Even at the time, it was still way behind the curve as well, but more recently graphic design has been accelerating their move into technology as well. Information design is a field that really was behind the times in terms of technology; was much more paper; was much more a traditional application. I think that’s one of the reasons why as Big Data has become such an important thing and really has created an opportunity for design in general. Information design in particular, to step forward and play a really crucial role but I haven’t seen that happen. The information design community, the notion of information design as a discipline hasn’t risen with Big Data. Hasn’t stepped into a position of prominence and attention like other sub-design disciplines have in years past, as things pertaining to their rhythms became significant or became what people were paying attention to. It’s too bad, because information design at its core, in terms of the tenets, in terms of the methodologies and approaches and particularly in terms of the outcomes and outputs, are exactly aligned with what’s going on with Big Data. It’s all about looking at very complex stories, very complex data sets, and the designing those to tell very crisp, understandable, elegant stories. The fact that that community hasn’t stepped into that opportunity is terribly unfortunate. I say it as a third person, but I’m still involved with it. I’m on the editorial board for the Information Design Journal — that’s the academic guide for the discipline. So, I guess I’m responsible as well. It’s just a tremendous opportunity, and the trends go in and out.

This Big Data trend is one where information design certainly could have and should have stepped more to the fore, but it just hasn’t happened. The remarkable thing about it is no other discipline really has either. Big Data, from my perspective, remains this very hand-waving vague thing that people abstractly understand; that there’s a lot of data, and if it’s used in the right way it can be very valuable, but it doesn’t really manifest in valuable ways or at least in as valuable ways as it can and should.

It is a lack of design that really contributes to that. The visualization of complex data sets and information, it’s not easy. Because of all the time I’ve spent in the information design community along with … at this point I’ve worked with hundreds of designers in my career. I know very well that your garden variety, even talented graphic designer isn’t necessarily going to be good at information design; in fact, most aren’t.

It takes a really specific sub-set of the skills that go into graphic design and to the point earlier, where I said that the practitioners often are strong in one or the other; of graphic design and writing. That gets at it a little bit too. A lot of what’s been done in the information design community … it’s a minority. More is on the graphic design side but a big chunk of it has to do with writing, has to do with things like forms and instructions, and bleeding into some other communities.

It’s a different skill set, it’s a different way of thinking and it’s much more structured. My wife, for example, is a medical illustrator, which is an aspect of illustration that is all around photo realistic representations of biological topics of the human body; of genomes; of animals; whatever the case may be but for … in a very instructional way.

She’s talked about how medical illustrators are known in the illustration community as being more conservative; more buttoned up; more controlled and information designers are very similar. The conferences that I’ve been to with some wonderful people but there’s just a little bit more conservatism, austerity. I’d even say a little bit more introversion perhaps but because it’s really about trying to think about these complex sets of information and data; and not only structure them properly but present them well.

Those two things are related but they also require very different skills to pull off and do correctly. The topic of data and designing for understanding, it always makes me think of information design because it is the one discipline that very specifically and emphatically is focused on that. Here we are in this huge trend for Big Data and information design doesn’t seem to be taking advantage of that.

It’s too bad; both because the field for a long time has stood to benefit from more attention, more opportunity to really imbue the world with the good that it has to offer. The field suffers but also the potential of Big Data is lessened. I feel almost ill saying the potential of Big Data because it’s strictly cranking along the hype machine. But Big Data at its best — when you have the right data set on an interesting topic and it’s designed properly — is massively powerful. That is the kernel behind the hype. The problem is the hype around Big Data; it’s very rarely paying itself off. Information design is something that really could lead the way in doing that. I’m guessing that the trend moves on to something else before that becomes relevant but who knows? Maybe there will something that happens and there will be a better confluence between information design and the Big Data trend to everybody’s benefit.

That’s all for this month and I look forward to talking with you next time.

We have filters and facets but they’re not all that helpful most of the time. 401(k) plans come up. Understanding my phone bill like when I travel internationally and I come back and I have the international long distance charges. That often makes no sense and I actually have multiple times with my cell phone provider where they double billed me for the data use while I was overseas but also for the plan that I paid for to cover the data used. A lot of that is just how they represent the bill. It’s hard to find that information and find out where the problem was. A couple years ago I went through into the home mortgage, went through that process. There were some parts of it that were very nice like the mortgage calculator where you could actually model different monthly payments and down payments and APRs and get a sense of what I could afford. There are other things like when it came down to closing cost there’s no hard and faster rule. I think closing cost could be 1 to 8% of the cost of the home which is quite a range on something that’s … this is a home.

I looked around. Truly there’s a pattern here so I can know what to expect and there wasn’t. That’s a place where there’s enough data that you could easily surface a pattern and some estimates. I have a kind of personal note. A few years ago I got tired of going into places like Central Market or Whole Foods and seeing the wall of cheeses, 800 plus cheese options and not having a clue where to start or what the differences were. My wife and I signed up for a cheese 101 class. We sampled 25 different cheeses that night, learned about the 8 different types of cheeses and the 3 milks they come from and out of that I started sketching kind of this info graphic to help me make sense of that world and since then I’ve gone on to sample dozens of more different kinds of cheeses but I have this understanding now. I understand fundamentally what are the differences and where I should go for certain types of flavors and some things like that. I think that’s what’s missing. It’s just this really deep understanding of a space. The kind that comes through expertise and through training but I think if we focus more on how we design content we could help people understand and comprehend a lot more than we do. It’s really a difference between knowing what to do like going through the steps versus really understanding what you’re doing and how it works. My goal would to be to get people that place of understanding where you can make better more informed decisions.

Let me go back to that mortgage calculator example even though that’s a very crude example of what I’m talking about. In a way you’re modeling and simulating possible futures. You’re saying, “Okay, if I only put this much down what would my monthly payment be? Okay, I can’t do that but if I put this much down and I get this APR if there’s a good credit, what will it be?” You’re playing with possible futures and you learn what makes the difference, what doesn’t, things like that. Of course there’s the serendipity of playfulness where when you play you discover things you didn’t plan on, you didn’t expect and that’s often where the insights and discoveries come from. That’s the idea of playing with data and exploring different perspectives or views. It’s definitely intriguing to me what happens there.

At first, I was like, “Wait a second, we just lost some data.” Like he couldn’t see everything for a year at once like you could in a static print info graphic but the same time you’re starting to create more personalized stories at that moment where you’re asking, “Okay, if we’re going to go to Florida, when should we go?” You can adjust the slider and see the average rainfall decline or increase. If you want to look for patterns as you play with it you start to see certain things swell certain times a year. I don’t know, there’s something about when you cross over and make something interactive which is … it’s so much richer. There’s so much you can get out of the data then.

There’s one quote I’ve really hang on to and it’s basically she was talking about her approach to designing the school room and designing a learning environment. She’s talked about basically we have prepared the environment and the materials. It wasn’t so much about preparing the lesson and dispensing the information as much as shaping the environment the students are going to be in and placing walls, chairs and materials in that environment that the students could discover and start to play with. Right there, what you’re fostering is independent learning or self-directed learning which is the most powerful way to learn. The tools or the objects you would place in the classroom were often physical objects, manipulatives, things that you could play with.

Examples being like these cylinder blocks of different sizes where they’re all proportionally represent the same volume but they’re different sizes. Some are very fat and shallow and some are very thin and deep and you play with these. They’re physical manipulatives but at the same if you try to put them, the wrong one into the wrong hole it’s not going to fit. There’s feedback loop there that’s coming from this object that let you know that no, that doesn’t fit here. There’s just all the self-learning and there’s these physical manipulative objects and there’s the teacher on the side just kind of creating the environment and noting student’s pattern.

Yeah, definitely I’ve been thinking a lot more about the systems I design and we talked a lot about shaping paths in what we do and in nudging behaviors and fact I’ve written a lot about that in various articles and in my book but lately I’ve been thinking more about the sandbox environments where you create the sandbox and you let users or players or whatever maybe kind of shape their own paths and explore their own ways, Minecraft being a perfect example of this Pinterest, Twitter. These tools, initially people scratch their heads out and were like, “How should we use this or what should we use it for?” Once people started playing in that sandbox you saw the people’s behaviors and you could say, “Oh okay. I’m going to try that.” You could model your own behavior after others. Definitely lots there to take away.

A lot of similar threads there. I think he’s just several years down the path ahead of me and much deeper than I’ll ever be able to go. Amazing guy. One of the things he talks about is embodied cognition which is relatively new over the last decade. What he’s talking about is how we think through doing which sounds rather obvious but if you look at a lot of traditional HCI models, there’s this idea that there’s some external stimulus. We take it as input into our brains, we think about how to respond and we tell our hand what to do and where to move the mouse or where to move the finger, to touch the glass and all the thinking goes on in the brain. That would be a thinking then doing model.

What he says is that’s just not true. That’s not how we work. Some examples he points out are when you’re playing a game of scrabble. You’ll see players reach out and physically rearrange the tiles to see different possibilities. They’re thinking through doing. They’re using those external space. Same thing happens in chess games where someone will reach out and grab the chess piece. They’ll move it around the board, hover over different spaces and then return it the original position ‘cause they’re still thinking and there’s no change, external change in the environment but they’ve used the environment to explore their possibilities, to think beyond the capabilities of, the limited capabilities of our brains. When he was talking about things like that I immediately connected it to Montessori and some of the manipulatives.

You learn letters by tracing sandpaper letters or you learn basic math concepts with counting beads, like a bead or rod of 10 beads, a grid of 100 beads, a block with a 1,000 beads. There’s this idea that learning is very physical and very tangible. Anyway, that’s kind of where he takes it. From there I’ve just been reflecting a lot more on the role of my body and different activities. Definitely a little bit quantified self-reflection here but I became aware a few years ago that when I lean forward at work like at a desk I’m going to do a different type of work or different … I’m going to think differently than when I’m leaning back say sitting in a recliner working. I started working a standing desk a few years ago. I started initially because of some back problems I was having then I discovered that standing was perfect for meetings or for preparing a talk that I was working on for example and that sitting was actually … I couldn’t do those things. I was engaged differently.

That’s extended beyond being in front of the computer, I found when I go to like my son’s soccer games. If I’m standing I’m 100% engaged, 100% focused but if I sit down on the bleachers then I tend to look around and get distracted. I pull up my iPhone and do other things. I find myself standing a lot more so I can be fully committed and fully engaged in things.

I want to take that and start to then look into the future just a little bit. In one of your articles last year from the Pastry Box you said, you got the quote that said, “what happens when communication, movement, motion, position and other forms of interaction become part of the designer’s toolbox?” You said for you that’s sort of what you see as the thrilling future. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about where you see that going and how you see that playing out.

I was thinking about that and then combining it with some of the embodied cognition conversations and looking around with some of the new hardware, new sensors there coming out. Things like you being able to create the sensation of texture on a smartphone for example. As you’re going across in the game on your tablet something might feel like sandpaper like something else feels gravelly while something else feels smooth. You can actually do that and there’s a couple ways to do it.

There are definitely technologies coming out of Disney Labs and Chris Harrison where you can like grip the doorknob as a sensor or touch plants. There’s a lot happening with bringing our whole body into these interactions and when you combine that with how we learn with our whole bodies or how we move through space with our bodies and think with our bodies. To me that’s the thrilling combination, the thrilling future. It kind of puts everything we’ve done up to date in context and says, okay the click on the mouse or the touch on the screen is highly limited to what, where we’re headed.

On a related note, I was thinking I just saw Iron Man 3 and there’s a scene where he’s trying to sift through all the data and the patterns and form connections and the room becomes this holographic environment that he’s walking through and interacting with and it’s definitely a graphic design eye candy to watch but at the same time I was thinking, “Wow.” There’s something to be able to move through and arrange these objects and filter and sort and remove these representations in the way you can’t do with real physical objects that is exciting from a cognitive perspective. I actually could see analyzing you’re thinking and using that special arrangement as mechanisms to help us see patterns or organize things and that of course is what he does and he finds the lead that he goes to and the rest of the movie continues from there. We start thinking of these, those science fiction movies or fantasy, superhero movies have a totally different suggestion to you.