For me, 2016 will go down as the year of the gut, when reason and restraint took a holiday. Foundations were shaken, bigly. Concepts like data, information, fact, and truth were all sent through the wringer. Reality became a crowdsourced phenomenon, a channel you could change with the push of a button if the broadcast didn’t …
Tag: philosophy
Making and Meaning
Like many other service professions, information design is typically defined by what the practitioner makes, how they make it, and what benefit comes from it. Invariably, the “making” part of information design work is what usually gets the most attention both within and outside of the field. With steadily increasing awareness of information design as a real …
New Modalities of Understanding
While doing research on the links between information architecture and information design, I came across a video clip of Richard Wurman talking about the origin of the term he has been credited with inventing. It isn’t the first place he’s told the story, so this particular video didn’t seem earth-shattering… until right around the 5:40 …
Leaving Twenty Ten
To say it’s been a long, difficult year is the understatement of the year. Few have been spared from the thrashing waves of change and misfortune that coursed through this year, whether it’s continued joblessness, lack of health insurance to cover necessary medical treatment, or the shock of sudden natural disasters. In my own life, …
The Mind of the Seeker
Humanity’s search for knowledge, in its many forms, has always fascinated me. Spanning geographies, cultures, faiths, and generations, the enduring pursuit of truth and insight into the diverse realms of human experience has yielded some of the greatest works of science and art — from the sequencing of the human genome to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel …
Escaping Flatland
I usually put more effort into coming up with titles, but this time I settled on what was nearer to hand (thanks to Edward Tufte). In a metaphorical sense, the idea of escaping flatland sums up much of what’s been on my mind lately: breaking free from the mundane “two-dimensional” aspects of daily life and …