I am a slow thinker, so I need to draw to make sure I am keeping track of everything. I draw to see what’s in my head and what people tell me, so more often than not, I’m drawing in a meeting at the flipchart or whiteboard, during a conversation, or at least once or …
Tag: problem solving
The Game of Knowledge
As the “Information Age” continues to unfold, gaining knowledge has become the central activity in many of our interactions.* Sure, we’re busy shuttling information around, constantly optimizing how we shape and transmit it, but no matter how thought-through, well-designed, and engaging it is, information must still be translated to something meaningful and useful for the situation we’re facing right now. Information informs our problems …
The Things You Don’t See
Information design, by nature, is concerned with making sense of the known: data, facts, observations, ideas. It involves taking existing content and putting it in a format that makes it more readily know-able. But rarely does information design acknowledge the missing, the unknown. A recent talk by Andy Kirk on representing the absence of data …
Rational Thinking Made Tangible
Over the years, I’ve come to understand that information design work is as much a process of reasoning and investigation as it is an activity of pure design decision-making and production. In the earliest stage of my career, I thought information design was only about making graphics that put facts and figures in a clear, …
The Real Meaning of Information Design
We’re in the midst of an information design information overload. Blogs, books, courses, and workshops proliferate, covering every hot topic under the sun: big data, data visualization, infographics, “vintage” information design, software, etc. And while there are a few helpful guides along the way to navigate through this space, digging through the layers of content …
The Other Visualization
We often think of visualization in the most tangible sense of the word: an image or representation of thoughts, data, observed phenomena — something you can look at. Visualizations conventionally take the form of a print document or on-screen display, but they also occupy environments and increasingly live on devices. Much attention these days is …