“In central Europe, design is at a crossroads. It is 15 years since the collapse of communism and the arrival of democracy and the free market and a great deal has happened in the design communities of countries such as the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, Poland and Hungary. Design is at different stages of development, reflecting national economic conditions and the relationship of designers with their own local traditions of design, but certain factors are shared, and it is these opportunities and dilemmas that I want to explore.” (Rick Poynor – Design Observer)

“(…) a forum for both practitioners and researchers. It aims to enhance design knowledge and practice so that informed design can support people’s interactions with printed and electronic materials, whether using verbal text, numbers, pictures, diagrams or other forms of representation. IDJ+DD brings together the variety of ways of investigating and thinking about the effective design of information in various genres.” (John Benjamins Publishing Company)

“This year’s winners were selected by our distinguished jury from a group of entries including Web sites, Kiosks, CD-ROM projects and PDA’s. The 43 winning projects are showcased, and in further detail in the September/October 2004 issue of Communication Arts magazine.” (Communication Arts) – courtesy of elearningpost

“This case history demonstrates how information design research and practice can bring about useful social change on a large scale. It is a lightly edited version of a report prepared for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in August 2002 following our work on redeveloping the consumer instructions for Panadol, the most widely used paracetemol analgesic in Australia.” (David Sless – Communication Research Institute of Australia)

“There are certain words you need to ban the use of, and ‘busy’ is one of them. In knowledge-driven economies, ‘busy’ is an outdated word that reflects a manual labor approach to work. Instead of ‘busy’ you need to use words such as ‘effective’ and ‘productive’.” (Gerry McGovern)

“Internationalization has become a very popular topic around web design. Designers are becoming more aware of the global scale of websites and are taking into account different language character sets, date formats and currencies. The more subtle effects of culture, however, are less evident. In an attempt to study these factors, Aaron Marcus and Emilie W. Gould discuss how Hofstede’s cultural dimensions of power-distance (PD), individual vs. collectivism (IC), masculinity vs. femininity (MAS) and uncertainty avoidance (UA) and long term vs. short term orientation (LTO) may apply to global web sites. As an exercise, I looked at several corporate and consumer websites that might illustrate – or perhaps contradict – the patterns Marcus and Gould described.” (Kevin Cheng – OK/Cancel) – courtesy of chris mcevoy

“The question ‘What is a digital document?’ is seen as a special case of the question ‘What is a document?’ (…) Old confusions between medium, message, and meaning are renewed with digital technology because technological definitions of “document” become even less realistic when everything is in bits.” (Michael K. Buckland)

“Three meanings of ‘information’ are distinguished: ‘Information-as-process’; ‘information-as-knowledge’; and ‘information-as-thing’, the attributive use of ‘information’ to denote things regarded as informative. The nature and characteristics of ‘information-as-thing’ are discussed, using an indirect approach (‘What things are informative?’). Varieties of ‘information-as-thing’ include data, text, documents, objects, and events. On this view ‘information’ includes but extends beyond communication. Whatever information storage and retrieval systems store and retrieve is necessarily ‘information-as-thing’.” (Michael K. Buckland)

“Kris Freeman (University of Washington) let me know her thesis research got published. A while back I gave Kris a tiny bit of help, for which she graciously thanked me. I’m always happy to see new research about web credibility and expect more good things from Kris. Congrats!” (Captology Notebook)

“What follows is the current level of understanding I have been able to piece together regarding data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. I figured to understand one of them I had to understand all of them.” (Gene Bellinger et al.)

“Many governments have so far approached the Web with a rather crude strategy of getting every service online. This has resulted in a proliferation of often poor quality websites. The strategy should be to identify the most appropriate government services for the Web and to do them really well.” (Gerry McGovern)

“Cultures and priorities vary, but there are some common issues for organizations as intranets continue to evolve.” (Shiv Singh – Line56)

“Here is a complete draft of a chapter on linking lines and causal arrows from my Beautiful Evidence. This chapter suggests methods for showing linking lines and causal arrows, and also demonstrates ideas for assessing the credibility of various links. That is, the links themselves are taken as explanatory evidence. Note the typographic design of the organization chart which replaces the conventional design of bureaucrats-in-boxes.” (Edward Tufte)

“A crucial aspect of most (if not all) Web systems is the way in which information is utilised and managed. Recent work on areas as diverse as topic maps, information architectures, adaptation of the Unified Modeling Language, agile development methods such as extreme programming, and modelling for the semantic Web, have all contributed to an emerging understanding of how to design the information structures that underpin the Web (and of course much of this work has in turn been informed by research in areas like hypertext and HCI).” (David Lowe – Journal of Digital Information 5.2)

“I = VT/AP: I = perceived cost of information to owner of information; V = validity of the information; T = time and effort to enter the information; A = availability of the information elsewhere; P – potential value to the owner of the information.” (Kevin Cheng – OK/Cancel)

“This paper discusses the globalization of e–learning, changes in languages as an effect of distance technologies and the lingua franca of modern times, English, and its effects on other languages. Hybrid languages such as Spanglish (Spanish English) and Swenglish (Swedish English) emerges as an effect of the increasing interaction between non–English languages and the dominant English language. The need for speed and efficiency in communication and the adaptation to new technology changes language dramatically as is observed in chat and SMS–mediated communication. The complexity of modern human communication is discussed with a historical perspective – the old modes of communication can now be used via Internet but this transfer changes their characteristics.” (First Monday 9.8)

“Research has long shown that the leading factor in persuading shoppers to buy from an e-commerce Web site is ease of navigation — findings that were supported in a recent survey by Jupiter Research. In other words, customers are saying make your site easy-to-use, and you’ll earn our sale.” (James Maguire – eCommerce Guide)

“Information architecture (IA) and information design (ID) are two fields that are taking the Web experience to a new level. They form the foundations of what is now widely known as user experience design (UXD). In this article, I argue that e-learning teams too have to embrace UXD practices in addition to learning design practices to take the learning experience to a higher level.” (Australian Flexible Learning Community)

“He’s given an excellent talk on how campus design and design for learning spaces have been changed by wifi and ubiquitous computing.” (Black Belt Jones)

“Support costs money. Some customers are worth supporting because they are, or have the capacity to be, profitable. Some customers are not worth supporting because the cost of supporting them is greater than the profit that can be made from them. Differentiating between profitable and unprofitable customers is a critical skill.” (Gerry McGovern)