All posts about
Information design

Information design is the skill and practice of preparing information so people can use it with efficiency and effectiveness. (source: Wikipedia)

For the love of experience: Changing the experience economy discourse

Added on 14 December 2011 Peter Bogaards
Really hope her dissertation changes the discourse.

“The attention for experiences as economic offerings has increased enormously in the last decade. However, the lack of a clear definition of experience and the bias towards the organization’s perspective in the discourse cause much confusion. In this study experience is taken back to its basis: the encounter between an individual and his or her environment. Different concepts, effects and values of experience are defined to construct a more integrative discourse for the experience economy from the individual’s perspective. To reap the benefits that the experience economy offers, the role of organizations has to change from a directing and controlling one to a more supporting and facilitating one. A true recognition of the co-creation that takes place in experiences shows how much latent potential for creating value there is yet to discover.”

(Anna Snel a.k.a. @annasnel)

Mental Modeling For Content Work: An Introduction

Added on 22 November 2011 Peter Bogaards
Introducing an old concept to a ‘new’ field of practice. Sigh!

“All it takes is a moment for our mood to change. Ideas and complex concepts can form in seconds given the right amount of cognitive capacity. Even something as simple as the way a sentence is structured or the words we choose will impact perceptions or the potential for another’s comprehension. It’s precisely for all of these ambient, behavioral and situational factors that content strategists should be better leveraging mental mapping and modeling for the planning, design and implementation of content. Mental Modeling is far from a new thing. (…) the first post in a three part series about adapting traditional views of mental modeling for the practice of content strategy.”

(Daniel Eizans a.k.a. @danieleizans)

Design is How It Works

Added on 3 November 2011 Peter Bogaards
Where did I read that definition of Design before?

“Jay zeroes in on the design process at companies that do design well. The companies come in different shapes and sizes. The point is that design is something at which any company can succeed. Jay will talk about how companies that embrace the idea that design is about creating a great experience are the ones that will flourish in the 21st Century.”

(Jay Greene ~ HIVE 2011)

Fear of Content

Added on 19 October 2011 Peter Bogaards
Not really sure why we changed data and information into content, as if it’s something completely different.

“Content can be a little frightening, it’s true. Not to everyone mind you. Some people simply love content, with all its oddities and challenges. More often than not these are the people who spend much of their time designing and creating content. But there are definitely people who look somewhat askance at this thing called ‘content’. The reasons why some people are less than enamored with content are worth considering and not only to refute them. There may well be good reasons to be afraid – or at least to approach content with due respect.”

(Joe Gollner a.k.a. @joegollner ~ The Fractal Enterprise)

Shoes, Cars, and Other Love Stories: Investigating The Experience of Love for Products

Added on 4 October 2011 Peter Bogaards
We not only love people, but products as well. And they don’t talk back, sort of.

“People often say they love a product. What do they really mean when they say this, and is this a phenomenon that is relevant to the field of design? Findings from a preliminary study in this thesis indicated that people describe their love as a rewarding, long-term, and dynamic experience that arises from a meaningful relationship built with products they own and use. Inspired by existing approaches to the experience of love from social psychology, research tools are developed for the closer study of person-product love. Using those tools the research in this thesis investigates how person-product interactions are linked to the experience of love and how these influence love over time. The findings reveal how the experience of love arises from person-product relationships, how love relationships develop over time, and which factors can provoke change in the love experience and love relationships over time. These findings present opportunities for design researchers and designers to foster rewarding experiences and long-lasting person-product relationships. Person-product love relationships can bring emotional rewards that benefit people’s wellbeing and stimulate sustained efforts to keep loved products for longer.”

(Beatriz Russo ~ Technical University Delft)

Wizards Versus Forms

Added on 19 September 2011 Peter Bogaards
But where’s the magic from these wizards?

“When I find myself designing an application that is complex, either in terms of its length or its logical dependencies, my natural instinct is to take a wizard approach. Wizards are cool; forms are dull. Product managers love wizards because they are so Web 2.0. Developers like wizards because they involve more programming expertise than just cranking out forms.”

(Mike Hughes ~ UXmatters)

What is serendipity? A workshop report

Added on 16 September 2011 Peter Bogaards
Great to see such an important concept researched.

“On 16th June 2010, a workshop took place at Dundee Contemporary Arts with the aim of gaining an initial understanding of the nature of serendipity. This workshop involved 3 groups of interdisciplinary researchers and academics generating examples from their work or everyday lives that they deemed to be serendipitous. These examples, along with any patterns identified, were then discussed with the larger group. It was proposed that serendipitous events are unexpected, with the specific serendipitous outcomes unintended. It was also proposed that serendipitous outcomes are clear and positive, always resulting in a change in the head (and sometimes in a change in the world). It was also suggested that while some serendipitous connections might be recognised immediately, others might only be recognised after some time, or might not be recognised at all.”

(Stephann Makri & Ann Blandford ~ Information Research Vol. 16 no. 3)

How Responsive Web Design becomes Responsive Web Publishing

Added on 6 September 2011 Peter Bogaards
I guess, content is becoming as fluid as possible.

“The last few years have been a good time to be a web designer. After a decade of making do with the aging technologies, methods and assumptions that gave birth to mainstream web publishing, designers are starting to trade the tiresome challenge of controlling the user experience for a few more interesting ones.”

(Chris Palmieri a.k.a. @cpalmieri ~ AQWorks)

Edward Tufte’s ‘Slopegraphs’

Added on 12 July 2011 Peter Bogaards
“What’s interesting is that over 20 years before sparklines came on the scene, Tufte developed a different type of data visualization that didn’t fare nearly as well. To date, in fact, I’ve only been able to find three examples of it, and even they aren’t completely in line with his vision. (…) In this post, we’re going to look at slopegraphs – what they are, how they’re made, why they haven’t seen a massive uptake so far, and why I think they’re about to become much more popular in the near future.”

(Charlie Park a.k.a. @charliepark)

Measuring information behaviour performance inside a company: A case study

Added on 16 June 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Measuring information behaviour performance to provide practical guidance for knowledge workers is an important issue for the success of a company. Drawing upon the literature from psychology, marketing, management and information systems, this paper develops a practical model of information behaviour that provides fundamental determinants of knowledge workers’ performance.”

(Yujong Hwang ~ Information Research, 16(2)

The Information Sage

Added on 15 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Edward Tufte occupies a revered and solitary place in the world of graphic design. Over the last three decades, he has become a kind of oracle in the growing field of data visualization – the practice of taking the sprawling, messy universe of information that makes up the quantitative backbone of everyday life and turning it into an understandable story. His four books on the subject have sold almost two million copies, and in his crusade against euphemism and gloss, he casts a shadow over the world of graphs and charts similar to the specter of George Orwell over essay and argument.” (Joshua Yaffa ~ Washington Monthly) ~ courtesy of jasonkottke

Making sense of and filtering information overload

Added on 10 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“The new generation of web tools are enabling us to collaborate to filter massive information overload. Creating visual frameworks can be a powerful way of making sense of information. The role of futurists is pattern recognition. Selective filtering to reinforce our biases is not new. Most of us will experience more diverse views than before the web.” (Ross Dawson ~ Trends in the Living Networks)

Why Great Designers Steal – and Are Proud of It

Added on 19 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“It is a fact of life that creative people – if they are any good-constantly absorb input and stimuli that influences their own creative output. By nature, they imitate and play with the ideas of other creative people. It’s how they learn and grow. It doesn’t matter whether you call this trait awareness, empathy, or even stealing. No innovative or successful design happens in a vacuum. Regardless of whether you realize it, what you see and interact with around you every day influences your work. Picasso just happened to be a master when it came to using stolen goods for the benefit of his own artistic pursuits.” (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters)

Idea Collider: From a Theory of Knowledge Organization to a Theory of Knowledge Interaction PDF Logo

Added on 8 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“A new and novel addition to core concepts of information science and technology is the Idea Collider, adapting the conceptual basis of the particle accelerator. The Idea Collider is presented as a theory of information and an information retrieval tool that deconstructs text to the underlying elements – the concepts, ideas, knowledge entities, taxons and knowledge bases – and then reconstitutes groupings of data. The authors champion the idea of a ‘multiverse of knowledge’, in contrast to the ‘universe of knowledge’ that is an important metaphor in traditional classification theory. A historical review of outstanding theoretical landmarks in classification theory explores the universe of knowledge metaphor, faceted classification theory and the universe of concepts, moving from a holistic view of existing knowledge to an elemental deconstruction that can account for all knowledge, past and future. The Idea Collider is proposed as a theoretical approach to identifying the essential parts of knowledge, dissociating those elements from culture- and time-bound dimensions and making them available for a bottom-up reassembly process.” (Richard P. Smiraglia and Charles van den Heuvel ~ ASIS&T Bulletin)

Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?

Added on 7 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“(…) the construction and framing of Design Thinking itself has become a key issue. Design Thinking originally offered the world of big business–which is defined by a culture of process efficiency–a whole new process that promised to deliver creativity. By packaging creativity within a process format, designers were able to expand their engagement, impact, and sales inside the corporate world. Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.” (Bruce Nussbaum ~ Co.Design)