“information design”
58 posts under this tag.
As I said on a previous post, I believe Spanish, my mother tongue, has a low status on the web. And as I laid there pondering the subjectivity of my assessment, I remembered Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiWP’s fascinating account of how (and why) he became a scientist (it appears in John Brockman’s excellent Curious MindsAM, a compilation of similar tales by top-notch scientists and a sure recommendation to anyone).
The particular anecdote that came to mind was when he and a friend quarrelled over whose neigborhood was the more communist (the matter was relevant because he was living in Italy and the country was then in political turmoil). Their brilliant analytic idea to try to settle the question was to count out the circulation of the left- and right-leaning newspapers in each of their neighborhoods’s newsstands. This of course sent them into all sorts of interesting statistical considerations, but it put them on the path of finding the subtle answers to their question, and it was certainly better than “the hocus-pocus most adults rely on to bolster their arguments”.
So I want to try to do something similar with my question—what is the linguistic vitality in the web of 14 languages?—and this post will be the beginning of my investigation. For reasons of practicality and personal bias, the 14 languages I’m going to settle to are: EnglishWP, GermanWP, FrenchWP, PolishWP, JapaneseWP, DutchWP, ItalianWP, SwedishWP, PortugueseWP, SpanishWP, FarsiWP, ChineseWP, EsperantoWP, and HindiWP.
 There’s something deep about Riya, the new image search engine, that bugs me. It reminds me a lot of a group in my university that was developing a digital whiteboard back in 2002. It was a fascinating technology, and, these being the days of Minority ReportWP, IMDB, I was infatuated with the possibilities. The thing was expensive and bulky, but allowed for some really sweet, unprecedented interaction with the computer not that far from those of said movie.
I’m not sure where I saw it first but I like it. When you want to link to Wikipedia, instead of underlining the word or phrase, place a superscripted WP right after it. Say, instead of tired old Internet Explorer, try FirefoxWP.
The advantage of course, is that you hint your reader to what the link is about, and that it could be combined with several other suplinks, as in: “I loved MunichAM, IMDB, WP, the movie.”
Today, just after finishing a slight redesign of my blog (inspired by caterina’s) and comparing it with other redesigns of other websites I’ve made along the past 2 years, I became aware of a small pattern to my madness: don’t enclose unless you must.
Before
Now
I’m not sure why—tenderfootness I guess—but my first website designs have always been unnecessarily enclosed, too many fences, too many cages. Only after much pruning and shuffling do I realize that much of it is extraneous, just clutter.
Much Much Before
Much Before
Before
Now
Most of the time you don’t need that box around that text, you almost certainly don’t need that big box to enclose your entire website, and you probably don’t need so many borders. Try erasing them and watch your website become more “flowing”, more open.
(For an example of what not to do, check my local newspaper’s hideous, caged redesign.)
Ok, yes, I’m sorry, it’s yet another looong quote. But it’s worth it. Read it if you want to see Steven Johnson, a most lucid man, at his most lucid, at his most techno-lyricist. Read it if you want to know how interfaces are our culture’s cathedrals, why interface design is the art form of our century, and why I’ll spend the next decade trying to master it. Read it as a favor. To me. To you.
And yet against all that dislocation and overload and multiplicity there is the interface. Most of the time we talk about the graphic interface as though it were a logical culmination of the digital revolution, its crowning glory, but the truth is, the interface serves largely as a corrective to the forces unleashed by the information age. Whenever I find myself being swayed by the fragmentation jeremiads, I like to sit down at my computer and go through the usual routines—check my e-mail, rearrange my desktop, log on to the Web—and concentrate all the while on what is really happening as I do these things. Because what is really happening, not on the screen but down in the innards of the machine itself, or out on the great expanses of the Internet, what is happening in that world is literally unimaginable. What is happening is that billions of tiny pulses of electricity are hurtling through silicon conduits, like an entire planet’s worth of digital automobiles making their way across the grid of a single microchip. And all those pulses self-organize into larger shapes and patterns, into assembly codes, machine languages, instruction sets. Some of these ethereal languages then transform themselves into flashes of light, or audio waveforms, and depart en masse from my machine into the sprawling backbone of the Net, where they disperse into countless separate units, and then thread their way through thousands of other microchips, before reuniting at their destination.
But what happens on the screen is this: a window pops open, a dialog box appears, a bright, cheerful voice tells me that I have mail.
No news here, of course, but something profound nonetheless. The great surge of information that has swept across our society in recent years looks genuinely innocuous next to the meticulous anarchy of real bit-space, that netherworld that lurks in our microchips and our fiber-optic lines. But we see almost nothing of that universe because we have built such sturdy mediators to keep it separate from us, translators that make sense of what would otherwise be a blizzard of senselessness. It is undeniable that the world has never seen so many zeros and ones, so many bits and bytes of information—but by the same token, it has never been so easy to ignore them altogether, to deal only with their enormously condensed representatives on the screen. Which is why we should think of the interface, finally, as a synthetic form, in both senses of the word. It is a forgery of sorts, a fake landscape that passes for the real thing, and—perhaps most important—it is a form that works in the interest of synthesis, bringing disparate elements together into a cohesive whole.
Seen in this light, all that ranting about the fragmented consciousness of the digital age sounds a great deal less convincing. After all, critics have bemoaned—or championed—the accelerated pace of the present, its dislocations and divided selves, ever since the industrial age powered up in the early nineteenth century. Think of Baudelaire losing himself in the shimmering, half-lit streets of Paris, becoming a “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.” Think of Joyce’s characters bouncing back and forth between biblical references and advertising jingles. Think of Marinetti’s poetry, renouncing “the ‘I’ in all literature” for the speed of the race car and the destructiveness of the machine gun. Conceptual turbulence—the sense of the world accelerating around you, pulling you in a thousand directions at once—is a deeply Modern tradition, with roots that go back hundreds of years. What differentiates our own historical moment is that a symbolic form has arisen designed precisely to counteract that tendency, to battle fragmentation and overload with synthesis and sense-making. The interface is a way of seeing the whole. Or, at the very least, a way of seeing its shadow illuminated by the bright phosphor of the screen.
When I think about the gap between raw information and its numinous life on the screen—something I try to avoid doing, because it is a dark and difficult thought, more than a little like contemplating the age of the universe—the whole sensation has a strangely religious feel to it, that sense of the mind trying to reach around a vibrant (and convenient) metaphor to the wider truth that lies beyond. Cathedrals, remember, were “infinity imagined,” the heavens brought down to earthly scale. The medieval mind couldn’t take in the full infinity of godliness, but it could subjugate itself before the majestic spires of Chartres or Saint-Sulpice. The interface offers a comparable sidelong view onto the infosphere, half unveiling and half disappearing act. It makes information sensible to you by keeping most of it from view—for the simple reason that “most of it” is far too multitudinous to imagine in a single thought.
Yes, I know it’s pretentious. But you just wait and see. Let the quote sit on your mind for some weeks and when the brain fart comes, let’s talk.
I was running out of space this morning—these days, not even half a tera is enough—so I decided to finally download one of those famous programs to visualize your folder structure. They had intrigued me before, to be sure, but they were a somewhat expensive technology back then, and so I resisted. I figured there would be something free by now. I wasn’t disappointed: SequoiaView does everything I wanted it to do, its free, its simple, and its way cool. (And I wasn’t disappointed at all on the utility of such a visualization, I freed up 100 GB half an hour later after installing it!)
Here’s my favela drive a couple of hours ago:
Es francamente increible el poder de la prensa para moldear una noticia. La portada de La Jornada de hoy, por ejemplo, dedica practicamente toda su primera plana—75% del area de contenido—al “noticion” de que carteles pro-peje fueron rasgados por la noche.
Notese el nada sutil entrejuego de los subtitulares. Despues de una lectura apresurada, en la memoria queda solo el desapruebo de (gulp!) los intelectuales; la frase “actos fascistas y autoritarios”; las palabras “ataque”, “vandalismo”, “navajazos”, “al amparo de la oscuridad”; y el enojo ante el cinismo de Abascal de decir, ahora, justamente ahora (y justamente abajo), que hay “plena libertad de expresion”, y de Fox y su “eleccion de Estado”. Sin decir nada de la validez de sus motivos, concentrandonos solo en la forma y el peso que le decidio dar a la noticia, puede alguien decir que La Jornada no anda de calientahuevos?
En la misma portada, en la esquina superior derecha, hay otra noticia con un titular interesante, especialmente cuando se contrasta con el titular que tuvo la misma noticia en la portada del Publico de ayer.
El titular de La Jornada pareceria a primera vista imparcial, mostrando prominentemente numeros, citas, y nombres de instituciones, pero es interesante como escoge no decir que las casillas en cuestion fueron casillas impugnadas, un detalle sutil pero absolutamente crucial. Sin el, uno puede asumir, uno es invitado a asumir, que si hubo “votos de mas” en 2 mil 873 casillas cualquiera, que marranadas no habra habido en las 127, 604 restantes? El resultado del conteo “reajusta porcentajes en la eleccion presidencial”, segun La Jornada, mientras que en el subtitulo de Publico (del articulo en si, ya no de su titular en primera plana), se afirma que “los resultados no cambiaron de forma significativa, dice Rodrigo Morales [consejero electoral].”
Lo primero que salta a la vista en la portada de Publico, en cambio, es el gran peso que le otorgo este a la noticia y como se esfuerza en asegurarse de que recordemos quien “gano” el rencuentro. Aqui si se menciona prominentemente que se trataba de casillas impugnadas, quejosas, pues la insinuacion es clara: ahi’sta pejistas, si ese fue el resultado de examinar las casillas problematicas, cual es el punto de examinarlas todas? Lopez Obrador se antoja pequeño como su subtitulo; canson, terco, y autoritario, “exigiendo” renuncias una vez que las impugnaciones no le favorecieron (por cuanto? por que no se aclara en portada lo minima que fue la diferencia con Calderon? por que no se aclara que mas que ganar, Calderon fue el que perdio menos votos?).
Y ya paranoiqueando, no es curioso que en el articulo de La Jornada sobre el reconteo de votos, al dar los cambios porcentuales de los candidatos solo se usa la palabra “subio” para Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, siendo que fueron tres los candidatos que subieron (bueno, al parecer ellos “pasaron” de un porcentaje a otro)?
En términos porcentuales, Calderón pasó de 35.868 a 35.893 por ciento; Madrazo de 22.261 a 22.257; López Obrador subió de 35.290
a 35.310; Campa de 0.968 a 0.961, y Mercado de 2.699 a 2.701.
Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion – and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
I just finished reading Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Put simply, I’m floored. They were both deep, beautiful books, and, particularly interesting for me, both were superb criticisms (of, respectively, information design and comics). They both self-consciously embarked on the hard task of developing taste, of teaching how to see.
Charts, diagrams, graphs, tables, guides, instructions, directories, and
maps comprise an enormous accumulation of material. Once described
by Philip Morrison as “cognitive art,” it embodies tens of trillions of
images created and multiplied the world over every year. Despite the
beauty and utility of the best work, design of information has engaged
little critical or aesthetic notice: there is no Museum of Cognitive Art [yet].
This book could serve as a partial catalog for such a collection.
My current appreciation (read infatuation) of criticism has been long coming but perhaps inevitable. As far as I can now grok, there are two and only two genres of education: education in skill and education in taste. Every other truly educational book is a critique.
School would do well to acknowledge this. Skill is how to do, criticism is how to see. Both are pointless without one another and a great mistake of modern education is to concern itself only with the former. It doesn’t generally think of pupils as criticism-capable, which is bollocks, and, much more harmfully still, it perverts criticism by trying to cast it as a skill. That’s how you get to rote equation solving or sickening memorization of periods of literature and its important figures.
Oh please, please—I’m begging you here—go do yourself a favor and buy Steven Johnson’s Interface Culture this very moment. Please. Please.
I’ve been rereading my hilites from it, searching for an elusive quote and I’m just shocked again at how good this book is. I have no doubt whatsoever this will be a canon book from the late twentieth century. Don’t be fooled by the 3.5 stars in Amazon, it’s simply a 1997 book that’s still ahead of its time.
Johnson is lucid to (and over) the brink of genius when he talks about interface, technology, media, computers, the web, blogs (which he predicts 10 years ago), hypertext, novels, software, online communities, artificial intelligence, culture, design, agents, TV, life, the universe, and everything.
Being his first book, written in his late twenties, it is full of youthful passion, exhuberance, and raw virtuosity—but, get this, he is right.
This digital age belongs to the graphic interface, and it is time for us to recognize the imaginative work that went into that creation, and prepare ourselves for the imaginative breakthroughs to come. Information-space is the great symbolic accomplishment of our era. We will spend the next few decades coming to terms with it.
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