(continued from previous post)

(1, 2 and 2, 12) Gunther Kress gave two presentations that called on much of the same data and examples, "Reading Images: abstract v. concrete representations" and "Multimodality: representation and new media." Good visual examples provided solid structure here, but would not be properly represented in this forum. One of the very elegant examples he used was to analyze the role of cultural traditions in the Chinese written language and their effect on cognition and role in communication. Specifically he looked at the very rigid conventions for forming Chinese characters and the dynamic inter-relationship with the Chinese culture, as well as the factthat the need to center those characters influence communication standards in print advertising. He also reinforced the widely accepted focus on human and social needs being the appropriate driver for designing information.

(1, 5) Elizabeth Sanders presented "Participatory Designing: information and adaptation." A systematic look at the evolution from a passive to participatory paradigm, Elizabeth sliced the progression from doing -> adapting -> making -> creating in a variety of ways, building to the thesis of adoptive design, attributed to Tom Moran. While there is definitely a movement toward more individualized and adaptive/adoptive design, I wonder if adoptive design will prove to be culturally viable as it will make experience overly individualistic and minimize the "shared culture" that we experience through consumption of mass cultural artifacts. While adoptive design certainly has some role there are valid cultural reasons that the paradigm will not shift completely.

(1,9) Karel van der Warde presented "Producers, Regulators and Users: balancing conflicting demands in medical information." This was a very sobering presentation, calling attention to the awful Information Design with regard to medical-related labelling and information space - including examples that resulted in patient death and devastating mis-treatment. Karel's passion for the subject came through in the content, use of humor and his physical presentation, to include a plea for substantive change in the relationship between the health care system and legal considerations. His four basic criteria for what medical information should be - valid, reliable, accurate and trustworthy - is good basic criteria for any situation where people are relying on good information for their basic well being.

(1, 11) Rune Pettersson was scheduled to present "Gearing Communication to the Cognitive Needs of Receivers: findings from visual literacy research" but did not end up attending the conference. A copy of his paper was available and he was grouped into this category.

It was an excellent collection of presentations, perhaps not pulling together to make a tightly wound unified whole, but covering a number of interesting elements pertaining to knowledge presentation. In total, both conferences and all four days, an excellent experience!

2by Two Conference - The Future of Knowledge Presentation

The last two days of the conference were a much more traditional format than the first two. 13 different presentations were given to the entire congregation on principles and practices (thanks: David Sless) pertaining to affect, cognition, behavior, communication, interaction, graphic design - and more. During the final discussion section we evaluated the domains of the different presentations based on David Sless' process for Information Design. Presentations were grouped in the stage of David's ID process that they best represented, with some presentations crossing boundaries. I will follow that structure in sharing a bit about all of the presentations that were given (parenthetical reference preceding the speaker's name indicates overall chronological order of presentation, followed by which day the presentation was made on):

SCOPING
(4,1) Corin Gurr presented on "Cognition and Diagrammatic Representation." Talking about the communication of diagrams from the perspective of designing large systems, Colin provided some good, basic information. One item of particular relevance to people less versed in information design is his "Order of perpetual salience," providing a structure for which visual differentiators are easiest to perceive:
1. Position along common scale
2. Position along identical, non-aligned scale
3. Length
4. Angle-slope
5. Area
6. Volume
7. Colour.
In plain English, that means differentiation by position along a common scale is very *easy* to perceive whereas differentiation by colour is (relatively) more difficult to perceive. Nice rule-of-thumb.

(6, 1) Barbara Mirel and Leif Allmendinger presented on "Visualizing Complexity: getting from here to there in ill-defined problem landscapes." Their presentation focused on a model they used in the grocery industry for communicating domain and causality based on collected data to assist decision making. The visual representations were well concepted and executed. Their analysis looked at basic issues of causality related to adding or eliminating brands, based on existing data regarding brand purchase decisions. It would be interesting to know if their analysis has been cut to the point of considering correlations between the purchase of different *products* as well as just different *brands* to accurately estimate the resonant effects on all sales that dropping Brand A for Brand B will have. In other words, while some brands may control little market share, if they are "sticky" their participants may change grocers altogether, making that brand a valuable one for overall revenues. With that (and greater) additional complexity to the model their visual approach also would increasingly make more sense.

(7,1) Jorge Frascara presnted "Prospect and Flow: making environments intelligible." Very much based in principles, Jorge's engaging style helped to ground the content and engage the audience. While his "case" building to full prospect interfaces is too involved for this forum, he made a valuable clarification about purpose in action: he clarified that "we look in order to understand - not in order to see." His point being that the purpose for acting (visually) is to understand, as opposed to just see. Given the important relationship between information and understanding, this is another way of seeing Information Design as a vital macro understanding dicsipline that naturally crosses almot all manifest domains.

(8,1) Roman Duszek presented "Warsaw Subway Information System / The Design Process." Roman has absolutely beautiful visual language and sense for storytelling, making this my choice for the most pleasurable overall presentation. Quick moving, largely driven by visuals and exhibiting real personality, Roman walked through different considerations, iterations and process steps before showing the final deliverable. The most memorable moment was at the end of his presentation, when he ironically displayed a slide that showed a single sheet of paper that contained all of the graphics used in this major, important project that undoubtedly took many months for him to complete. It is the perpetual problem of designers in general, but information designers in particular: our solutions are so complex, spanning even enterprise levels, that successful planning and production is quite expensive. Yet, the final deliverable may not "look" like much. So much that we do is in the process stage, and utterly lost on clients. As I am writing this, and thinking more about the domain of Information Design in juxtaposition to it, Roman's process for this solution is quite similar to solutions for enterprise digital communications infrastructures, as an example. The difference is that Roman is thinking in a physical domain while digital communication infrastructures (from a problem solving perspective) are largely done in the metaphysical; then, Roman's production language is visual and graphical, while the digital communication infrastructures are written and in programming. Another example underscoring the broad domain of ID.

(13, 2) Aaron Marcus presented on "Driving Miss Daisy: vehicle/driver user interface design." A very enjoyable and informative presentation, Aaron used a study for BMW and theoretical prototype "Executive Driver Control Panel" as structure for exploring the domain of vehicle/driver user interface design. The eventual model that we may be moving toward is largely customizable, very similar to having different settings for different people using the same computer. Of course, implicit in this was the reality that entertainment and communication devices are creeping more and more into the driving experience, raising the issue of safety. AM+A is based on decades of really excellent work, and these vehicle/driver user interface design projects are another example of that in practice.

BENCHMARKING
No presentations were categorized in this way. To clarify the term, benchmarking is testing the existing domain as a basis both for guiding the design to come, and for testing the final product.

PROTOTYPE DEVELOPMENT
(3, 1) Krzysztof Lenk and Paul Kahn presented on "Diagrams for Communication Between Designer and Client." This specifically focused on communicating the value proposition of information design/architecture to clients in a way that generates the sale. Paul used a prototype Flash diagram that showed the inter-relationship between domains within a project and the importance of what his company brought to the process in the ultimate success of the overall project. While interesting enough as a model for helping to sell our services this presentation also talked a bit about cultural specifics and differences and the role that they play in how we sell - in this case exploring the mindset of French middle managers. Nice.

(8,1) Roman's presentation was included in this group, the second of three groups it qualified under.

(10, 1) Wes Ervin presented "Strategies for Visualizing Financial Risk." Wes applied his charismatic style to the issue of broad consumer financial information, pointing out how misleading and ineffectual current "information" really is. This was a good example of how the use of tools that are part of Information Design - such as graphic design and statistics - can cloud reality as opposed to provide understanding. Indeed, the misrepresentation of information by financial service providers threatens the financial well-being of many people who - looking at what information they are given - think they are making one decision when in fact they are making another.

(13, 2) Aaron's presentation was included in this group, the second of two groups.

TESTING/REFINEMENT
No presentations were categorized in this way.

SPECIFICATION/PRODUCTION
(8, 1) Roman's presentation was included in this group, the third of three groups it qualified under.

MONITORING (this is a cyclical step connected to both Scoping and Specification/Production)
(1, 1) Neil MacKinnon gave the keynote, "Symbolic Interaction and Knowledge Presentation." With the overarching point that affective meaning and reaction are as important as cognitive understanding, Neil went from academic examples and principles to a fascinating database-driven software application that represents affective meaning through visual and mathematical representation, including participant-friendly graphical "faces" that communicate types of affective response. While the many layers of the application were interesting, one nugget that can be used by Information Designers concerned with affective effects are the three attitudes of affective associations that were identified:
1. Evaluation (from Bad/Awful to Good/Nice)
2. Potency (from Small/Weak to Powerful/Big)
3. Activity (from Inactive/Slow to Active/Fast)
In other words, through viewing those three areas of identification as continuums that define affective associations, we can begin to better understand what creates perceptions of affect and anticipate those inter-relationships, proactively designing for them.

(continued)