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April 06, 2003
ID's polar bear book
D*mn! My plans for my degree project are now toast. Rune Pettersson has published the polar bear equivalent for information design. Its title is Information Design: An Introduction (at Amazon). It was supposedly published in September 2002, but I managed to miss it until now. I had the pleasure of meeting Rune at the Vision Plus 4 conference in Pittsburgh back in 1998, and his book is an expansion of the paper he presented there. What's nice is that this is a great information design book for folks who come to ID from traditions other than graphic design, as it discusses text and message design (and cognition) as well as visual design. In this respect it has a lot in common with Karen Schriver's . Two caveats. One, Rune's book is more academic than either Lou and Peter's or Karen's books (Rune teaches at Mälardalen University in Sweden). In other words, lots more text than graphics and heavy duty referencing. (Interesting...Tufte is there, but Wurman is not.) The other caveat is that this is really one man's model of information design, which means that he lays out a map that hasn't been universally (or even widely) adopted by the international information design community. For example, he notes that: As a discipline and an academic subject matter, information design has three main areas of knowledge: infography, infology, and infodidactics. ... Infography is the actual, practical formation and execution of structured combinations of text, pictures, and graphic design. ... Infology is the science of verbo-visual presentation and interpretation of information. ... Infodidactics is the [method] used for teaching the various aspects of information design. This is some kind of line to draw in the sand (particularly as Sweden has not exactly been the cornerstone of early information design...the UK and the Netherlands would have to hold that honor). But at least someone has written something down. And this is the kind of text that really does need to exist--most other ID works are collections such as , or . I'm sure I'll have more to say once I've can find the time to read it through. When is the spring semester over?
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IDblog is Beth Mazur tilting at power law windmills. A little bit Internet, a little bit technology, a little bit society, and a lot about designing useful information products. Send your cards and letters to .
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