure 10.4a and b

Collage of Artists' Works and Public Responses. For the final collective work the Mass
Transformers created a tabloid insert for the evening newspapers and a video for televi¬
sion broadcast.

Figure 10.5
Video Art by David Russo.
258 Anderson

Figure 10.6
Destiny Is a Mystery, Video Art by Katie Donald and Video Associates.

Facilitating Artistic Collaboration

In any collaborative process, participants give up something to be a part of

the whole. In a best-case scenario, the resulting work reflects a cohesive¬
ness of intent, an eloquence, and a clarity that integrate each individual's
contribution. In a worse-case scenario, the resulting work becomes a com¬
promise between its collaborators that dilutes the integrity of individual
works but never integrates them into a unified whole. The approach to
collaboration we used for Modern Odysseys attempted to maintain each
artist's voice. The whole became a collection of individual voices that,
paradoxically, created cohesiveness through their diversity and complexity.
The Mass Transformers took great care to ensure that all artists incorpo¬
rated the thematic devices—the verbal, visual, and sound tags—in a way
that did not compromise their individual work. For example, whereas there
was but one version of the verbal and visual tags, sound artists could
choose from among twenty-one versions of the tag, ranging from inter¬
pretations by synthesized violins, piano, acoustic guitar, and jazz saxo¬
phone to versions featuring whistling and car horns. Each musician and
259 Collaborative Information Design

Figure 10.7
The Urban Guerrillas Performing as the Guzzler Brothers at the Opening Festivities.

a b

Another you
bv Metro's Artists' Prefect

Figure 10.8a and b

Mrs. Yamamoto Travels to a Foreigri Land, Video Art by Maria Gargiulo.
260 Anderson

composer selected the variation that best harmonized with his or her own
work.
The key to the project's collaborative process was the cohesiveness
brought to the project by the Mass Transformers. Except for the creation
of the tags, all the work produced by this lead team was collaborative in
the traditional sense. The resulting works reflected a clarity of intent in
spite of a divergence of form. It became difficult, if not impossible, to
identify individuals' voice as they and their work merged into the true
group voice.
In this context, my own role as lead artist was to function as a designer
of information in a way that clarified the communication process and
enhanced the sharing of knowledge, ideas, and emotions. After originating
the concept and processing the approval and funding of the project, I
acted primarily as a facilitator to different groups, both identifying impor¬
tant messages and organizing ways for these messages to support Metro's
more traditional communication, advertising, and public relations efforts.
Finally, I served as a kind of executive producer for the work as a whole to
ensure that the project continued to evolve as the public interacted with it.

Figure 10.9
Performance of the Micro-rap Opera, Hurry Up and Wait. The opera was written and
co-performed by the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet and Shomari Shanks.
261 Collaborative Information Design

Figure 10.10
The Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet.

What Was Learned?

While the artists involved were unanimous in their evaluation of the

project as successful, Metro officials were less sure. Even though they could
clearly critique the quality of each piece of the work, they found it almost
impossible to assess the results of the project as a whole. How could we
measure our success in meeting the work's main objective, that of stim¬
ulating citizens' thinking and discussion about transportation issues? One
of the problems resulting from expanding the notion of information
design—in this case in the direction of art—is the difficulty of meeting
people's normal expectations—such as the desire to assess the public re¬
sponse. Unfortunately, you can't measure symbolic grassroots effectiveness
very well—if at all.
Nonetheless, the effort to assess effectiveness was part of project plan¬
ning. The Mass Transformers kept accurate records of the distribution and
reach of each component in an attempt to understand the scope and sig¬
nificance of the work as a whole. Perhaps the most telling, and most easily
measurable element of the project, was the Voice Box. It received over
262 Anderson

twenty-six hundred calls, while Metro's public information line received

only twelve hundred calls. And the cost of the Voice Box was a fraction of
what was spent on the transportation agency's costly television, radio, and
print campaign.
The only negative press the project received occurred during the artist-
selection process, when one writer accused Metro of taking artists for a ride
and using them to create cheap publicity. The article went on to state that
"Metro's arts project crosses the line into the realm of propaganda ... and
smacks of the socialist realism enforced in post-WW II East Germany." In
fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. Not only did Metro executives not
tell the artists what to say—or censor what they wanted to say—they
were, if anything, anxious that the artists not be too articulate in their
support of bus usage, which the project was not intended to promote.

Implications and Possibilities

We can perhaps best view ARTp as one approach to information design as

experience—as a means, rather than an end in itself. By interacting with
the work as a whole, viewers became involved in and with the subject
matter. Supported by specific information—in this case, the brochures,
advertisements, and reports published by Metro—they could understand
the issues involved and become part of an ongoing discussion of possible
solutions. The model opens up provocative possibilities for both the crea¬
tors of information and the audience to initiate further collaborations.
Moreover, it suggests ways for information designers to play an expanded
role. Instead of serving as simply broadcasters of information, they can
become active leaders and facilitators of the process of collaborative com¬
munication and the sharing of knowledge, ideas, and emotions.
Ill Designing for the Technologies of Information

Design was once the prerogative of nobles. They alone had the means to
procure artisans capable of expounding a point of view: in the Pyramids
with their message of kingly immortality, in the great sculptures of anti¬
quity proclaiming a Pax romana, in Michaelangelo's timeless paeans to
papal omniscience. All the portraits commissioned, the cities designed, the
buildings constructed, the paintings, the songs, the literature—for a time
everything added to the natural environment by human beings was theirs.
In the physical realm, not much has changed. I thought of this while
driving through a particularly arid encampment of boxlike office buildings
owned by others, on broad, empty streets constructed by a government
not really under my control, on my way to buy the few small personal
items I could afford. In the buildings and on the streets I saw other small
people who, like me, inhabited the property of others to create wealth few
of them would ever own. After all these centuries, the design of the phys¬
ical environment remains largely the prerogative of powerful Others. Most
of us can only witness and accept.
Interactivity, however, changes things. It doesn't necessarily tip the
scales enough to make our culture more egalitarian, but interactive tech¬
nology does contain the seed of commutativity, the shared ability to affect
the basic drivers that make culture what it is. Some interactive media, of
course, do not reinforce this possibility. Bank ATMs and stamp machines,
264 Designing for the Technologies of Information

for instance, suggest quite the opposite: their activities are mandated and
controlled by powerful owners. If we choose to participate in their pro¬
cesses by depositing our savings or purchasing postage stamps, we must
pay a price in both cash and autonomy. Other interactive media, however,
proceed in an egalitarian direction and offer the rest of us—as Apple
Computer was once fond of saying—a chance to make a vital, self-
rewarding difference.
In chapter 11 Nathan Shedroff, one of the first to call himself an infor¬
mation designer, elaborates an extensive theory of interactivity in which the
promise of helpful participation is explicit. Working primarily with elec¬
tronic media, Shedroff has invented several methods of delivering and
manipulating information for the benefit of the end-user. Only a portion
of his theory—the most important part—is included here. It sets forth a
taxonomy and a system of shared forms of communication and under¬
standing. Sometimes, he points out, the unintended results of an infor¬
mation design can create an odd and wonderful synergy among means
and methods to make the consumers of information producers in their
own right. Consider the case of the Internet and how it has so far eluded
easy commercialization to remain a genuine vox populi of those with
access to computers. Shedroff tells us why this may be so.
Does interactivity contain its own meaning? That is, does the sheer act
of interacting tell us something about the nature of communication and
the predicament in which we might find ourselves while immersed in the
process? Sheryl Macy, Elizabeth Andersen, and John Krygier, three parts of
a successful environmental graphics consultancy, take a closer look at the
Shannon-Weaver model of communication and find in it clues to the
human desire for interaction. The model holds that signals representing
meanings are transmitted by senders to receivers through a medium of
communication. The problem is that the sender and receiver of a message
may not possess the same coding-decoding capabilities, which impedes the
flow of information. In chapter 12 Macy, Andersen, and Krygier put a new
twist on this situation, suggesting that designers' own coding-encoding
paraphernalia can either confound or exemplify the successful transmis¬
sion of meaning.
265 Designing for the Technologies of Information

Jim Gasperini, who designs deceptively simple computer games and

impressively complex computer art like the award-winning ScruTiny in the
Great Round, believes that ambiguity, not common-sense, is the key to
conveying meaning to the consumer of information products. He cites
several examples of highly ambiguous information designs in diverse me¬
dia—drama, music, and film, as well as computer-based forms—in which
ambiguity makes all the difference. In chapter 13 Gasperini argues that
openness to ambiguity is the designer's most important tool and that cer¬
tain self-described information designers, armed to the teeth with massive
desktop processors, daily practice overdesign. As receivers and designers of
information, we all suffer the consequences. The Taoists say, "He who
speaks does not know, and he who knows does not speak." We must
practice our profession quietly in order to sense ambiguities we can cap¬
ture and tame to the purposes of good information design.
Inherently, design and art are at odds. Designers deliberately strive to
share with a target audience a particular point of view, whereas artists
create only to express themselves. Or so the mythology goes. The lines
are blurring, however, before an onslaught of digitalization described in
chapter 14 by composer and computer scientist Steve Holtzman. Art once
locked away in a private gallery or hidden in the artist's loft may now be
disclosed, via the Internet for example, to a global audience of admirers
and critics. Once digitally created or captured, it can circulate freely in the
public domain. Easy transmission and manipulation can alter art and
transform design; a passage of music can be incorporated into a composi¬
tion of a very different style. Selfish art may become communal design—
and communal design become selfish art. Holtzman shares with us his
vision of how digital bits, the Is and Os that are the building blocks of
information, can be shaped to a purpose—even if the final outcome is
never known.
So far we have examined how design creates informational artifacts in
space. In chapter 15 Simon Birrell leads us one step beyond, into spaces
that are themselves informational artifacts: cyberspace, virtual worlds
composed of information that is the product of imagination. The synthetic
266 Designing for the Technologies of Information

environments that exist within these worlds may be simple or elaborate,

compelling or silly. As in a film, every element of the virtual world is
within the producer's control—every element, that is, except the human
being whose experience is the object of the producer's designs and labors.
Stepping into an immersion space or figuratively projecting oneself into a
screen-borne image, the individual is integrated into the imagery. The
better the design of the virtual world, the better it fits with the individual's
own cognitive world and the more compelling it is until, ideally, it
becomes a stand-in for the material world. Though no virtual world has
yet been designed with such a high level of realism, designers are becom¬
ing more and more skillful at designing these information universes. Birrell
reflects on the practical and moral issues associated with the design of
the virtual worlds that, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, will be the
ultimate expression of information design.
Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field
Theory of Design

Nathan Shedroff

The most important skill for almost everyone in the next decade and
beyond will be the ability to create valuable, compelling, and empowering
information and experiences for others. To do this, we must learn estab¬
lished ways of organizing and presenting data and information as well as
develop new ones. Whether we do this through traditional print products,
electronic means, interactive experiences, or live performances makes little
difference. Neither does it matter whether we are employing physical or
electronic devices or our own bodies and voices. The process of creating
anything is roughly the same. The methods of solving problems, respond¬
ing to audiences, and communicating to others in any medium are
enough alike for us to consider them identical for the purposes of this
paper. The same issues apply across media and experiences, because they
directly address the phenomena of information overload, information
anxiety, media literacy, media immersion, and technological overload—
important problems that need better solutions.
The intersection of these issues can be addressed by the process of infor¬
mation interaction design that is described in this paper. In other circles it is
called information design, information architecture, or interaction design. Some
call it instructional design, and yet others, simply common sense. We all
constantly create or engineer interactions, presentations, and experiences
for others. Information interaction design addresses the pervasive need
268 Shedroff

Figure 11.1
Information Interaction Design. Interface Design is a combination of three categories of
disciplines: information Design, Interaction Design, and Sensorial Design (which includes
all kinds of visual, auditory, written, and other sensorially-related disciplines).

to do so with one process for producing every book, directory, catalog,

newspaper, or television program. We can also use it to create every CD-
ROM, kiosk, oral presentation, game, and on-line service, as well as every
dance, music, comedy, or theater performance. The traditions and tech¬
nologies change with every venue, but the process does not—or should
not.
Information interaction design is the intersection of three different dis¬
ciplines: information design, interaction design, and sensorial design (see
figure 11.1). Information design's principles originate in the publishing and
graphic design worlds, although few professionals in these fields inten¬
tionally practice them. The discipline addresses the organization and
presentation of data—its transformation into valuable, meaningful infor¬
mation. Although it is something that everyone has always done to some
extent, mostly unconsciously, only recently has information design been
identified as a discipline in itself, with proven processes that can be
employed and taught. Unfortunately, there are precious few sources for
learning about the practice of either information design or interaction
design.
269 Information Interaction Design

Interaction design (in essence, story creating and storytelling) is at once

both an ancient art and a new technology. Media have always affected the
telling of stories and the creation of experiences, but currently new media
offer capabilities and opportunities not previously addressed in the history
of interaction and performance. The demands of interactivity in particular
are often misunderstood by all but the most experienced storytellers and
performers. We do not yet understand precisely how these skills are
expressed through interactive technologies, what interests audiences will
have in them, and what demands audiences will make of these tech¬
nologies. Consequently, there are few sources of information about these
issues and the techniques we can use to meet them. The practitioners of
this new territory are desperate for some new ideas and cogent explan¬
ations. Interaction design is also the most critical component to the
success of interactive products.
Sensorial design is simply the employment of all the techniques we use to
communicate to others through the senses. Most of the time we think first
(right after writing) of employing the visual design disciplines, such as
graphic design, videography, cinematography, typography, illustration, and
photography. But the disciplines that communicate through other senses
are just as important; sound design and engineering, musical performance,
and vocal communication are also effective in the appropriate circum¬
stances. In fact, sometimes they are the most creative media to employ.
Tactile, olfactory, and kinesthetic senses, although rarely used (often due
to technological or market constraints), are just as valid and can add
enriching detail to an experience.
The professional disciplines of these sensorial media are worlds unto
themselves, with their own histories, traditions, and concerns. To learn
each one well would takes more time and skill than could be expected
of any individual. Therefore it is important for everyone (including the
general public) to gain at least an overview of the important issues and
techniques of each discipline, so that they can be employed correctly in
presenting ideas and communicating messages—especially within a team.
Experienced experts in each of these areas, therefore, should participate in
270 Shedroff

deciding how to employ the various media in support of a project's infor¬

mation and interaction goals and messages.
These levels of understanding are significant because they define the
boundaries within which we can create and communicate. While infor¬
mation design is most heavily involved in the representation of data and
its presentation, interaction design is most relevant to the creation of
compelling experiences. When designing projects, I usually find it easier to
start with the information design process if a lot of data already exists; if
not, I begin with the interaction design. The following sections describe
processes I have found useful for both approaches.

Information Design

While few designers have been explicitly concerned with the issues para¬
mount to clear communication—organization, presentation, goals and
messages, clarity, and complexity to name a few—these functions have
been addressed, at least on a subconscious level, by everyone who attempts
to organize his or her thoughts and communicate them. Information
design doesn't banish aesthetic concerns, but it doesn't focus on them
either. Most important to communication are the issues listed above.
However, there is no reason why elegantly structured or well-architected
data can't also be beautiful. Information design isn't meant to replace graphic
design and other visual disciplines but to provide the framework for expressing
these capabilities.
Our understanding of understanding must begin with the view that
what most of us deal with everyday—the vast numbers of things that
bombard our senses—is not information. It is merely data. Richard Saul
Wurman expresses this well.1 Data, he points out, is fairly worthless to
most of us. It is the product of research or creation (e.g., writing), but it
is not an adequate product for communicating. To have value, it must be
organized, transformed, and presented in a way that gives it meaning—
and makes it valuable (see figure 11.2).
271 Information Interaction Design

Producers

Research rsosfiiiauuii
Creation Organization
Gathering
Discovery

Figure 11.2
The Understanding Spectrum. Understanding is a continuum that leads from Data,
through Information and Knowledge, and ultimately to Wisdom.

Information is also not the end of the continuum of understanding. Just

as data can be transformed into meaningful information, so information
can be transformed into knowledge and then, further, into wisdom.
Knowledge is a phenomenon we can build for others, just as we can build
information for others from data. This is done through interaction design
and the creation of experiences, a process we will discuss further in the
next section. But at this point, just think for a moment how hard it is to
build a meaningful experience for someone else. It is first necessary to
understanding who that person is; what his or her needs, abilities, inter¬
ests, and expectations are; and how to reach them. Brenda Laurel often
states that the interactive medium "is not about information, it is about
experience."2 She is absolutely correct, but I would add that in creating
these experiences for others (and even for ourselves to some degree), we
272 Shedroff

must understand and structure the information (and data) we use to build
them.

The Continuum of Understanding

A Bit About Data Data is the product of research, creation, collection, and
discovery. It is the raw material we find or create that we use to build our
communications. Most of what we experience, unfortunately, is merely
data. It is fairly easy to distinguish: it is often boring, incomplete, or
inconsequential. It isn't valuable as communication, because it isn't a
complete message. Most of the technology we call information technology is,
in fact, only data technology, because it does not address understanding or
the forming or communication of information. Most of this technology is
simply concerned with storage, processing, and transmission.
Data is useful to producers, or to anyone playing a production role.
Everyone does this to some extent, whether professionally or personally—
in print, electronic, or spoken forms. But data are not meant for consum¬
ers. Yet too often we deluge our audiences with data instead of informa¬
tion, leaving them to sort out and make sense of them. Many providers
even brag of the amount of meaningless, contextless data they throw at
their customers. CNN, for example, actually calls its bits of data “factoids"
and slides them in between other, meaningful presentations.
Successful communications do not present data. If presenters don't
bother to provide context and build meaning, audiences will have little
patience for doing it themselves. As designers, we must ask ourselves con¬
stantly what service we provide.

More About Information Information is the first level at which it is

appropriate to communicate with audiences. It represents the transmission
of thoughtful messages that reveal the relationships and patterns (the
context) among the data presented. Transforming data into information is
accomplished by organizing them into a meaningful form, presenting
273 Information Interaction Design

them in appropriate ways, and communicating the context around them.

I describe these processes in more detail in the following sections.

The Experience of Knowledge Knowledge is the pay-off of any experience.

It is the understanding gained through experience, whether bad or good.
Knowledge is communicated by building compelling interactions with
others, or with systems, so that the patterns and meanings of the infor¬
mation can be assimilated. There are many types of knowledge: some is
personal, having a meaning unique to one person's experiences, thoughts,
or point of view; local knowledge is that shared by a relatively few people
through their common experiences; while global knowledge (at the other
end of the spectrum) is more general. Global knowledge is more process-
based and, necessarily, more limited, because it relies on such high levels
of shared understandings and agreements about communication. Effective
communication, which must take into account the audience's knowledge
base, is more difficult with larger audiences, whose pool of shared knowl¬
edge is less detailed and more generalized.
Knowledge is gained through a process of integration, in both the pre¬
sentation and the mind of the audience. Information forms the stimulus
of an experience, while wisdom is the deeper understanding of the mes¬
sage that can be gained through the experience. Knowledge, therefore (as
figure 11.3 illustrates), is fundamentally participatory; it is the level all our
communications should target, for it is the one that allows us to convey
the most valuable messages. It is also the highest level that we, as design¬
ers, can affect directly, since it is still in the local or global range. Past this
point, understanding is primarily the responsibility of audience members
as their personal experiences are more deeply tapped.

What Is Wisdom? Wisdom is the most vague and intimate form of

understanding. It is much more abstract and philosophical than the other
levels, and we know less about how to create or affect it. Wisdom is a kind
of metaknowledge, a blending of all the processes and relationships
understood through experience. It is the result of contemplation, evalua-
274 Shedroff

Figure 11.3
Understanding Context. Context becomes more personal as understanding becomes
more complex. In addition, participation on the audiences' part becomes important and
then mandatory along the same progression.

tion, retrospection, and interpretation—all of which are particularly per¬

sonal processes. We cannot create wisdom as we can data and information,
and we cannot share it with others as we can knowledge. We can only
create experiences and describe processes that offer our audiences oppor¬
tunities to find wisdom. Ultimately, wisdom is an understanding that must
be gained by the individual.

Organizing Things
The first step in transforming data into information is to play with its
organization. This is one of those simple, yet crucial processes that seems
worthless until through it we discover something we have never seen
before. We need to realize that the organization of things affects the way
we interpret and understand the separate pieces. Take any set of findings:
about students in a classroom, a company's financial data, a city's demo-
275 Information Interaction Design

graphics, or the kind and numbers of animals in a zoo. How would you
organize them? Which arrangement is best?
Richard Saul Wurman suggests five ways to organize everything, but
seven seems clearer to me. Everything (and I mean everything) can be
organized in one of these ways: according to the alphabet, location, time,
continuum, number, or category. A last way of organizing things can often
be randomness—in other words, no organization. (If you can think of
another way, let me know.)
The point of this understanding is that there are usually better ways to
organize data than the traditional ones that first come to mind. Each
organization of the same set of data expresses different attributes and
messages of the set. It is important to experiment, reflect, and choose
which organization best communicates our messages. We also need to
keep in mind that while these seven ways of organizing things make it
easy to brainstorm new presentations, it is up to us to choose the one that
is most appropriate to our audience (i.e., the method of organization that
highlights the most important aspects of a presentation).

Alphabets Just about any book has an alphabetical index because, while
we may know exactly what we are looking for, we often do not know
where it is. Although the alphabet is an arbitrary sequence of symbols,
indexes work because we were taught the sequence early and have had it
reinforced throughout our lives. It is not universally useful, as you will
find if you ever try to use a telephone directory in a language that uses an
unfamiliar alphabet. While most indexes are organized alphabetically, very
few products are (mostly dictionaries and encyclopedias). This is because
few data have any great meaning based on the first letter of their respec¬
tive labels. In actuality, of course, the alphabet is a continuum (from A to
Z), but it is a special one for the reasons stated above.

Locations Locations are natural ways of organizing data whose impor¬

tance lies in their relations or connection to other data. How easy would it
be to find the exits to an airplane if they were listed and described in text
276 Shedroff

with no diagram? Although many projects can benefit from locational

organizations, they are seldom used, simply because their designers never
experimented with the idea. Producing maps and diagrams is not as easy
as simply writing text, but if you have ever used an atlas or an Access
travel guide, you know how much better a sense of a place you get
when things are oriented by their geographical relationships. Consider, for
example, a subway map that simply lists all station stops in sequence,
compared to one that arranges them in a layout resembling the city they
serve. This may sound obvious (and it should be), but then why do car
manuals not organize parts by their location on the car or medical books
arrange ailments according to their location in the body—the one sure
thing we know when we aren't feeling well?

Time Organizing things according to time or sequence may sound obvi¬

ous for bus and train schedules or for historic timelines, but it can be just
as effective for cooking, driving, or building instructions. Time need not be
addressed solely in terms of minutes and hours but can also be organized
in days, months, years, centuries, processes, or milestones.

Continuums Any qualitative comparison can be describe with a contin¬

uum. All ratings systems, whether numbers of stars or numbers of RBIs
(runs batted in), imply a value scale. Arranging items in a continuum
indicates that this value scale is the most important aspect of the data.
Like other organizations of data, a continuum used as the primary organi¬
zation expresses a particular message and order of importance.

Numbers I categorize number systems as a separate way of arranging

things even though numbers, like alphabets, are an arbitrary continuum
(usually in base 10, as our species has ten fingers). But unlike alphabets,
base-10 numbers are much more universal, because they can be combined
in different forms according to their mathematical relationships. It is
common, but not necessary, for numerical organizations to be continu¬
ums. For example, the Dewey Decimal System used for organizing books in
277 Information Interaction Design

many libraries is a number system that does not represent any magnitude
or attribute of the books but simply assigns numbers to categories and
subcategories.

Categories Categories are a common organization, and a reliable one,

as they allow similar things to be grouped together according to some
important attribute. The specific categories, however, are crucial, as they
communicate more easily than other organizations the designer's preju¬
dices and understandings. Like all organizations, categories affect the audi¬
ence's perception of the information.

Randomness While random or arbitrary organizations might not seem a

useful way to organize things and "add value" to them, they are some¬
times the best way if a challenge of some kind is involved. Think about
a game in which all the pieces are already arranged or in which the
sequence of moves is predetermined and carefully and logically laid out.
it wouldn't be very much fun to play. There may be other times when
random organizations present a better experience than an orderly one, and
it is up to us to explore those possibilities and employ good judgment.

Advanced Organizations
In case these descriptions seem too dry and utilitarian, let me describe an
example in which the organization of data can provide an intense emo¬
tional reaction. If you are familiar with the Vietnam War Memorial in
Washington, D.C., you may know how quietly moving this monument is
(figure 11.4). But you may not realize the importance of its organization.
The names of all of the U.S. military personnel who died in Vietnam are
inscribed on the surfaces of two long, black, granite walls. The walls at the
beginning of the monument are short (around twelve inches tall) but they
increase in height to more than nine feet at the center where they meet.
They are constructed this way for a special reason. The names of the men
and women are arranged according to the time of their death, beginning
with the first who died during the "police action," mounting as the death
Figure 11.4
Advanced Organizations. The organization of information can effect more than merely
legibility and understanding, it can be the basis of powerful, emotional reactions. The
Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., is an example of an organization of data
that drives form, space, and ultimately, emotions.

toll rose at the height of the war, and trickling down as the United States
pulled out of the country. The names thus chart the pattern of the United
States's involvement and the personal stories of the people involved and
most affected by it. Imagine how different the monument would be with¬
out this organization. Suppose the names were listed alphabetically (which
was actually proposed when the design was accepted). While it might be
easier to find a particular person, the search (like the names themselves)
would be reduced to a mechanical process, a granite White Pages. Lost
would be the individuality of each name and life. And in a list of seven¬
teen John Smiths, which one is yours?
An alphabetical organization would have completely depersonalized the
monument and diminished its emotional power. So would most other
organizations. Imagine an organization by categories: pilots listed here,
infantry listed there. How about a continuum based on rank or, for that
matter, height: the tallest men and women at one end, the shortest at
another?
What is key to this emotional experience is that those who died are
found among those with whom they died. Without this organization, in
279 Information Interaction Design

fact, there is no longer any meaning to the wall's gradual growth and
dwindling height. Any other organization would have created a different
memorial entirely, one, most likely, without the power and emotion
created by the one built. Yet all of this is somewhat subliminal. When
you visit the monument, you aren't much aware of the mechanics of its
structure, but it works nonetheless. And this is true of any project,
whether it is a sensitive and emotional monument, a powerful, inspiring
museum, a useful and concise catalog, or a thrilling and interesting
performance.

Multiple Organizations
Almost all organizations are really nested, multiple organizations. Most
directories, for example, list people's names by division or location, then
by department or title, and then by alphabet. Catalogs may break products
into categories first, then arrange them in a continuum based on price
(highest cost to lowest perhaps). Be aware that the primary organization is
just that and that large groups of things may need secondary or even
tertiary suborganizations. Each of these subcategories, of course, needs to
be clear and meaningful as well.
It is also useful to include indexes that organize the same items in
different ways. This allows people to find things in the ways they are
accustomed to or in the ways they learn best. All people learn differently
and have varying skills. Some may be comfortable with maps, while others
prefer lists. Some may not understand the alphabet, while others can't
relate to a continuum. Multiple organizations help everyone find things
more easily. In addition, even if people understand the organization, they
may not have the correct information. For example, they may know the
street they need to go to, but not where to find it on a map (this is where
street indexes come in handy). They may know that they want a recipe for
a low-calorie dessert but don't want to search through every recipe in the
dessert section to find one.
Lastly, it is precisely the ability to see the same set of things in different
organizations that allows people to uncover the patterns of relationship
280 Shedroff

among them. If possible, a design should let people rearrange things

themselves or provide them with alternative organizations so that they can
discover the patterns for themselves.

Metaphors
Much has been made of the ability of metaphors to help people under¬
stand things quickly. While a metaphor can be generally helpful, it is a
false crutch to cling to. Metaphors (which are usually similes) are not
required; nor are they always the best approach. Too many interactive
projects, for example, start with the question “What metaphor should the
interface use?" Most often, the interface shouldn't use any metaphor at
all—at least not as the word is narrowly defined.
Metaphors are simply one way of establishing context (i.e., transforming
data into information). It is important that the context implied be the one
intended and that it match the desired understandings. Too often, meta¬
phors establish the wrong context and help create inaccurate expectations
that cannot be met.
Metaphors are especially useful when they fit well into a user's or read¬
er's experience. But to be used well, they must be abandoned when they
begin to fail, or when they are asked to do more than they are capable of.
A good example is the desktop metaphor used by many personal com¬
puters. The strength of this idea was that it used common objects to indi¬
cate relationships by analogy (a trash can for discarding files, files for
individual projects, folders for keeping groups of files together, etc.). For¬
tunately, the designers ignored the metaphor when it broke down (for
example, in inventing dialog boxes) and didn't try to take it further than
was convenient.
Recently, a colleague of mine suggested that metaphors could be another
way of organizing data. She may be correct, and more thought should be
devoted to this question. But 1 generally feel that metaphors are more
about representation than about organization or presentation. They seem
to me to relate more to the cognitive orientation (i.e., the meaning) than
to the structure of a presentation.
281 Information Interaction Design

Goals and Messages

All effective communication involves defining the goals of the experience
being created and the messages to be conveyed as early as possible in the
development process. These two objectives drive all decisions—from infor¬
mation design, through interaction design, and including all aspects of
sensorial design. Every decision, no matter how simple or mundane,
should support the goals and messages. This is a way of ensuring that in¬
appropriate data, techniques, technology, or styles will not be used. At
every decision point, the choice should be the solution that best meets the
goals and messages decided on at the beginning of the project. While this
sounds obvious, too often the ideas that drive the presentation are at odds
with the messages presented.
Very often the goals and messages stipulated by a client will not be
correct. The client is often too close to the problem to see the solution
clearly. To be successful, we need to uncover one or two layers of funda¬
mental goals that underlie the stated goals and agree to present these.
Otherwise, we may find ourselves unable to satisfy the client or commu¬
nicate the correct messages to our audience.

Clarity
The most important goal of effective communication is clarity. Clarity is
not, however, the same as simplicity. Often a simple organization is clear
if the intended message is brief and limited in scope; but if the message is
about a complex relationship, it may necessitate presenting a large amount
of data. This complexity can be made clear through effective organization
and presentation and need not be reduced to meaningless "bite-sized"
chunks of data, as simplifying it usually does. Clarity is best accomplished
by focusing on one particular message or goal at a time and not attempt¬
ing to accomplish too much all at once. Simplicity, on the other hand, is
often responsible for the "dumbing down" of information rather than the
illumination of it.
282 Shedroff

Interaction Design

Think for a moment about what experiences are. How do you create them?
How do you know when they are successful? What are the most satisfying
experiences you can remember? Unfortunately, few people are ever taught
how to create wonderful experiences for others. I believe that one of the
nicest experiences you can have is to enjoy a stimulating conversation
with another person over a great meal. 1 would rather do that than watch
television, read a book, or use any interactive product I have ever seen. But
how do you set up and maintain such an experience? We are taught
history, science, mathematics, languages, and many valuable processes but
hardly anything about having a great conversation, though this can be
one of the most satisfying things in life. Why?
While some people seem to have natural abilities for creating wonderful
experiences for others (think of the "life of the party," that great instruc¬
tor, your friends, etc.), most of us must learn the hard way, through trial
and error. Wouldn't it be great if we could be explicitly taught how to
create meaningful interactions for each other? This is what interaction
design addresses. Unfortunately, it is still a new field and has few texts,
fewer classes, and almost no curriculum—even less of these than informa¬
tion design. The best sources for learning the skills critical to the success of
any interactive project or presentation are the performing arts. Indeed, the
most successful people now practicing interaction design in new media
seem to have a background in some type of performance: dance, theater,
singing, storytelling, or improvisation.
Because of the history of interaction in the performing arts, the fields of
scriptwriting, storytelling, performance, and instructional design provide
some of the only sources of guidance. Each of these disciplines attempts to
communicate varied stories and messages through the creation of interest¬
ing and wonderful experiences. As we look to these disciplines for knowl¬
edge about interactivity, we must also keep in mind the limitations of the
technologies and media through which our messages are transmitted.
283 Information Interaction Design

Passive >
Interactive

Simple Navigation Sophisticated Navigation

Playback Only High Audience Control

Creation Tools, Creation Help

"Living Information”

Pseudo-Intelligence, “Agents,"
Modifiable Behavior, Personalization

Figure 11.5
Interaction Spectra. There are several aspects to experiences that audiences tend to fell
make an experience more "interactive." Some of the most important are these six.

Continuums of Interactivity
One way to consider the meaning of interactivity is to envision all expe¬
riences (and products) as inhabiting a continuum of interactivity. On one
side are such passive experiences as reading or watching television. While
some have held that even these activities involve an interaction between
the mind and the device, or the imagination and the story, this argument
seems weak and overly philosophical to me. By comparison with experi¬
ences like painting, conversing, or producing a television program, these
activities offer the audience no choice, control, or incitements to pro¬
ductivity or creativity. The difference that defines interactivity, then, can
include the amount of control the audience has over the tools, pacing,
or content; the amount of choice this control offers; and the audience's
ability to use the tool or content to be productive or creative.
All products and experiences can, therefore, by placed along a contin¬
uum (as shown in figure 11.5). It is important to note that there is no
284 Shedroff

good or bad side of this continuum. The only value judgment should be
whether the level of interactivity (place on the continuum) is appropriate
to the goals of the experience or the messages to be communicated.
Interactivity is different from production values or richness of content.
Television programs and films can have incredibly rich stories, technical
qualities, and narrative presentations but offer almost no opportunities for
interaction (except changing the channel or leaving the theater). Compare
this situation with the experience of improvisational comedy, in which the
audience is involved by offering suggestions or actually joining the action
as the story is created.

Control and Feedback The first two spectrums of interactivity involve

how much control the audience has over the outcome (i.e., the rate, se¬
quence, or type of action), and how much feedback the interface supports.
Typically, experiences with high interactivity offer high levels of feedback
and at least some control. Examples of these kinds of experiences are
games in which the play depends directly on the player's involvement and
choices—unlike television, in which the experience plays out whether
anyone is there or not.

Productivity and Creative Experiences Productivity is another spectrum

that can coincide with other interactivity spectrums. Creative experiences
allow a user/creator/participant to make, or share in making, something.
Some experiences can be used more productively than others (as opposed
to being merely entertaining), and productivity is traditionally more valued
in business products than in entertainment devices. Nonetheless, most
people find creating and producing something interesting, entertaining,
and fulfilling—even in leisure activities. Tools of creation are therefore ex¬
tremely important components of the meaningful, compelling, and useful
experience. Creative products require users to participate in shaping the
experience or manipulating components instead of merely watching and
consuming what the product brings forth.
285 Information Interaction Design

Technologies that are co-creative (a term coined by Abbe Don) offer the
user or audience assistance in the creation process.3 People are naturally
creative and are almost always more interested in experiences that allow
them to create instead of merely participate. While many situations can
create anxiety in people not accustomed to performing with the tools or
techniques provided, this anxiety can be lessened through careful design
or by offering assistance that helps people express their creativity. This
could take the form of recommendations, guidelines, advice, or actually
performing certain operations for users.
Another attribute of interactive creative experiences is the ability to add
new content or tools to the initial set so that a product, toolset, or data¬
base becomes a "living," evolving project. As yet, few products are
designed to grow or become more valuable over time with the active par¬
ticipation of the audience. Future products that help users structure their
experiences and share their knowledge are certain to become more valu¬
able than those that do not.

Adaptive Experiences Adaptive technologies are those in which the be¬

havior of the user/reader/consumer/actor changes the experience. These
changes can result from agents, modifying behaviors, and pseudo¬
intelligences. Agents are processes that can be set to run autonomously,
performing specific, unsupervised (or lightly supervised) activities and
reporting back when finished. Modifying behaviors change the tools and/or
the content in different ways, depending on the actions and techniques
of the user. Some games, for example, do this by becoming more difficult
as the player becomes more proficient. Others may modify the content to
reflect a user's point of view, level of proficiency, or desire for varying
amounts of detail. Both agents and modifying behaviors, as well as other
techniques, can make a device or character in an interactive presentation
(e.g., game) appear to be intelligent (pseudo-intelligence). Of course, this
appearance of intelligence alludes to a much larger question about intelli¬
gence, life, and how these are defined. Suffice it to say that making certain
kinds of choices to change behavior based on the actions of others
286 Shedroff

(whether random, instinctive, or algorithmic) can create the appearance

of a sophisticated system or process and imply a kind of independent
intelligence.

Communicative Experiences Like other productive and creative experi¬

ences, opportunities to meet others, talk with them, and share their per¬
sonal stories and opinions are always viewed as valuable and interesting.
Because these experiences involve two or more people, they also inher¬
ently involve high levels of control, feedback, and adaptivity. The tele¬
phone is a great example of such a communicative device. So are chat
lines, discussion bulletin boards, and cocktail parties. Some of these are so
valuable and enjoyable for some people that they become virtually indis¬
pensable to their lives.

The Experience Cube

Each of the six attributes described above can be plotted on a diagram
(figure 11.6) in order to visualize how typical interfaces and products are
related to each other by these attributes. Unfortunately, it is difficult to
create a clear six-dimensional diagram; however, we can produce a close
approximation by combining the feedback and control attributes into one
dimension (height), the creative, productive, and communicative attributes
into another (width), and envisioning the adaptive attributes as a third,
depth dimension. This gives us an experience cube that gives us some idea
of the general relationships among the kind of experiences we can learn
from.
One of the first lessons to note is that all life experiences (whether
mediated by technology or not) fit into this cube. This is important,
because it reminds us that the experiences we create in our designed
products are viewed within a much wider context by our audiences.
Unfortunately, most producers of interactive media or multimedia don't
realize this fact. It must be remembered that a reader/user/consumer has
access to many media and, most likely, is not as enamored of the tech¬
nology of any particular medium as its developer might be. This means
287 Information Interaction Design

Holodeck

conversations
,
painting, composing

playing, performing
: improv theater

o
i.
■ceoirf’
*■>
c etertroRit worsts
o
u electronic books
utilities
TS vsfwtaii
c interactive
theater training ■ TTTS

w television
m email
St
"C newspapers
<u ^•v books
u.

Figure 11.6
The Experience Cube. By combining the six interaction criteria into three axis and
arranging in a cube, a clear progression toward more elaborate and interactive experi¬
ences emerges.

that the competition for interactive media products is as big as all of hu¬
man experience. In other words, your competitors for that CD-ROM on
tropical fish are not only other tropical fish CD-ROMs, or even laser discs,
but also television documentaries, narrative and reference books, aquari¬
ums, scuba diving, travel, and so forth. If the experience you create is not
a compelling one (whether justified by the bounds of the technology or
not), you will never find a large audience.
This is probably why we have seen only a few categories of successful
interactive media products: children's books and lessons, games, reference
works, and pornography. Both games and reference works use interactive
media appropriately and create experiences that cannot be duplicated eas¬
ily in other media. While some children's books and products do this too,
even those that don't have been successful, probably because the market
(parents) can justify any expenditure—on both the products and the
systems to run them on—that contributes to their children's education.
288 Shedroff

Curiously enough, even though current pornography uses interactive

technologies particularly poorly, the market thrives. There seems to be an
overlap between sexual curiosity and technology.
So, we come back to the question: How do we as designers create
meaningful experiences and interactions for others? As noted above, we
must first revisit our goals and messages and re-evaluate the kinds of
experiences we want our audience to have. We must also ask them what
they need and want from these experiences. This inquiry is what market
research is supposed to be about. It is not user testing (which needs to
be done later once some possibilities have been developed), but it is
nonetheless a crucial step. The process of development must involve
brainstorming various alternatives for meeting these goals, messages, and
audience interests and abilities (in whole or in part) until possible solutions
emerge. We must then give shape to the solutions with the tools of senso¬
rial design and test them before we approve them or label them successful.

Sensorial Design

Sensorial design is simply an all-encompassing category comprised of the

many disciplines involved with the creation and presentation of media
experiences (figure 11.7). These include writing (text); graphic design,
iconography, map making, calligraphy, typography, illustration, and color
theory (graphics); photography, animation, and cinematography (images);
and sound design, singing, and music (sound). We should probably also
include perfumery and cooking in this category, as these involve the pur¬
poseful stimulation of the senses—even if the senses of smell and taste are
not very widely utilized as entertainment media. Each of these disciplines
have deep traditions and detailed procedures. It is not pertinent to focus
on them individually at this point; but while they are different in many
ways, they all share some common attributes and concerns. The latter
include the appropriate use of media, style, and technique; concern with
media literacy and bandwidth application to a particular technology; and
an understanding of the human senses.
289 Information Interaction Design

Tactile Senses
Visual Senses
. . ;

Titm ■

Auditory Senses

Olfactory Senses

Figure 11.7
Sensorial Media. All "presentation" media stimulate the senses in some way. While
visual, auditory, and written media are the most common for computer interfaces, they
are not the only important media available.

Media Differences
Each medium has different strengths and weaknesses. Each excels in dif¬
ferent capabilities and different types of communication. Ihese are intri¬
cately related to the way we perceive the world through our senses (figure
11.8). Think for a moment about our senses and how we as designers use
sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. To do so more effectively, we need
to develop a better understanding of our senses, how they operate, how
they relate to each other, and how to create for them.4 Gaining this un¬
derstanding will be but the first step toward learning to imagine more
compelling experiences.

Style and Meaning

Using the media appropriately is not always easy. Many times, one person
or group involved in a project demands that a particular component be
290 Shedroff

cultural factors/
cognitive abilities

speakers hearing^

displays vision 4k

smell/taste

^ voice recognition speech ~

sound recording sounds

kinesthetics/gesture

touch/dexterity

'stylus/keyboard/mouse
trackball/touch screen/joy stick

Figure 11.8
Media Differences. Each medium has its own strengths and weakness regarding inter¬
faces between people and machines. These must be chosen wisely to be used
effectively.

used when another would be better. The same is true of style, which con¬
veys meaning, whether implied, accidental, or deliberate. Choosing the
appropriate attributes and implementing them consistently is essential to
development of a cohesive audience experience. On large projects, this
cohesion can easily get lost as many people implement various parts
according to their own standards and preferences. There are few details
that do not affect the presentation, legibility, and understanding of a
message. Even a detail like whether to set text flush left, flush right, cen¬
tered, or justified on both margins changes the legibility and perception of
the paragraph, and, therefore, affects the text itself. All sensorial details
must be coordinated, not only with each other but also with the goals and
messages of the project. The better integrated and careful the synthesis of
these design processes is, the more compelling, engaging, and appropriate
the experience will be and, consequently, the more successful the inter¬
active communication will be.
291 Information Interaction Design

Conclusion?

Designing an interface for any audience experience, whether technological,

physical, or conceptual, begins with the creation of meaning and the
development of an appropriate type of interactivity. These decisions influ¬
ence further decisions about the type and style of sensorial media needed
to present the experience to the audience in an appropriate and supportive
way. Addressing one factor in the equation while ignoring the others can
lead to an incomplete or unbalanced experience. In many cases, simply
understanding the concepts of interactive information design can lead to
development of better experiences. More often, it is necessary to address
explicitly ways of integrating these concepts into the components of the
final design.
This is really not a conclusion as much as it is a beginning. There is still
much for all of us to learn and share about these issues. Both information
design and interaction design are extremely new disciplines and will grow
and improve as we experiment and create. The concepts formulated so far,
however, represent the beginning of a better understanding of communi¬
cation and will serve us well over the next phase of our development.

Notes

1. Richard Saul Wurman is one of the most renowned information architects. His Infor¬
mation Anxiety (1989) is one of the few instructional sources available on information
design. His issue of Design Quarterly, Hats (1989) also provides a condensed version of his
most important understandings.

2. Brenda Laurel, one of the ablest interface designers in the industry, is a major propo¬
nent of the design of experiences. Her edited anthology, The Art of Human-Computer In¬
terface Design (1990) is a great place to start, and her Computers as Theatre (1991) is a
good place to continue.

3. Abbe Don, another talented interface designer, specializes in interfaces for personal
narratives. Her address is Abbe Don Interactive, 618 Sanchez, San Francisco, CA 94114.

4. Diane Ackerman’s book, A Natural History of the Senses (1990), offers an inspiring dis¬
cussion of our sensorial experiences.
292 Shedroff

References

Ackerman, Diane. 1990. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Random House.

Laurel, Brenda, ed. 1990. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Reading, Mass.
Addison-Wesley.

Laurel, Brenda, ed. 1991. Computers as Theatre. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Wurman, Richard Saul. 1989. Information Anxiety. New York: Doubleday.

Wurman, Richard Saul. 1989. Hats, a special issue of Design Quarterly, no. 145.
n Interactivity and Meaning

Sheryl Macy, Elizabeth Anderson, and John Krygier

Meaning is a community of understanding. The transfer of meaning is the basic purpose

of language, and the association between language and meaning is indissoluble.
—Mario Pei

All human communications are an attempt to transfer meaning. Written

and spoken languages traffic in semantic content. Music and art expand
the concept of meaning to include emotional, visual, or aural experiences
one person wishes to share with another. Interactive programming, a new
communication medium combining language, images, and sound, creates
a new dimension of information manipulation. If its developers thor¬
oughly understand the new environment's demands and possibilities,
interactive communication will enhance the process of exchanging mean¬
ing still further.

Why Is the Communication of Meaning So Difficult?

Whatever the method of communications used, humans have always

found the transfer of precise meaning problematic. Language is funda¬
mentally error-prone, because our immensely complex human thought
processes make the symbolic representation of any single idea a daunting

task.
294 Macy, Anderson, and Krygier

Human brains are a matrix of neurological, cultural, environmental, and

experiential memories, the product of each individual's cumulative per¬
sonal observations. Every message, because it is derived from many expe¬
riences in the sender's past, requires the receiver to draw on a similarly
broad range of information in order to understand it clearly. Concepts are
not self-contained, free-standing crystals of meaning but are integrated
into a much larger context. Imagine, for example, the different images of
the symbol tree that might be constructed by English-speakers from
southern India, northern California, or a colony on Mars. Similarly, a
current (1998) Internet compilation states that there may be ten or more
words for ice and snow in the Labradoran Inuit language and as many as
forty-nine words for snow and ice in the language of western Greenland.
Linguists have noticed that geographic locations afflicted by wind, rain, or
other harsh weather elements generally weigh in with high word counts to
describe the relative degrees of these phenomena.
Given the vast and varied supporting data that surround the symbols we
use to communicate ideas, it is amazing that humans are able to commu¬
nicate at all. In moments of frustration, most of us have felt certain that
no two people on earth understand anything in exactly the same way and
that our belief in human communication is no more than a comfortable
delusion.
Fortunately, perfect communication of meaning is seldom necessary;
imperfect or incomplete transmission is often enough to achieve the
desired result. When one person must quickly communicate to another the
message, “Run, that tree is falling," the subtleties of the tree's structure,
shape, or emotional associations are irrelevant. It's enough to know that
the tree is large, dangerous, and moving rapidly downward. We can define
human language as a set of agreed-upon conventions that make such rapid
exchanges of information possible in spite of our differences.
The pioneering linguist Leonard Bloomfield observed, “Each person must
necessarily refer language symbols to his or her own experience, and no
two of us have the same background of experience. Even where the term
represents approximately the same concept in two different minds, the
295 Interactivity and Meaning

reaction may be altogether different. Meaning, like its carrier, language, is

subject to human variability and human differences ... but areas of general
agreement permit the business of semantic transfer to go on and function”
(1933: 92).
Aristotle was the first to understand language as an arbitrary convention
—a social contract that assigns a name to an object or an action on the
basis of broad social agreement. This understanding has become an
accepted foundation of modern linguistics, although subject to many
academic subtleties.
Nineteenth-century neolinguists like Benedetto Croce held that language
is sound whose purpose is self-expression rather than communication; he
believed that it is the individual's creative urge that is the ultimate arbiter
of change and innovation in language. In Ferdinand de Saussure's early-
twentieth-century view, language is a sociological phenomenon shaped
by its speakers and their psychological processes; this explanation was a
natural precursor to the Marxist school of linguistics that stresses language
as a class phenomenon. But virtually all modern students of communica¬
tions would agree with Mario Pei that "The purpose of language is abso¬
lute. It is the transfer of meaning from one human mind to another. If the
form of communication used fails in this one respect, no true language
can be said to exist ... if there is no semantic transfer from one mind to
another, speech resolves itself into a series of noises ... incapable of being
referred to the thought centers for interpretation” (1962: 109).

Expanding the Richness of Our Communications Environment

Not content with the scientifically measurable details of a tree's height,

diameter, and color, human observers wish to communicate their observa¬
tions in considerably more depth and detail. Is it a dead and barren
hulk buffeted by the harsh winds of January? Or is it a stately, ancient
oak spreading protective arms over a family picnic on a warm summer's
evening? What emotional response does the tree evoke in the observer?
Do its leaves whisper in a voice that speaks of other days? These things
296 Macy, Anderson, and Krygier

matter, as the tellers of tales and the painters of pictures have long realized
as they searched constantly for more effective ways to communicate subtle
shades of meaning.
We could reasonably argue that each increase in the complexity of
our communications vehicles—the moves from pictographic languages to
abstract alphabets or from cave painting to digital image manipulation—
has been motivated by a desire to improve the range and richness of
meaning we can share. Incomplete communication of meaning may be
adequate for everyday life, but humans appear driven to find more com¬
plete expressions of their experiences.
The introduction of each innovation in communications has brought
new potential for realizing this aspiration. Advances in the subtlety and
complexity of language have been followed by technologies that, in turn,
vastly extended the reach of human minds. New capabilities, however,
may also introduce new limitations. For example, face-to-face human
speech provides speakers with an opportunity to express themselves visu¬
ally as well as verbally, by using facial expressions, body language, and
tone of voice to enhance the richness of the semantic content. Books and
telegraph wires extend the physical distance across which a person may
express semantic content but eliminate visual and aural information that
may be integral to meaning. The telephone preserves changes in the tone
of voice but disembodies the speaker and precludes the exchange of visual
information. Even two-way video communication, which reintroduces the
visual element across long distances, is unable to convey the subtle and
undefinable meanings sometimes discernible by such sophisticated human
senses as taste, smell, or tactility.

The Potential of Interactivity

Interactive programs running on personal computers provide a singular

combination of new tools to enhance the communication of meaning.
They can present visual, verbal, and aural information and have the added
advantage of giving users access to huge databases of supporting informa-
297 Interactivity and Meaning

tion. Nonetheless, they too have their limitations. They still lack the true
interactivity of two independent intelligences exchanging ideas. Because
they cannot yet replicate direct human-to-human interactions, we must
classify interactive programs with books and cave paintings. It is possible,
however, that algorithms sophisticated enough to endow computer pro¬
grams with some level of “intelligence" will be developed in the future.
Rather than permitting them to simply parrot the content installed by
their human authors, programs will be able to combine new input with
existing data, reach independent conclusions, and create original ideas—
making them truly interactive.
Even today's (early) versions of interactive programming greatly enhance
the possibilities for human communication. By adding more powerful
tools for writers, artists, and musicians, computers have increased the
potential for sharing meaning. By offering users access to a superset of
information and a richer context for an author's message, interactive pro¬
grams improve readers' ability to understand the intended meaning. And,
if the authors of interactive programs are willing to make information
easily available, these programs can give users the freedom to explore a
world of new ideas.
Access to such a wealth of information, therefore, is affected by at least
two gating factors: the thoroughness of authors' identification and inclu¬
sion of relevant information; and, even more important, their willingness
to share control of the ultimate result.

Sharing the Control of Meaning

If we define the spoken communication of meaning as a process that

includes the situation in which the speaker utters a sound, the sound
itself, and the hearer's response,

Speaker's situation —> Speech —> Hearer's response

then a similar exchange between an interactive program and its user

should also include these elements—plus the numerous other possibilities
298 Macy, Anderson, and Krygier

for simultaneous communication of the message presented by the inter¬

active medium.

Author's intention —>

—> Visual message —> User's response
—> Verbal message —► User's response
—> Musical message —> User's response
—> Symbolic message —> User's response
—> Aural message —+ User's response

The introduction of this expanded potentiality can place an increasing

responsibility for reaching decisions about the program's meaning on the
shoulders of users. Each added level of informational richness may explain
the author's context more fully, or it may increase the possibility that
users will reach a conclusion about the program's meaning that is entirely
different from what the author intended. Early in the design process,
therefore, authors of interactive programs must make decisions about the
level of control they wish to maintain over their program.
Highly structured interactive environments allow the author to main¬
tain rigid control over meaning by allowing the least flexibility and the
smallest potential for user-supplied meaning. Although this type of pro¬
gramming can take advantage of some of the richness of the interactive
medium—primarily through the use of full-motion video or sound to sup¬
plement written material—it restricts its full potential. This approach may
be essential, however, when an author needs to communicate a sequence
of narrowly defined, tightly controlled ideas with little or no input from
the user. However, a linear presentation that allows the user to do nothing
more than turn the page is actually less interactive than a printed book,
which at least lets the reader skip to the end to find out "who done it." As
in all things, unwillingness to relinquish control can result in limited
gains.
For creators willing to share the creative process, and for authors wishing
to communicate abstract concepts that require user participation to define
their meaning, interactive programs offer broader horizons. The potential
299 Interactivity and Meaning

for user freedom in interacting with the information provided is almost

unlimited. The heightened freedom may mean loss of author control; or it
may increase the likelihood of users getting lost in the program's complex
interior structure; but it also allows users to take full advantage of all the
available data.
Instead of marching through a linear series of data chunks and reaching
an inevitable conclusion, individual users can choose where, when, and
how they approach the information. At its best, the data supplied can be a
model of the larger matrix of information and experience that surrounded
the idea in its author's mind. And in the same way that we explore our
own past experiences for information to make sense of a new event, users
of an interactive program can explore its informational structure in search
of the supporting data needed to understand it.
Interactive computer programs have the potential to convey meaning
more accurately than any other communications medium yet devised.
They offer a richness and range of data that mimics, on a small scale, the
matrix of information that surrounds our own ideas. When we attempt to
communicate meaning by using such a program, we are no longer forced
to launch our thoughts into the unknown, alone and unsupported. Instead,
we can find the ideas we seek to understand surrounded by familiar sights,
sounds, and friends and supported by a wealth of data that validates and
confirms their meaning.

References

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language, 2nd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Pei, Mario. 1962. Voices of Man: The Meaning and Function of Language. New York: Harper
& Row.
 Structural Ambiguity: An Emerging Interactive
Aesthetic

Jim Casperini

In recent decades various literary and dramatic artists have experimented

with ways to make the role of the audience more active. Although com¬
puter technology now makes it possible to develop a true interactive aes¬
thetic, grafting interactivity onto earlier forms of narrative is like making a
movie with a fixed camera: it fails to take advantage of the essential power
of the medium.

Interactivity in Literature and the Theater

The first interactive work I remember hearing about was a French novel of
the 1950s. It originally came in a box, printed one chapter per page, with
instructions to shuffle the chapters and read them in any order. Intrigued
by the concept, I hunted down a copy at my college library, only to find
the pages firmly bound together like every other book, a victim of the
indiscriminate efficiency of a library binding service.
Since then we have seen such partially interactive works as Julio
Cortazar's Hopscotch (1966), a novel with a number of "optional” chapters
that readers can read or skip at their own discretion, and, more recently,
Milorad Pavic's "lexicon novel,” The Dictionary of the Khazars (1988),
whose many short chapters may be read in a variety of sequences.
Numerous reader-active books, the first and best known of which is
302 Gasperini

Edward Packard's Superbike (1995) in the Choose Your Own Adventure

series, allow children to choose from among several different plot lines at
the end of each chapter.
In the theater, this century has seen numerous attempts to alter the
aesthetic distance between audience and performer. As part of a play
within a play in his Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922), Luigi
Pirandello placed a simulated audience within the real audience to rein¬
force the emotional link between audience and actors. In his theory of
epic theater, Bertolt Brecht continually fought the notion that people in
the audience were simply observers of an aesthetic object. He searched for
ways to break down the veil of illusion, make the experience of theater
instructive as well as entertaining, and stir the audience to action in the
here-and-now. Toward the end of his life, asked whether the theater was
still an adequate means of representing the modern world, Brecht replied
yes, the world can be represented on the stage, but only if it is portrayed
as veranderbar (changeable).
Playwrights and directors continue to experiment with ways of altering
the distance between actors and audience. In the theatrical version of
The Mystery of Edwin Drood the audience is offered the opportunity to select
one of a number of endings (a device Brecht used several decades earlier).
The Living Theater, among others, continues the Brechtian antitradition
into our times. At performances of several recent plays (Tamara, Tony'n
Tina's Wedding), the audience mingles with the actors, choosing what
aspect of the story they want to observe at what time.

Limitations

Interactivity in book form suffers from a severe technological limitation:

the page does not change. Readers' decisions can have very little impact
on the way the story unfolds. Varying the order in which a story's
chapters are printed may affect readers' perceptions of individual chapters;
but as reading a particular chapter has no effect on how later chapters
read, the author's ability to build contrasting chains of choice and conse¬
quence is very limited.
303 The Role of Ambiguity in Multimedia Experience

Interactivity in the theater suffers from different practical limitations.

The choice of endings in Edmund Drood, coming at the very end of the
play, is more of a gimmick than a true effort to involve the audience in
the writing process. While the audience walking around the set of Tamara
undoubtedly experiences the characters' world differently than it would in
a conventional play, the essential plot structure is unaffected by anything
audience members do. Though these works allow an unusual degree of
audience participation, they are not truly interactive.
Actors' improvisational workshops, of course, call for a high degree of
interactivity. So, in a more limited way, do the skits of certain comedians
and the performances of improvisational troupes. Giving the audience
control over the plot development of a full-length commercial production,
however, would mean advance preparation for a dauntingly broad range of
possible audience suggestions. The enormous expense involved—not to
mention the extraordinary demands such a production would make on the
actors—ensures that the theater will remains dominated by linear plot
lines and audiences that quietly watch the spectacle unfold.

Performance in a Computer-generated World

Enter the computer. Computer technology allows us to create elaborate

simulated worlds within which players have considerable freedom of
action. They are given the general outlines of a character and told to
improvise their reactions to a simulated environment, simulated props,
and other (sometimes simulated) characters. Although a computer¬
generated interactive simulation is a performance medium, it differs from
other performance media in that the audience is also the protagonist. An
interactive work, by definition, first presents a player with some sort of
choice, then with the consequences of that choice. It therefore takes place
over time and allows for construction of a plot, which gives it at least
some kinship with other forms of narrative. Like drama, the interactive
work may also provide encounters with simulated characters, although, as
we will see later, "characters" may take unusual forms.
304 Gasperini

While analogies to the theater and to literature are useful, they are
inexact. By erasing the distinction between audience and performer, stories
told using computer technology have made a radical break with both tra¬
ditions of storytelling. But what is it about these technologically sophisti¬
cated role-playing exercises that make them more like short stories than,
say, like a game of charades? One answer may be found by taking a close
look at one of the key techniques of narrative: ambiguity.

Structural Ambiguity

The depth of a narrative work's ambiguity is a good measure of its quality.

The richer the work, the more it resonates with ambiguous meanings.
In any work, we can distinguish three different levels of ambiguity: two
familiar levels and one that is quite new.
The first level, textual ambiguity, appears in texts presented on a printed
page or on a screen. A metaphor, a word or phrase with a surface meaning
that also points to something else, is this sort of ambiguity; it means at
least two things at once. The celebrated definitions in William Empson's
Seven Types of Ambiguity are all variants on textual ambiguity. According to
Empson, ambiguity is "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives
room to alternative reactions to the same piece of language" (1947: 1). In
some forms of writing (e.g., technical writing, journalism) the opposite of
ambiguous is precise. In creative writing the opposite of ambiguous is dull.
Another level of ambiguity, interpretive ambiguity, comes into play when
words appear as part of a theatrical performance. The same role may be
interpreted in radically different ways. One actor may portray Hamlet as an
indecisive introvert, another as an impotently raging victim of Oedipal
conflict, and a third as a suicidal misanthrope. The contributions of
the director, set designer, and others also influence the way the audience
understand the work. One way to distinguish a great play from a merely
good one is by the degree to which it lends itself to different inter¬
pretations, so that actors and audience alike will wish to experience the
play again in a different guise.
305 The Role of Ambiguity in Multimedia Experience

A truly interactive work offers a third level of ambiguity, structural ambi¬

guity, which arises from the role the audience plays in creating the plot.
Rather than building a nuanced experience from the meanings of words
and phrases, or from a dramatic interpretation, structural ambiguity con¬
structs meaning from alternative possibilities of choice and consequence as
they are played out over time.
There are two types of this structural ambiguity: closed-ended and open-
ended. In the former, certain "apparent” ambiguities are first raised in
the player's mind and then resolved. The work becomes less and less am¬
biguous as play progresses. In the latter, ambiguity deepens as the work
unfolds. The open-ended type of ambiguity has the greatest potential for
creating richness of meaning. However, as closed-ended ambiguity is used
in most current computer game narratives, we will discuss it first.

Closed-ended Structural Ambiguity

Typical "twitch” games, including most Nintendo and arcade-style com¬

puter games, depend principally on learning to perform a hand-to-eye co¬
ordination task. The game presents players with a series of obstacles,
sometimes stringing them together into a simple story and sometimes not
bothering with plot at all. The player learns when to zig, when to zag,
where to put the falling trapezoid, how to kill the bats, how to deal with
endlessly sprouting mushrooms. It's stretching a point to call this process a
resolution of ambiguity, so let me quickly pass on to firmer ground.
A better example of closed-ended ambiguity may be seen in the type of
game known as adventure or interactive fiction, stories that proceed accord¬
ing to what I call a resistant plot. The player takes on a role within an
imaginary world filled with apparent ambiguities that he or she must
resolve. By overcoming obstacles or solving puzzles—for example, discov¬
ering the hidden usefulness of simulated objects or learning how to
change the behavior of a character—the player advances the plot. Since
the original Adventure was invented by a pair of computer scientists named
306 Gasperini

Crowther and Woods in the mid-1970s, the genre has seen considerable
refinement in graphical imagery and application to varied subject matter.
One problem with resistant-plot stories is that they demand a great leap
of faith. The player must spend a considerable amount of time struggling
to make something happen without being sure that the end result will be
interesting. Many people are understandably reluctant to spend a good
chunk of their lives beating their heads against imaginary walls. As a
former writer and player of interactive fiction, my own current feeling
about this kind of computer game is best summed up by a line from
Voltaire: "Life is too short to learn German."
Even in the best interactive fiction, once all the puzzles have been
solved the plot is revealed in all its naked linearity. A finished closed-
ended work is like a punctured balloon, empty of all ambiguity. There is
little reason for anyone to go through it again.

Open-ended Structural Ambiguity

By contrast, an open-ended work becomes more ambiguous, not less so,

the more it is played. It is through repeated experiences, comparing the
different plots chosen through the same web of potential plots, that a
work becomes most meaningful. This can be most clearly seen in the genre
known as simulations. Here, again, we must distinguish between different
uses of a term.
Classic computer simulations are designed as serious analytical tools, or
as a means for training people in specific tasks. Setting up a model of a
real-world system (e.g., a power plant, an airport control tower, an all-
terrain vehicle) allows players and designers to examine the workings of
that system. They can test modifications on the model before putting
them into actual practice, identify potential problems, or learn their jobs
in an environment where mistakes cause no real damage.
Narrative simulations, however, are designed with more broadly didactic
and expressive goals in mind. By playing a role within a simulated system,
players can explore the system the author has modeled and experience the
307 The Role of Ambiguity in Multimedia Experience

underlying conflicts, powers, and constraints that are peculiar to that role
in the real world. Two examples of this type of simulation are Sim City by
Will Wright and Maxis Software and my own Hidden Agenda, written with
TRANS Fiction Systems.
Sim City puts the player in control of a landscape, which begins as a
bucolic stretch of riverbank seen from the air. As you create residential
areas, roads, power plants, and industrial districts, the city quickly comes
alive. Little houses start to appear once people (the sims) move in. Soon
the sims may be seen going back and forth to work in cars and commuter
trains. Opinion polls tell you how they feel about your skill at managing
their city. They complain about taxes, demand that you spend more on
police and fire protection, and plead for emergency aid in the aftermath of
floods and earthquakes.
Hidden Agenda also puts the player in a position of power, this time as
the president of a fictitious Central American country (figure 13.1). The
action takes place as encounters with various characters, who are repre¬
sented by photographic images and bits of dialogue about policy choices
you must make. These characters—representing political parties, Army
factions, social groups, professions, economic classes, other nations, and
international agencies—all try to convince you to follow their policy
agendas (figure 13.2). If they grow impatient or disillusioned with your
leadership, they may take action on their own.
These two games present the world very differently—one through a
graphical representation of a growing metropolis, the other through words
and background graphics that express the changing positions taken by
various characters (figure 13.3). They are alike, however, in inducing
players to feel increasingly responsible and ambiguous about the effect
they can have on a virtual culture. Players inevitably measure each city
they build in Sim City against the variant cities they might have built had
they made other choices. The city itself—"your" city, which you may
name for yourself if you so desire—becomes a kind of character for whose
growth, problems, and personality you feel directly responsible. Since
you can save and copy the city at any point, you can build two or more
308 Gasperini

Hidden Agenda
Season

CONSULTATIONS CONTACTS

ENCOUNTERS LOGBOOK REPORTS

SAVE RESTORE HELP

Ett ivi-ivl-i-ivivivi-ivl-ivivimvl

Figure 13.1
Hidden Agenda, An Interactive Game of Political Choices.

variants on the same city and observe the effects of even minor mod¬
ifications of policy.
In Hidden Agenda the player's choices incrementally construct one plot
out of an extremely varied number of potential plots. For example, mid¬
way through the game, El Presidente can decide to hold elections;
depending on other choices made along the way, various things happen
during the election season. Sometimes events play out as they did in
El Salvador's 1982 and 1984 elections: with terrific violence, assassination
of leftist candidates, strong right-wing army control of the process, and
proclamations by the United States that the results are a triumph for
democracy (figure 13.4). Sometimes they play out more as they did in the
1984 Nicaraguan elections: with minimal violence, withdrawal of rightist
candidates, strong left-wing army control of the process, and U.S. officials
denouncing the results as fraudulent.
309 The Role of Ambiguity in Multimedia Experience

Hidden Agenda
"Much of the best land in Chimerica stands idle,
kept fallow by a few absentee speculators who
live in Miami and collect their checks by mail.
Meanwhile, the majority of our population
struggles to subsist, with no land of their own at
all.

"It is time for a thorough land reform program to

give a share of power and wealth to the landless
laborers and subsistence farmers."

Julio Olivares Las Casas

Agriculture Minister
Reconsider Proposal

( Accept this fiduice

Put Proposal on Agenda J

"My advice: Announce plans to give power and \ i (gx

wealth to the poor through a land reform program1
Y
Figure 13.2
The Agriculture Minister, A Character in Hidden Agenda.

As the author, I am of course making several ironic points in this

example, points that the interactive structure amplifies and sets in context.
Each time a player completes the election campaign, he or she naturally
compares what happened this time and what happened during earlier
elections. These comparisons serve to deepen the player's awareness of the
range of available structural possibilities.
In both simulations, it is up to you to decide whether you have "won"
or "lost.” Sim City's extremely open-ended format lets you follow the
progress of your city through the centuries, whereas in Hidden Agenda your
term as president is limited to three years (if you are not overthrown in a
coup or voted out of power). Regardless of how your term of office ends,
the simulation concludes with an encyclopedia entry supposedly written
far in the future. This "Verdict of History" details what you tried to do and
describes the results, but it is up to you to interpret this verdict and eval-
310 Casperini

Hidden Agenda

Vicente Castillo Ayala

Owner of 400-acre cotton farm "Los Chiles" and Cotton Cultivator
part owner of several other farms in Trinidad Continue This Encounter
province. President of ACCA, the Chimerican.
Association of Cotton Cultivators. Member of one Ha<i(l Bi<K|r<iptn|
of the "nineteen families" long dominant in
Chimerican life, both second cousin and Encounter Someone Else j
brother-in-law of the current leader of the _
Rosarios.

Advising: Agriculture Minister_

feriMi f
Figure 13.3
A Prominent Chimerican Land Owner, A Character in Hidden Agenda.

uate your successes and failures according to your own set of priorities
(figure 13.4).

Authored Interactivity or Game?

The author of a novel or play, of course, does more than string together
sequences of ambiguities. The ambiguous elements must have at least a
surface coherence and be informed by some encompassing vision. Can the
designers of simulation games do something similar? Can we describe
these works as “authored”?
I believe we can. Though most simulation games offer schematic ren¬
derings of the essential processes of real-world systems, exactly which
processes are incorporated into the model and exactly how they play out is
a matter of artistic choice that reflects the author's own understanding and
311 The Role of Ambiguity in Multimedia Experience

USA Yesterday
ALL THE NEWS THE NATION NEEDS

...the streets of Poyais became one endless

parade as enthusiastic crowds
demonstrated their hopes for the future by
honking horns, waving banners and
joyfully traipsing through the city... the Oldest News
spontaneous bursts of affection reminded
an observer of the enthusiasm Corazon Back
Aquino met once Ferdinand Marcos had
finally left the Philippines... Nent
Newest News
Progress Charts

Figure 13.4
A News Report Screen from Hidden Agenda.

passions. The schematization allows players to participate in and under¬

stand within a short time processes that in the real world take place over
years, decades, or centuries. It also allows the designer to impose his or her
personality on the work as a whole. Although designers may honestly
attempt to model reality accurately and present controversial issues in a
balanced light, they inevitably construct works that at bottom represent
their own vision of the world.
A term already exists, of course, for imaginative exercises that ask a
player to actively perform a role: it is game. But this word covers so many
different activities, from charades to baseball to Monopoly, that using it in
this context tends to trivialize interactive programs. To many people the
word game suggests something entertaining but not serious—and certainly
not artistic. (Of course you could consider baseball, say, as a form of dance
with a set, familiar choreography on the theme of conflict, and a certain
312 Gasperini

range of interpretive freedom for individual performers. I suspect, however,

that few ballplayers would define themselves as movement artists.)
The assumption seems to be that since a game requires the player to
take some sort of action, it is inherently less dense with meaning than
forms directed toward a relatively passive audience. This assumption arises,
quite naturally, from our long familiarity with many types of games. From
earliest childhood we use games to amuse and instruct ourselves, starting
with the simplest and moving on to those of increasing complexity.
Whatever the main point of interest—which players win or lose, how
well they play the game, how much fun they have along the way, or how
much money they make—most games are simple sets of procedures for
taming and managing conflict and can be repeated over and over again.
Most interactive game designers have ceded so much control over out¬
comes that players can have very little sense of participating in someone
else's artistic vision.
Yet here I am, arguing that new technologies allow such exceptional
authorial control over an interactive experience that a "game" may be
designed with enough precision and depth to be considered a form of
narrative art. How can that be?

Wanted: Term for a New Category

Part of the difficulty is semantic. Once we find a name for this distinctive
category of experience, it will be easier to evaluate it on its own merits,
instead of endlessly distinguishing it from other things. Unfortunately,
all the words we use to describe authored interactive works—game, simu¬
lation, interactive fiction, multimedia presentation—are too broad; they point
(ambiguously!) in too many directions at once.
Take simulation, for example. If defined very broadly, a simulation of
human behavior presented by actors on a stage is called a drama, a play, a
theatrical experience, the stage, or histrionics. A simulation of human behav¬
ior we experience by reading words in a book or a periodical is a narrative,
literature, a novel, a short story, or fiction. A simulation of human behavior
313 The Role of Ambiguity in Multimedia Experience

experienced by watching patterns of flashing lights on a screen is called a

cinematic presentation, a motion picture, a movie, a television show, or a video.
Similarly, a simulation of human behavior experienced by interacting with
computer technology is called ... What? We sorely need a new term or
two. Interactive works are not subgenres of drama, fiction, or cinema—
they are a fourth thing entirely.

Strengths of the Medium

Every medium has its own peculiar strengths. Because simulating human
behavior interactively is so new, there are vast numbers of subjects that
have not yet been addressed. It is already clear, however, that one of the
medium's great strengths is its ability to show us the world from another
person's perspective. What does the world look like to a Latin American?
What powers come with the role of leader of a small country? What are its
limitations and constraints? There are interactive works that enable a
player to experience a day in the life of an Israeli, a typical Australian
neighborhood barbecue, and the life of a French gentleman during the
Enlightenment.
So far, most of these works have been designed for instructional pur¬
poses, offering players insights into sociology, language, and history. As
time goes on, we may use the interactive medium to help players develop
more personal insights. A game might explore, for example, what it is like
to be a woman on the edge of madness or a man in the midst of a midlife
crisis. Another might simply examine "what it is like to be me." There will
undoubtedly be propagandistic uses, with interactive Leni Riefenstahl's
creating strongly biased simulated worlds. Some interactive artists may
decide to use the new medium to look at subject matter traditionally
associated with narrative art. On the other hand, the interactive medium
may be able to deal with some aspects of human experience better than
traditional forms can. Questions of economic theory and political philoso¬
phy, for example, can be more easily woven into the narrative structure in
a medium that casts the audience in the role of protagonist.
314 Gasperini

Novels, plays, and films about men and women in public life usually
focus on the tension between the public and the private person. They do
so in part because these forms (at least as they are conventionally used)
work by inducing the audience to identify with and care about the prin¬
cipal characters. Because the audience of an interactive work no longer sits
to one side judging the way the protagonist meets various challenges,
authors can use the player's sense of direct responsibility for the charac¬
ter's actions to build emotional resonance.
That a work is built with structural ambiguity does not preclude the use
of other levels of ambiguity as well. 1 believe we will soon see an increas¬
ingly poetic use of textual ambiguity in interactive works and will recog¬
nize that interpretive ambiguity is a natural consequence of collaboration
between author and player. The effects of this collaboration may already
be seen in the tendency of complex simulated systems to behave in ways
their designers did not explicitly plan—a phenomenon known as emergent
behavior. For example, in some enactments of Sim City mature slums begin
to appear as the result of the choices made by some players.
Simulation games have the potential to accomplish some of the pur¬
poses Brecht sought to achieve in his experimental theatrical forms. The
interactive medium can inform while entertaining, make the audience an
active and aware participant, and illuminate the political and cultural
context within which audience and performance exist. In some games,
interactive players can choose to examine information in many different
formats (for example by viewing charts or newspaper reports), which is
arguably analogous to Brecht's technique of underlining the significance of
events by placing placards inscribed with statistics on stage.
Not all of Brecht's theatrical innovations were designed to break down
aesthetic distance. In fact, he fought against the idea that theatergoers
should lose themselves in the characters on the stage. By contrast, the
appeal of many computer games is precisely that they induce players to
lose themselves in a character—or, worse, in a sequence of pointless
aggressive actions. What Brecht would have thought of the interactive
375 The Role of Ambiguity in Multimedia Experience

medium is idle speculation. I suspect, however, that he would have hated

most current computer games.

Interacting with the Future

Although I firmly believe that computer games can be serious works of art,
I do not argue that the works produced so far do much more than hint at
that possibility. Serious art not only evokes emotion, it also embodies its
creator's own authentic emotions. Just how deeply the interactive medium
will probe into the human psyche and the human condition remains to be
seen. Are we witnessing the birth of a new art form, one that holds out
the promise of expressing the tenor of our times? Or will interactivity
develop into a new kind of hype, a way to sell us the illusion of control
while packaging a safely neutered rebellion against the enforced passivity
of so much of our current culture? It may well be both.
Most members of the audience remain unprepared to look beyond the
immediate gratification of closed-ended games devoted to trivial themes.
As the generations growing up with interactive entertainment mature,
however, the medium will mature along with them.
Moreover, the medium is very new, and still cumbersome to work with.
Designers face a constant struggle simply to keep the logical nature of our
primary tools from dominating our thought processes. After all, computers
really only know how to count to one; everything else is illusion. The
challenge is to build works that aspire to some artistic purpose in a context
set by the binary thinking of computer programs—to somehow use logical
computers to recreate human fuzziness.
Perhaps it is inevitable that this new form of narrative arose in the age
of quantum mechanics. Physicists tell us that what we take to be solid
matter is only a reflection of our limited perceptions; that time may be
bidirectional; that things can be simultaneously true and untrue; and that
it is entirely possible to create and destroy alternative universes. Maybe the
way the interactive medium plays with ambiguities in the structure of
experience mirrors the way we have come to view our universe. Perhaps
316 Casperini

our cultural imagination is only following, in crude and timid fashion, our
innate sense of the ambiguity of existence as it molds the structure of our
dreams.

References

Cortazar, Julio. 1966. Hopscotch. New York: Pantheon.

Empson, William. 1947. Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2nd ed. New York: New Directions.

Packard, Edward. 1995. Superbike. Milwaukee: Gareth Stevens.

Pavic, Milorad. 1988. The Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words.
New York: Knopf.

Pirandello, Luigi. 1922. Six Characters in Search of an Author. In Three Plays by Luigi
Pirandello. New York: Dutton.
14 Sculpting with Zeroes and Ones

Steve Holtz man

Sculptors are taught to respect the material they work with. If the material
is clay, the sculpture should look like clay. If it is stone, the sculpture
should have the weightiness of stone. If it is steel, it should reflect the
strength of steel. Sculptors also learn to take into consideration how light,
heat, cold, and the environment interact with their material, knowledge
that helps them unleash its expressive potential. The sculptor Henry
Moore believed that "Every material has its own individual qualities. It is
only when the sculptor works direct, when there is an active relationship
with his material, that the material can take its part in the shaping of an
idea" (quoted in Burnham: 95).
The grandeur of Michelangelo's sculptures reflect the color and scale of
his massive blocks of marble. Rodin's sculptures emerge from slabs of
rough unpolished stone to harness the raw power of their weight and im¬
mobility. Present-day sculptors such as Richard Serra slice through open
space with massive sheets of steel whose surfaces—when exposed to the
air—are thickly coated with layers of red-brown rust.
The information designers of the future will also need to consider the
materials they work with as they sculpt their digital worlds. Peeling back
the layers of structure from the surface of digital worlds ultimately reveals
the lowest level of abstraction in digital form: the Os and Is of binary
code. Creation in the world of digital media is a process of designing
318 Holtzman

information—in the sense of information defined by Claude E. Shannon

some sixty years ago.

Information Theory

Claude Shannon was a precocious research student at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology when, in 1937, at the age of twenty-one, he made
the breakthrough that laid the foundation for the digital computer. He
demonstrated in his master's thesis that both the Is and Os of Boolean
algebra and the various Boolean operations that could be applied to
process them (e.g., addition, subtraction, and the logical and, or, and not
operations) could be represented by electrical switches that were either on
or off. Using webs of electronic relays and switches and following the rules
of Boolean logic, he could create a binary string—the input—that could
be processed to create another string—the output. With this insight, the
binary world of digital technology was born.
Eleven years later, Shannon, who was then working at Bell Laboratories,
published "A Mathematical Theory of Information." He suggested that,
while science after Einstein had come to focus on the relationship between
energy and matter (E = me2) measured in electron volts and grams, it had
overlooked information. He proposed that information was a phenomenon
as fundamental as energy and matter that could also be quantified and
studied as a thing in itself (Shannon and Weaver, 1949). His theory out¬
lined how information could be measured in bits—the number of Os and
Is required to represent a piece of information in binary code.
Shannon's Bell Labs research was focused on finding the most efficient
way to send messages through wires or space that prevented them from
being garbled by random noise. When he considered the problem of
quantifying information, he was thinking, in particular, of information in
the form of words and numbers.
How many bits does it take to represent a (text) message? For example, if
you want to distinguish among 128 different symbols—say, the 52 upper-
and lower-case characters of the alphabet, the ten numeric characters 0
379 Sculpting in Zeroes and Ones

through 9, all the punctuation marks, and the various other symbols you
might need for a message—you can represent each one by a unique com¬
bination of seven bits (27 equals 128). Thus a word made up of five char¬
acters (or symbols) would require thirty-five bits of information, and a
sentence of a hundred characters would require seven hundred bits of
information. The more information there is, the larger the number of bits
needed to represent it.
In Shannon's definition, information is derived from the structure of
the bits. It is the inverse of randomness: if there is no structure to the
arrangement of the bits—that is, if the bits are randomly organized—there
is no information. To the extent that there is structure, there is infor¬
mation. In Shannon's information theory, information is the structur¬
ing of bits. In the digital context, therefore, when the computer becomes
a tool of human expression, that expression is a product of designing
information-as-it-was-defined-by-Shannon. Anyone creating structure in
any digital form is, literally, an information designer.

Chameleons of the Julia Set

The fundamental materials of today's information designer are strings of Is

and Os. The material of digital worlds is digital information—nothing else.
Only the sequence of bits turns it from incomprehensible data—strings of
Is and Os that we cannot interpret directly—to the vivid experience of a
digital world. Only the form of the data distinguishes information from
random noise.
To better understand how the work of today's digital sculptors is shaped
by this ethereal material, I visited the studio of J. Michael James in the
rolling hills of Sunol in northern California. I asked him why, given his
training in traditional sculpture, he chose to work in a virtual medium.
James replied, "My drive for self-expression requires digital media. I have a
fascination with fractal structures. All sorts of fractal forms fly around in¬
side of my head all the time. Yet, even though nature creates fractal forms,
there's no way outside of the virtual for me to work with them for per-
320 Holtzman

sonai self-expression. I can't actualize my ideas in any other medium"

(James 1996).
The view out the window—a red-tailed hawk circling above the dry
brown grasses and craggy oaks—is a stark contrast to the interior of his
studio, which is cluttered with technology. James creates his virtual sculp¬
tures on a network of Intel Pentium computers. He has removed the covers
of the machines and stacked them to one side. Exposing the computers'
guts facilitates the removal and insertion of various components. James is
constantly adding faster graphics cards, bigger disk drives, more RAM, and
new motherboards, along with upgrades of the latest processor, in his
continuing attempt to satiate the demands of his virtual art. A tangle of
cables connect graphics tablets, scanners, joysticks, and other devices to
his computers.
Yet James's studio isn't so much what I see scattered across the room
but, rather, what sits within his computers—in cyberspace. I peer into this
virtual studio through a twenty-one-inch color-correct monitor and see his
Chameleons of the Julia Set (figure 14.1). Iridescent chameleons hang from a
wall in virtual space, and I see that they are structured in the form of a
fractal spiral I recognize as the Julia set.1 As I push the joystick to view it
from the side, the three-dimensionality of the sculpture becomes evident.
The chameleon-vine clings like ivy to the polished white sheet of a wall
(figure 14.2).

The Digital Design of a Chameleon

Rather than using a hammer and chisel, James shapes his chameleons with
computer software for digital design. His tools include software for creating
three-dimensional forms, utilities for digitally scanning photographs and
graphics, various "plug-in" modules for processing digital images, and
programs that perform the complex calculations required to simulate even
the simplest lighting effects.
The structure of James's unnatural sculpture originates with a single
chameleon clinging to a branch. He peels back the texture-mapped veneer
321 Sculpting in Zeroes and Ones

Figure 14.1
Chameleons of the Julia Set by J. Michael James.

of one chameleon to show me the "wireframe" that maps its contours

(figure 14.3). To demonstrate how he creates a chameleon, James begins by
scanning in a picture of a chameleon seen in profile. He then takes the
scanned image and digitally processes it to create a vector representation—
that is, a representation of the profile as a series of connected straight
lines. This gives him a two-dimensional outline of a slice down the middle
of his chameleon from nose to tail.
To create a three-dimensional form, James then uses his mouse to make
a copy of the profile and to point to, click, and drag the connecting points
of the vectors of this second outline to form a profile of the chameleon as
seen from half way between the center and its side. He creates a third
322 Holtzman

Figure 14.2
Side View of the Three-dimensional Chameleons Sculpture.
323 Sculpting in Zeroes and Ones

Figure 14.3
The "Wireframe" of a Single Chameleon.

profile half way again between the second profile and the side and, lastly,
a fourth set of vectors outlining the chameleon's side.
After positioning the slices parallel to one another in layers, James
instructs the computer to stretch a virtual skin across the two-dimensional
profiles, producing a transparent three-dimensional mesh surface of con¬
necting polygons. Each one of James's chameleons is made up of hundreds
of polygons.
Within the computer, the wireframe itself is a data structure defined as a
series of numbers representing the vectors that make up its form:

VERTEX

-238.767624 20 -234.272858 30 242.820145 70 192 0

VERTEX
-230.624588 20 -248.100037 30 246.640839 70 192 0
324 Holtzman

VERTEX

-230.777878 20 -262.700500 30 254.805893 70 192 0

VERTEX

-239.422287 20 -272.456177 30 264.313049 70 192 0

VERTEX

-251.660660 20 -271.826385 30 272.149475 70 192 0

VERTEX

-264.454071 20 -262.115295 30 275.486694 70 192 0

VERTEX

-269.094482 20 -247.592529 30 269.839233 70 192 0

VERTEX

-270.672424 20 -233.822052 30 262.358734 70 192 0

As James sculpts in virtual space, the computer processes the vector data to
redraw the morphing forms.
Having created a three-dimensional wireframe model of his chameleon
perched on a branch, James next digitally scans photographs of the skin of
a chameleon and the bark of a branch into the computer. He uses image-
processing software to manipulate the hues and saturation of the chame¬
leon's skin colors to give it an unnatural iridescence. He adjusts the
contrast of the tree bark only slightly. He then wraps the flat plane of
digital surface onto the naked wire structure in a process known as texture
mapping. He has now created the digital representation of his kernel cha¬
meleon (i.e., the basic form he will replicate to produce the complete
sculpture).

Creating the Julia Set

To create the larger structure of his sculpture, James forms a mirror image
of the chameleon by giving his computer a few simple instructions. He
325 Sculpting in Zeroes and Ones

then performs an affine linear transformation to produce a Julia set; that is,
he applies the quadratic iteration Z2 + C to each of the two chameleons
again and again until the representational image has been transformed
into an abstract form.
Rendering a single view consumes hours of computer time. Vector lists
must be processed for size and position and flat textures wrapped around
wireframes. The sculptor must direct the computer to calculate the lighting
reflections, taking perspective into account. The complex array of binary
numbers that represent the texture-mapped surfaces is processed by a series
of other computer instructions to ray trace the translucent lighting—a
process that is extremely computation-intensive.
Finally the computer presents the results of its computation. As we study
the virtual structure, rotating it, zooming in and out, I ask him what
would be involved in making a minor change—perhaps shrinking the
chameleon's width or tweaking its skin tones. After confirming that 1 was
only posing a hypothetical question, he smiles as he describes the flexi¬
bility of his virtual medium. "If this were, as they say, carved in stone,
making changes would be a major production, especially if you wanted to
restore a part that had already been cut away. That, of course, would be
impossible. But the virtual material I'm working with is incredibly mallea¬
ble. In the end, my sculpture is only made up of a string of bits, each of
which represents a dot of the image that creates the illusion of a virtual

world."
He types a series of instructions to the computer to show me the inter¬
nal binary representation of the sculpture within the computer. Hundreds
of thousands of zeros and ones fly across the screen.

001010100000000000000001000000110000000100010001000000010000010000
01101000000001000000010011110101000011100111000000000000000000000000
01111010100000011001011100000000110001011100000001111000100010100000
000 0010101100001010000 ...

He then goes on to explain, "My sculpture is a unique structure of 0s and

Is. At its essence, it's only digital information. To make a change, all I
have to do is instruct the computer, in effect, to reprogram it, to recom-
326 Holtzman

pute the sequence of Os and Is. It's when I want to make a change that
it's most clear to me that creating virtual sculpture is nothing like working
in stone or clay."

Virtual Substance

Digital technology has made possible new media that could not exist
without it. The sculptures of J. Michael James's virtual worlds are not made
of clay, or marble, or steel; they are the stuff of cyberspace. Their digital
representation, the binary data that define their structure, are nothing but
rows of numbers in a vector list. James sculpts his worlds out of Os and Is.
Yet, though he creates his works in a world that exists exclusively in the
digital domain, they are not without substance. They are made of infor¬
mation, which is now, in this Information Age, taking its rightful place
beside energy and matter as a fundamental shaper of the world we live in.
Of the three, only information is at the heart of who and what we are. It
is a manifestation of our humanity that, in digital form, is sculpting new
worlds. Self-expression in digital form is, literally, a process of information
design.

Notes

1. A fractal is a “self-similar" structure that is repeated perfectly within itself over and
over and with endless resolution to create a larger complex and beautiful structure.

References

Burnham, J. 1987. Beyond Modem Sculpture. New York: George Braziller.

James, J. M. 1996. Author's conversations with J. Michael James, May.

Shannon, C. E., and Weaver, W. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Information. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Personal Reflections on the Development of
Cyberspace

Simon Birrell

The recent arrival of real-time three-dimensional graphics for low-cost

personal computers appears to have been a boon for enthusiasts eager to
construct multiuser cyberspace—the Holy Grail of the Virtual Reality
community. There has been a flood of 3-D chat worlds released on to the
Internet, based around the various software-only rendering libraries,
including my own effort, MILENA. I was very proud indeed of its cool 3-D
graphics, created by artist Jose Maria Gonzalez. Jose spent a great deal of
time rendering images of moodily lit streets and buildings in 3-D Studio
and then importing them into the RenderWare scenes as textures. We
played with the transparency and wireframe features of the Tenderer in the
"rave" zone. And, grudgingly, we tried to cut down on our polygons to
keep the scene running in real time on hardware we liked to think of as
modest.
I'm therefore being a little perverse in this essay, as I would like to argue
that 3-D is not the key technology for cyberspace and that the emphasis in
our industry on flashy 3-D may actually be leading us down the wrong
technological paths. I think that our attention as a community should be
focused on other areas, and that we may be making hardware demands on
the end-users that are misguided.
Because, face it, 3-D graphics need a LOT of power. Many people reading
this book are computer professionals—whether programmers or design-
328 Birrett

Figure 15.1
A Virtual Teapot.

ers—and are used to having their equipment upgraded at least annually.

But home users still using their 386s will be getting a very different
impression of the cyberspaces we are building them.

A Different Approach

Let us think about what is important in the development of cyberspace.

Let's take a specific example, that of a virtual teapot. What is the most
important thing we have to consider when constructing a virtual teapot
(figure 15.1)? I suspect that typical answers from the VRML (3-D software)
community might be

■ It should have a nice decorative texture wrapped around the model, so it

looks like my aunt's old teapot.

• It should have gourard shading to give it a rounded, chinalike surface.

• It should have a low polygon count, so that it can run in real time on
normal PCs.

These are all interesting answers. And all wrong. The most important
thing about a virtual teapot is that it should make tea.
A teapot is not a teapot because it is red, blue, textured, or even round.
A teapot is a teapot because it makes tea. It may be a square teapot. It may
329 Personal Reflections on the Development of Cyberspace

- pick up method
- break method
- make tea method

Figure 15.2
A Platonic Teapot.

even be modeled in the shape of a human head with a long nose acting as
a spout. It is still a teapot, providing that we can make tea with it. The
point is that we should consider virtual objects by what they are and what
they do, not by what they look like. The physical model or representation
of our virtual object should be a secondary characteristic.
Let us consider an alternative way to represent a virtual teapot (figure
15.2). Plato believed that all the objects that we see in the world around us
are but reflections, or imperfect versions of a perfect "divine" object
inhabiting some celestial nonphysical realm. In other words, all teapots on
earth are but imperfect versions or variations on the single divine, essential
teapot. The essence of this divine teapot is its ability to make tea. It is
quite clear that Plato had in mind the intricacies of cyberspace develop¬
ment, as this is a useful and practical way to think about the problems we
are trying to solve.
Plato's most famous analogy was that of The Cave. Consider a cave with
a fire in the center, and imagine that there are animals and people moving
around the fire. They cast great moving shadows on the walls of the cave.
Now imagine that we, as terrestrial observers, are also in the cave. Our
faces are turned to the wall, facing away from the beings moving around
the fire. In our ignorance, we imagine the moving shadows to be the real
thing and forget that they are cast by real, "essential" objects out of our

sight.
The real objects moving around the fire are the "real” virtual teapots,
and the shadows are their 3-D representations. VRML-like software simply
renders the shadows, ignoring the real objects, and, even worse, is now
330 Birrell

Figure 15.3
A Platonic Teapot and Its Physical Model.

trying to push the shadows around by adding "behaviors." Behaviors are

not something that should be tacked onto a 3-D model as an afterthought;
behaviors define what that object is. The 3-D model is thus "attached" to
the real object (figure 15.3).
What does all this buy us?
First of all, it is clear that we can have multiple types of representation
for users who all share the same world. The lucky Silicon Graphics user
can see a beautiful 3-D, zillion-polygon rendered teapot. Other users might
have a simpler model, or even a two-dimensional icon on their desktops.
Yet others might see the same teapot on their terminals as the message
"There is a teapot here" (figure 15.4). Intel is working on this project.
Second, focusing on the essence of an object simplifies many of the
problems we may come across in simulating worlds. Certain aspects of
physics can be modeled as a graph of relationships connecting objects
with methods, ("the teapot IS ON the table"), rather than having to worry
about perfectly reproducing all the dynamics of the real world.
Thirdly, this solution allows for different types of representations for
different problems. Many of the arguments that have flared across the
mailing lists are of the type "if we implement feature X then my game
won't run fast enough," or "if we don't implement feature X then I won't
be able to make my virtual wind tunnel work properly." The underlying
assumption behind these arguments is that there exists a single represen¬
tation suitable efficient for both a wind tunnel and a game. Perhaps we
331 Personal Reflections on the Development of Cyberspace

\ 3D Teapot
\
\
\
2D Teapot

There is a teapot here.

TextTeapot

Figure 15.4
Multiple Physical Representations of a Teapot.

should work on multiple graphical solutions that are optimized for differ¬
ent problem domains.
Finally, with the ever-increasing demands on our hardware from 3-D
graphics removed (or at least put to one side for a while), we could turn
our attention to all the other, burning issues of multiuser consistency, data
availability, and behavior modeling.

Pioneering Work

As an example of what can be achieved in cyberspace development, I'd

like to describe a computer game made four years ago that 1 helped work
on and show that it implements many of the technologies that we should
be concentrating on today.
The game in question, called Jekyll & Hyde, was made at the now-defunct
Palace Software in London. It was designed and programmed by a brilliant
332 Birrell

Figure 15.5
A Screen Shot of the Jekyll & Hyde World.

young programmer called Chris Stangroom and was an example of what

we then called adventure games, and that are now called interactive fiction.
Most modern interactive fiction has followed the same path as current
cyberspace work and concentrated almost exclusively on adding ever-more-
sophisticated graphics to a fairly simple core program. They are usually
based on tree structures of decision points, in which the user chooses from
among a set of predetermined paths through story space, each one accom¬
panied by flashy multimedia presentations. In no sense can we consider
this type of game to be a “world.”
Jekyll & Hyde worked on a different principle (figure 15.5). It was a sim¬
ulation of a small, sixty-zone world that contained autonomous characters
(today we might say "agents") who moved from zone to zone and inter¬
acted with each other. Some characters were controlled by their own
internal programs—written in a custom-built interpreted language called
Character Control Language, (CCL)—while others were controlled by
human players through a menu interface. The descriptions of where you,
the player, were and what you saw were represented mostly as text.
Characters had basic behaviors, such as "defend yourself if attacked,”
and different people had more specific behaviors. They had goals, such as
333 Personal Reflections on the Development of Cyberspace

“work out the antidote to the magic potion,” for Dr. Jekyll or "make lots
of money through theft, blackmail, and extortion.” for the criminals. They
had emotional states and relationships with other characters that numeri¬
cally reflected levels of friendship, lust, suspicion, and so on. These values
were dynamic, altering the characters' behavior toward each other and
being modified by external events. Somebody might begin the game as
your friend but, if you persistently treated him badly, his feelings and his
behavior toward you would soon change.
From the point of view of the world simulation, there was no difference
between a character controlled by a user and a character controlled by a
CCL program; in current terminology, the avatars were treated in the same
way as the agents. This meant, for one thing, that it was trivially easy to
implement a command to switch characters at any point in the game. This
was fun, but we had to restrict the shifts to give the game some degree of
challenge. Otherwise, you could win a fight with an enemy by becoming
the enemy, killing yourself, then swapping back to your previous character.
It also means that things are going on in the background. While you as
a user are playing in one zone, two computer-controlled characters may be
fighting (or making love) in another zone. This made the game difficult to
test. As Dr. Jekyll, you might send the CCL-governed delivery boy off to
fetch a much-needed ingredient. On the way back from the chemist,
however, he might be mugged by a CCL-governed thief, who sells the
ingredient and spends the money down at the pub. All the game tester
would see is that the delivery boy has gone off and not returned. It was
hard to tell what was a bug, and what was a legitimate twist of fate
(figure 15.3).
That problem also threw up fascinating challenges to the way we could
provoke story situations for the player (although this is less relevant to
cyberspace development and ought to be the subject of another essay). In
Jekyll & Hyde we did not impose a story upon the world; all we could do
was set up the characters' initial relationships and goals and let them get
on with it. It was rather like trying to program an ant colony, and our
characters led us a merry dance.
334 Birrell

It seemed important—particularly after early testing with volunteers—

to stop players running amok throughout the world. We decided to do
this within the world system by simulating a police force rather than by
mechanically restricting players' freedom of action. With his cheerful dis¬
regard for what was generally assumed to be possible, Chris invented an
entire system of crime detection and investigation in which the police
could be either computer or user controlled. When a criminal act occurred
in the game, an "atom" of knowledge, which had attributes referring to
the aggressor, victim, time, and so on, was "instantiated." Any witness to
the crime would have a copy of that atom, or memory, and could pass
it on to other characters by gossiping or reporting it to the police. The
police, who were told these knowledge atoms, or who could partially con¬
struct them from examination of the scene of a crime, would move
through the world, questioning suspects and verifying their alibis. Notice
that this atom of crime knowledge is a first-class object within the world
design, although it is totally nonphysical. In no way does it represent the
"behavior" of a physical object.
fekyll & Hyde also featured such inanimate objects as safes, jewels,
money, fire, and teapots. Everything was represented by text, with the
occasional spot graphic. But we could still model basic physical relation¬
ships and properties in the manner described at the beginning of the
essay. "The teapot is on the table" can be modeled as two abstract objects
with a relationship between them. You could put an object inside another
objects—so that weighing the container would correctly return their com¬
bined weight—set fire to objects, break them, and so on.
Chris implemented liquids made by mixing of chemical ingredients
together. So ingredients such as mercury, acid, and water could be mixed
into a single liquid that would additively combine the properties of all
three. One day a games tester discovered an interesting side effect of this
capability. There was a pub in the game with a CCL-controlled barman
who served the other characters when they came in for a drink. The tester
discovered that you could pour the potion that turned Jekyll into Hyde
into the pub's beer barrel. This meant that from then on every character
335 Personal Reflections on the Development of Cyberspace

who came in for a nice glass of beer would instantly turn into a raving
maniac and that within a few minutes the game world would be littered
with dead bodies.
It's important to understand that this outcome was not explicitly pro¬
grammed into the game; it emerged as an unexpected consequence of the
way a high-level abstract physics had been programmed into the game.
It surprised and delighted the hell out of the programmer. This chance
appearance seems such a fundamental aspect of any really rich simulated
world that 1 believe we can offer it as a necessary condition for a virtual
reality:

A virtual world is not real unless it can surprise its own creator.

This all sounds great, but is it cyberspace? Surely one of the defining
characteristics of cyberspace is that it is multiuser?
Jekyll & Hyde was, in fact, a multiuser adventure. Up to four PCs, Amigas,
and STs could be connected into a ring by an eccentric use of the serial
port, and a player at each computer could control up to three characters—
all other characters being CCL-controlled. In designing Jekyll Sr Hyde Chris
met with, and resolved, many of the issues still being debated today in
discussions of multiuser world consistency. In summary then, Jekyll & Hyde
had:

■ A high-level abstract representation of the world, including relevant

physics

■ Autonomous agents with emotions, relationships, and goals

■ Avatars that could do the same things as agents, and vice versa

■ Multiuser consistency

■ The ability to surprise its own creator

This, to me, is a cyberspace, even if its interface is text-based and not 3-D.
It is richer, more interesting, more sophisticated, and more "real” than
anything I've seen on the Internet, or indeed anything I've seen on- or
off-line in my three years in the VR industry. I know of no other project,
336 Birrell

Figure 15.6
Chris Stangroom.

before or since, of equal scope. Chris's world seethed with a bizarre crowd
of madcap characters living out their brief existences according to their
own logical and moral precepts. They fell in love, got drunk, fought,
robbed, became sad, and got high on opium. Crimes were committed,
investigated, and solved. Clandestine encounters between adulterous char¬
acters were witnessed, gossiped about, and published in the newspaper.
And when they slept, you could read their dreams.
It was written, and it ran, on a 286 processor in one megabyte of
RAM.
In the summer of 1995 Chris Stangroom was robbed and killed while on
holiday. Shortly before then we had begun discussing the revival of the
fekyll & Hyde world engine as the basis for a new, on-line 3-D cyberspace
environment. It is maddening to think that such a person can be taken
from us for the sake of a few dollars. We can only guess at what he would
have achieved had he lived (figure 15.6).
337 Personal Reflections on the Development of Cyberspace

The Way Forward

Describing in hindsight why a particular information architecture was used

is a lot easier than instructing others how to design in the same way. The
design process seems to consist of endless reevaluations of what each soft¬
ware entity really is, which is another way of saying what it has to do. I
know another talented programmer who once spent days anguishing over
what the cursor in the word processing program he was writing really was.
Suddenly it came to him in a flash. The experience is like emerging from a
complicated mathematical problem and seeing a beautiful, simple result.
Steve Jobs once said that hard software problems always appear easy at first
glance. Then the programmer thinks about it for a bit and begins to realize
that it's actually much more complicated than he or she thought. Most
people stop there. However, if you keep thinking about the problem long
enough, it eventually becomes simple again.
It is critical that we develop a high-level, abstract way of modeling our
virtual worlds and use 3-D, or 2-D, or text as a window onto them. It's a
lot harder intellectually than spinning a few 3-D objects in a browser, but
the results will be cleaner, more beautiful, and more powerful in the end.
Surprisingly enough, it's feasible to do this on very modest platforms.
Exciting, rich multiuser environments over the Internet are achievable
today. My suspicion is that they will not be invented by the experts cur¬
rently pontificating about which kind of scripting language should be used
to push around their 3-D models. I suspect they'll be invented by some
brilliant kid without the money for a 3-D accelerator card who, with
youthful disregard for what ought to be possible on his machine, will
dream of making sophisticated, interesting, and fantastic worlds where we
can all work, live out our fantasies, and make tea.
Epilogue
16 Presenting Information

Jef Raskin

When Bob Jacobson asked me to write a chapter for this book, I hoped to
be here, batting in the clean-up position. On reading the other chapters,
I find that they accurately represent the diversity of the field—from fuzzy
New Age touchy-feely rantings to thoughtful studies. I believe that most
readers will find the practical pointers in the form of heuristics developed
by experienced practitioners to be especially valuable. Overall, although
some of the material is rather vague, at least the reader is always pointed
in the right directions.
One of the ways we increase the returns we receive from understanding
the world is by adapting our vocabulary to reflect our increasing knowl¬
edge. Humanity never would have progressed beyond building the most
primitive of mechanical engines if careful thinkers had not learned to dis¬
tinguish between energy, force, work, and power. These words are still used
loosely in everyday speech, but professional mechanical designers and
physicists use them carefully and with well-defined meanings. Professionals
in the field of information-related design will have to learn to be equally
careful. We must not allow sloppy thinking to muddy the deep waters we
find here at the meeting place of art, psychology, and electronic technol¬
ogy. Things are difficult enough as it is.
I was embarrassed to see a few of the authors in this book abusing terms
such as information, digital, and binary, seemingly unaware of their precise
342 Raskin

meanings and implications. If our field is to advance, we must, without

displacing creativity and aesthetics, make sure our terminology is clear.

There Is No Such Thing as Information Design

As a curmudgeon, I am delighted to point out that the very title of this

book, Information Design, is a misnomer. Information cannot be designed;
what can be designed are the modes of transfer and the representations
of information. This is inherent in the nature of information, and it is
important for designers to keep the concepts of information and meaning
distinct.
Information is an abstraction from any meaning a message might have
and from any particular form a message might take. In the 1940s, the
founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, moved information from
the realm of philosophers to that of physicists by showing that the term
could be given a clear definition. Not only could we define it, but, he
demonstrated, we could quantify information and treat it as a part of
physics, something I found amazing and eye-opening when I first read his
works. One of the ideas that Shannon established is that any piece of
information can be represented by a sequence of the elementary particles
of information, which we now call bits. The unit of information presents
us with a two-way choice: we can model a bit mentally as yes or no, green
or red, on or off, zero or one, and so on. The word bits was coined by the
mathematician John W. Tukey as a contraction of Binary digiTS, that is,
zeros and ones, the most commonly used mental model of the smallest
unit of information (Shannon and Weaver 1949: 9).
We can represent any piece of information as a sequence of bits or,
equivalently, as a sequence of characters in a text or a string of numbers in
base ten (or any other base). These mechanical rearrangements do not
change the information in any way. There is nothing special, with regard
to the content, about the binary (base two) representation of information,
although some people (even in this book) treat numbers in base two as
something almost mystical.
343 Rationalizing Information Representation

Similarly, there is nothing special about the digital representation of

information. If I take some information and translate it into a nondigital
(i.e. analog) form—say, voltages on a conductor or the frequencies of a
radio signal—that information remains unchanged. We can convert it back
and forth between analog and digital representations at will. In fact, every
time we use a modem to send e-mail over a telephone line we convert
digital information into analog form; yet nothing happens to the infor¬
mation from losing its digital cachet. The information is the same however
it is represented, and the identical message eventually appears on the
recipient's display, showing no evidence of ever having been in analog
form.
Readers should therefore disregard any use of the term digital in this
book when it is used to imply that the digital nature of some information
affects its the content or impact. The form of information storage or
transmittal—whether digital or analog, binary bits or decimal digits, or
in some other guise—is irrelevant to the issue of conveying meaning to
people. It is this issue that is the proper subject of this book.
You might ask: If any information can be represented as a finite sequence
of symbols, can we represent other aspects of the world, such as a one-
centimeter cube of pure gold or an infinitely long, nonrepeating decimal
like the square root of two, as information? We can. I just did. That
information can take the form of a bunch of numbers—or even the form
of words on a page—does not limit the content the information might
convey.
Even though information is an abstraction independent of form and
therefore cannot be designed, the way in which we represent information
to others is of crucial importance in communicating the meaning of the
information. The representation of the information is the plastic medium
with which we work. It would have been more appropriate to name this
book Designing Information Representation.
So, how do we represent particular information so that it has a desired
effect on the recipient? That it is possible to define the issue (and the field)
in this way depends on the fact that we can represent the same informa-
344 Raskin

tion in different ways and that some representations are more effective
than others. In addition, the particular effect we want to achieve can vary
a great deal.
This is where we—graphic designers, computer-interface specialists,
artists, musicians, sound technologists, lighting directors, cognitive psy¬
chologists, type designers, ergonomicists, and even mathematicians and
physicists—come in. It is our job to design the representation of informa¬
tion for human consumption.

Theory and Practice

Learning how to represent information effectively requires us to travel

along two complementary paths. One is the apprenticeship route, on
which we learn from the example of current and past practitioners. The
other path is the theoretical route, since understanding some theory—and
how to apply it—can shortcut much trial and error. I use theory in the
sense that scientists usually do, to mean an established body of knowledge,
rather than in the everyday sense of a tentative idea.
Some of the chapters in this book provide concrete examples of the
practice of representing information effectively. They represent the appren¬
ticeship path. To leverage further our designing efforts, we can build on
the foundations of information theory and cognitive psychology that
underlie the theoretical path. The right place to start on the second path is
with an examination of the audience for our information: people.

Ergonomics and Cognetics

In spite of technical advances, our access to external information has not

expanded beyond that provided by our senses of sight, hearing, touch,
smell, balance, and taste. Therefore, the first responsibility of the designer
is to know the limitations and capabilities of the human senses, a body of
knowledge usually considered part of ergonomics and the study of human
factors. A practitioner should know or have immediately to hand, for
345 Rationalizing Information Representation

example, the angular resolution of the human eye and how large lettering
must be for various colors, light levels, distances, and contrast ratios. We
need to know, for example: How fast can the eye move from point to
point? How long does it take to find a target visually? Under what con¬
ditions can we hear and understand speech (e.g., in terms of signal-to-
noise ratio), and what range of frequencies are easiest to hear? Which
typefaces are most readable? How much or how little pressure can we feel
on our fingertips and elsewhere on our bodies? How much force can a
human hand exert? In addition, we must know how all this data is
affected by human variables such as age and health.
At times, common sense and established practices are sufficient guides to
this knowledge. But be careful. Time and again, hallowed practices have
turned out to be less than optimal, and designers ignorant of ergonomics
have often failed to create products that work within the physical and
mental limitations of human users. Don Norman's delightful book, The
Design of Everyday Things, is full of examples of designer disasters.
As a designer, you may be called upon to create a computer kiosk or a
web interface. Doing so efficiently and effectively is difficult if you are not
familiar with the pertinent research in cognitive psychology and with
quantitative methods such as those explained in the classic book, The
Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction by Stuart Card, Thomas Moran,
and Allen Newell (1983). Hundreds of millions of computers have unpleas¬
ant interfaces (Microsoft Windows comes to mind) because they require
abilities humans simply do not possess, proving that their interface
designers were ignorant of fundamental facts about the human mind. The
sheer volume of jokes about computers reflects our near-universal dissatis¬
faction with their interfaces.
Of course, it is not only cognitive psychology that is useful. When our
representations of information have emotional content, it is helpful to
have studied what little is known about human emotions from an engi¬
neering point of view. For example, there is no direct correlation between
color and emotional content; the meaning of color is culturally mediated.
Red is not universally seen as a sign of danger; in some oriental cultures it
346 Raskin

is white, not black, that is associated with death; and so on. Naive
designers who rely on their intuition (i.e., cultural biases) in these regards
are likely to find that creations intended to work for a variety of users
unexpectedly fail.
I am not suggesting that designers should study the neurophysiology of
the brain. While such studies can lead to useful knowledge about how
people absorb and react to representations of information, how the brain
functions internally is not directly relevant to our field. We can treat the
brain as a black box and safely ignore all the twaddle about the parts of
the brain and what they do. Even when this physiological information is
technically correct (which is not always the case), it is of no direct use to
us. As information presenters, our only interest in the human brain is how
it reacts holistically, that is, how people respond or behave.
The currently fashionable right brain-left brain distinctions are particu¬
larly silly. Does it matter to us, as designers, that certain abilities are
located at such and such a location? Would it make any difference if the
right brain-left brain abilities were localized in the top and bottom of the
brain rather than the right and left halves? I think not. Useful information
takes an operational form.

Art or Science?

Every major field of human activity is a mix of art and science. Theoretical
physicists and professional mathematicians speak of the aesthetics of their
work and are driven by concerns about elegance and beauty. Is a painter
any less an artist for knowing perspective, understanding Josef Albers's
elegant experiments and demonstrations about color, or being aware of
chemical incompatibilities between various kinds of paint?
Designing the presentation of information, by the same token, partakes
of the nature of both art and science. Edward Tufte's books reflect such
a blend of knowledge. In one of them he outlines his five principles for
designing graphics (1983: 105):
347 Rationalizing Information Representation

■ Above all else show the data

■ Maximize the data-ink ratio

■ Erase non-data ink

■ Erase redundant data ink

■ Revise and edit

The first four principles are (mostly) science-based. But the last, "revise and
edit,” tells us not only to check repeatedly that the first four conditions
are met, but also to apply our aesthetic judgment to the final work.
Describing electronic displays in terms of numbers of pixels no more
makes our work technical than the fact that the frequencies of consecutive
notes of the tempered chromatic scale have a ratio of the twelfth root of
two makes musical composition a hard science.

Summary

This book presents a cross-section of the art, science, and personalities

involved in representing information effectively. As I have pointed out,
some practitioners try to drape themselves in the mantle of technological
modernity, recklessly pinning the drapery together with abused jargon and
misunderstood concepts. The gaps that are left prove more revealing than
they know. This does not mean that their work as designers is bad; it just
means that we cannot learn much from what they say about their work.
I predict that, just as astronomy moved from the ancient tales of how
the constellations were formed (lovely, but totally fictitious) to the modern
scientific models of the universe (breathtakingly beautiful and even more
awe-inspiring), the most valuable improvements in the effectiveness of
representations of information will come from scientific analyses of human
performance. I do not imply any abandonment of art and the artistic
impulse. I used to spend hours tediously learning the formal motions used
in conducting the various musical meters so that those actions would
become automatic; now, when I conduct an ensemble, 1 do not spend any
mental energy on technique but can focus entirely on communicating the
348 Raskin

music through the baton. For the same reason, a designer who works with
information should have a firm grasp of human factors. Once mastered,
that knowledge can be swept into the unconscious, where it can guide you
unobtrusively, leaving you free to concentrate on the emotive and aes¬
thetic sides of your work.
The designer must, to use Wittgenstein's words, "throw away the ladder
after he has climbed up it" (1961: 151). It has been the role of my chapter
to point out that it can be dangerous to dispose of the ladder any sooner.

References

Card, Stuart, Moran, Thomas, and Newell, Allen. 1983. The Psychology of Human-Com¬
puter Interaction. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Norman, Donald. 1988. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.

Shannon, Claude, and Weaver, Warren. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Infonnation.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Tufte, Edward. 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, Conn.:
Graphics Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul.
Contributors

Elizabeth Anderson, a member of the Society for Environmental Graphics

Design, has over nineteen years of experience designing signage systems,
logos, typefaces, and all kinds of graphics. Her educational background
includes work in literature, typography, fine arts, and graphic design.
Elizabeth attended Whitman and Reed colleges and has taught at Portland
State University and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a partner,
with John Krygier, in Anderson Krygier Inc.

Judy Anderson is a professor in the School of Art at the University of

Washington. She has received numerous public art commissions and
served as lead artist for collaborative works involving writers, video artists,
musicians, performers, visual artists, architects, and urban designers. As a
design consultant, Ms. Anderson creates comprehensive identity programs,
publications, and information/exhibition design systems. Her work creating
special edition books in experimental formats is supported principally by
grants and awards.
Her special edition books have been exhibited worldwide and are in the
permanent collections of the Walker Art Gallery, Getty Museum, New York
Public Library, and several universities. She has received numerous regional,
national, and international awards for her print and book designs and
has published in Print, CA, Idea, AIGA Graphic Design Annual, ID, Print
Casebooks, Typography 4, and the New York Art Directors Annual (which
awarded her a Gold Medal). As a 1995 fellow of the Northwest Institute for
Architecture and Urban Studies in Rome, she explored the expanded role
350 Contributors

of public and private communications in the vitalization of key public

gathering places.

Simon Birrell's fate was sealed at the age of seventeen when his parents
bought him a BBC microcomputer. Since then he has worked in the
videogame industry, first as a programer at Virgin Games, then as head of
development at Palace Software. On moving to Madrid, he joined Realidad
Virtual, Spain's pioneering virtual reality company. Birrell programed
MILENA, one of the world's first Internet-based chat spaces. He now heads
the E-Spaces studio in Madrid, where he develops three-dimensional and
multimedia worlds for the Internet. His paper in this volume is based on a
lecture given at the CyberConf in June of 1996.

Mike Cooley has studied engineering in Germany, Switzerland, and

England and holds a Ph.D. in computer-aided design. He has held director-
level design and technical management posts in the public and private
sectors and currently directs several high tech companies and the Euro¬
pean Union's Technology Exchange ("The Product Bank").
Dr. Cooley is an international authority on human-centered systems
design and has been a visiting professor at universities in Europe, Australia,
the United States, and Japan. He is a member of joint EU/Japan Commission
on New Technologies and has directed major EU projects in advanced tech¬
nology. His software work includes tools for Learning and Earning Organ¬
izations, which utilizes Dr. Cooley's "Curiosity Generator." He has published
over 120 scientific papers and is the author or joint author of 15 books in
English and German on technology and its consequences.

Brenda Dervitt received her Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in communications

from Michigan State University and her bachelor's in journalism from
Cornell University. She has worked as a public information officer, jour¬
nalist, and researcher and has taught at Syracuse University and the Uni¬
versity of Washington. She is currently a professor of communications at
Ohio State University. Her teaching and research focus on the design of
responsive communication and information systems and the use of inter¬
pretive methodologies to incorporate users and their needs into the design
351 Contributors

of such systems. She is past president and a fellow of the International

Communication Association and a member of the governing council of
the International Association for Media and Communication Research. For
a decade she served as editor of Progress in Communication Sciences. Dr.
Dervin is the author of numerous scholarly articles and book chapters.

Jim Gasperini at the time of writing was a partner with Tennessee Rice
Dixon in ScrutTiny Associates, a New York-based developer of aesthetically
sophisticated multimedia. Their interactive CD-ROM artwork, ScruTiny in
the Great Round, won the Grand Prix du Jury at MILIA '96 in Cannes. They
also collaborated with J. Carter Brown on the CD-ROM adaptation of his
international art show, Rings: Five Passions in World Art (Calliope Media)
for the Atlanta Cultural Olympiad. For the past twelve years, Gasperini has
worked at the intersection of writing, design, and programming, using
interactive media to create new forms of storytelling and make complex
ideas entertaining and comprehensible. He explores the aesthetic possibil¬
ities of structural ambiguity in works like Hidden Agenda, his political role-
playing game, and has designed interactive works in CD-ROM, CD-i, and
3- DO for publishers around the world. Gasperini's latest accomplishment
is a complete redesign of SimCity, the popular urban-planning simulation
game. His critical and theoretical articles about interactivity have appeared
in Wired, Interactivity, Eloquent Interfaces, and Talkback. He holds a B.A. in
literature from Williams College.

Yvonne M. Hansen holds a Ed.D. and an M.A. in organization develop¬

ment from the Fielding Institute of Santa Barbara. She is the founder and
principal of Consulting in Human Interaction and of Geminideas Press. Dr.
Hansen is the author of Think Visually! and V.A.S.T.: Visual Approach to
Systems Thinking. She has taught art in the United States and abroad and,
at the college level, has offered courses in organization theory and behav¬
ior and leadership and group dynamics. In her passion for enhancing
visual, conceptual thought to generate whole-brain creativity and enable
systemic thinking, Dr. Hansen created Graphics Tools, a system of real¬
time visual notation to give visible form to ideas, nonlinear phenomena,
planning ideas, and other abstractions. A consultant to entrepreneurs,
352 Contributors

Yvonne resides in Austin, Texas, where she is involved in professional and

community groups. Sometime in the next few years she intends to build a
house out of straw bales and earth.

Steve Holtzman, an advocate of "new content" for the digital age, was
the author of Digital Mosaics (Simon & Schuster, 1997), a preview of future
digital worlds. His earlier work, Digital Mantras (MIT Press, 1994), has been
critically acclaimed as "a philosophy of creativity for the digital age."
Holtzman was a guest commentator on National Public Radio's All Things
Considered and wrote for, among others, Wired, HotWired, Technology Re¬
view, and Digital Media. Over the past fifteen years, he held various execu¬
tive positions in the high technology industry. Most recently he was CEO
of Perspecta, Inc., a software company developing new ways to navigate
the Web and find information on the Internet, and was on the boards of
directors of Liquid Audio and The Motion Factory, also Internet software
companies. Steve held a B.A. in philosophy and a Ph.D. in computer sci¬
ence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Robert Horn's professional work has concentrated on developing the

research and systematic foundations of information design. He is chair¬
man of Information Mapping, Inc., an international consulting company
located in Waltham, Massachusetts; the company specializes in making
complex information understandable. He is also president of the product-
design group, MacroVU, Inc. Horn has taught at Harvard and Columbia
universities and is currently a visiting scholar at the Program on People,
Computers, and Design at the Center for the Study of Language and
Information of Stanford University.
His information design projects have included an information database
and retrieval system for all federal programs in education, training, and
research and the design and development of the standard reference work
on simulations and games for education and training. He is the author of
eight monographs and books, including his recent Mapping Hypertext,
which describes how the precise structuring of information can solve
many of the problems of the on-line display of information. He has com-
353 Contributors

pleted another book, Visual Language. An earlier work, How High Can It
Fly? summarizes the research on structured writing.

Bob Jacobson, editor, has a long history of involvement in the design of

information environments. As a community-media activist, he gained an
early appreciation for the power of information technology as a tool for
individual and collective learning and activation. He served on the city of
Los Angeles's first cable television commission and was a founding mem¬
ber of the Los Angeles Public Access Project and, later, Sacramento
Community Radio. As a principal consultant and staff director with
the California State Assembly, Dr. Jacobson wrote California's Universal
Telephone Service Act; it provides low-cost telephone service for low-
income individuals (and in 1996 was incorporated in the federal Tele¬
communications Reform Act). He also wrote California's Telephone Privacy
Act and the pioneering Electronic Commerce Act of 1984. Dr. Jacobson
was a cofounder and associate director of the Human Interface Technology
Laboratory at the Washington Technology Center and the founder and
CEO of Worldesign Inc., an award-winning virtual-worlds design studio,
both in Seattle. He founded and from 1990 through 1995 comoderated the
USENET newsgroup, [Link]-worlds, the main "meeting place” for the
nascent virtual worlds industry. Most recently, he has been a senior con¬
sultant with SRI Consulting in Menlo Park, California, and a strategic
technology planner with IBIS Consulting in San Francisco. He currently
consults to leading Internet and design firms on strategic and information-
design issues.
Dr. Jacobson is the author of Municipal Control of Cable Communications
(New York: Praeger/Ablex, 1977) and An "Open Approach" to Information Poli¬
cymaking (New York: Ablex, 1989), and coauthored Access Rights to
the Electronic Marketplace (Sacramento: Assembly Office of Research, 1981). As
a Fulbright Scholar and with support from UNESCO and the Nordic Devel¬
opment Bank, he helped to organize a multinational policy study of regional
telecommunications in the "Nordkalott,” the region of Scandinavia north of
the Arctic Circle. Dr. Jacobson holds an M.A. (Television Studies) from
UCLA's Theater Arts Department, an M.A. (Communications Management)
from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of South-
354 Contributors

ern California, and a Ph.D. in Information Systems Planning from UCLA's

Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning.

John Krygier, a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Los

Angeles, brings over thirty years of industrial and graphic design experi¬
ence to his work. He has worked in transportation design, architectural
design, product packaging and marketing, and graphic design for a wide
variety of national and international clients. In his work for Anderson
Krygier, Inc., he developed numerous environmental graphic design proj¬
ects and computerized interactive displays.

Sheryl Macy is an author and producer of interactive programming. Noted

for her lively intellect, insatiable curiosity, and highly developed ability to
make connections, she puts words to paper for a variety of clients. Macy is
a 1976 graduate of the University of Oregon School of Journalism and has
a lifelong interest in the arts and technology.

The teaching and research activities of Romedi Passini, a professor in the

School of Architecture of the University of Montreal, bridge the topics of
environmental psychology and architectural design. After completing his
architectural training at the Eidgenovssische Technische Hochscule in
Zurich in 1964, he spent the five years designing large buildings. Attracted
by the emerging interdisciplinary field of environmental psychology and
armed with a grant from the Canada Council, Passini embarked on gradu¬
ate studies in that field and received his Ph.D. from Pennyslvania State
University in 1977. His first book, Wayfinding in Architecture (Van Nostrand
Reinhold 1984, 1992), introduced the concept of wayfinding and its ap¬
plication to building design. With graphic designer Paul Arthur, he has
also published a reference work entitled Wayfinding, People, Signs, and
Architecture (McGraw-Hill 1992). Passini has explored various research
issues in environmental perception and cognition and the problems of
mobility and wayfinding among the visually impaired. His current research
focuses on wayfinding and diorientation in dementia and spatio-cogni-
tive deficiencies caused by brain lesions, specifically topographical amnesia
and agnosia.
355 Contributors

Jef Raskin is best known for having created the Macintosh computer
project at Apple Computer, where he was manager of advanced systems.
Earlier, he was a professor of visual arts and director of the Computer
Center at the University of California, San Diego. He has served as CEO of
several companies, including his own, Information Appliance Inc, and is
presently a writer and consultant on human-computer interaction and
system design.
Raskin has published three volumes of chamber music and exhibited his
artworks at several prominent museums and galleries. He has also been a
conductor of the San Francisco Chamber Opera Company and has repre¬
sented the United States at the International Festival of the Arts in Edin¬
burgh, Scotland. He is currently attempting to build a pipe organ from
corrugated cardboard.

Throughout a long career, C. G. Screven has combined university teaching

and research in learning, perception, and motivation with consulting in
interpretive planning, evaluation, and design for informal public environ¬
ments. He has worked for thirty years in museums and public settings that
have served as laboratories for examining the limitations and potentials for
generating voluntary attention and learning in public settings. Dr. Screven
is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee and has taught and conducted research at Colorado State Uni¬
versity, the University of Geissen (Germany), the Institute of Design at
Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Office of Museum Programs of the
Smithsonian Institution.
He has published over eighty-five journal articles, monographs, and
book chapters and conducted symposia, hands-on workshops, and forums
all over the world, including, among many others, the TVA Energy Center;
the Institut fur Museumkunde, Berlin; the National Museum of Natural
History, Smithsonian Institution; the Louvre, Paris; the Powerhouse
Museum, Sydney, Australia; the Seneca Rocks Visitor Center, U.S. Forest
Service; and the Desert Botanical Gardens, Phoenix. He is the principal
of Screven & Associates, Chicago, the editor of Visitor Studies Bibliography
and Abstracts (published by Exhibit Communications Research), and a
board member of the Education Foundation, Society for Environmental
Graphics.
356 Contributors

Nathan Shedroff has been an information and interface designer for over
ten years. He is currently the Chief Creative Officer at vivid studios, which
he cofounded eight years ago to develop online brand strategies, online
products and services, and online events and communities. He earned a BS
in Industrial Design, with emphasis in Automobile Design, from Art Center
College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Before co-founding vivid, he worked with Richard Saul Wurman as a
senior designer at TheUnderstandingBusiness. Throughout his career,
he has worked in many different media and authored several books on
multimedia, computers, and information. His electronic experience spans
CD-ROMs, kiosks, published titles, application development, and online
experiences.
Nathan is actively defining and developing new understandings of all
aspects of information and interaction design, communication, visual
design, and online brand development.
Nathan was nominated for a Chrysler Innovation in Design Award in
1994 and, while a student, received an Honorable Mention in the 1987
Unisys Industrial Design Competition.
Nathan teaches and speaks often at both international colleges and
professional seminars. He has written and designed several books
and maintains a website with resources on Interaction Design at http://
[Link]. com/thoughts/.

Hal Thwaites has over ten years of professional work with the Canadian
Broadcast Corporation to inform his ongoing research and teaching at
Montreal's Concordia University, in its Communication Studies Depart¬
ment. He has served as a consultant in the areas of communication re¬
search, media information design, and analysis for private companies and
government departments. Professor Thwaites's work focuses on the areas of
media production, children's television, computers and new media, com¬
munication programming, information design, virtual reality, and three-di¬
mensional media. He is the founding Director of the 3Dmt Center, a
nonprofit organization devoted to three-dimensional and new-media tech¬
nologies based at Concordia University. Thwaites has organized two inter¬
national conferences on three-dimensional media, 3Dmt '89 and 3Dmt
357 Contributors

'92, and has recently served as a co-organizer of several related conferences

in Japan. He has lectured internationally in Belgium, Germany, Japan,
Taiwan, and the United States; and coauthored two texts on communica¬
tion analysis and biocybernetic research. He is a tenured faculty member at
Concordia and serves on the boards of the International Journal of Virtual
Reality (USA) and the International Society on Virtual Systems and Multi-
media. (Japan).

Roger Whitehouse is one of the world's leading experts in the design of

universal and accessible information and wayfinding systems. Trained as
an architect and graphic designer, he has been responsible for many land¬
mark projects for institutions and corporations in the United States and
abroad, including the research and design of a visual, audible, and tactile
information system for low-vision and blind users at The Lighthouse Inc.
in New York. He is president of Whitehouse & Company a New York
design consultancy.
Whitehouse is a fellow of the Society for Environmental Graphic Design
and an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He is the
author of New York: Sunshine and Shadow (Harper & Row 1974) and A
London Album (Seeker & Warburg 1980). He has taught at the Architectural
Association, London, the School of Architecture of Columbia University,
and many other schools in the United States and the United Kingdom.
His clients include the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Metro¬
politan Museum of Art, Sotheby's, the Knoll Group, Herman Miller Inc.,
and IBM.
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