Information Architecture: Readings and Solution

Our final project in Information Architecture has started, and I'm looking forward to the outcome. This will be a new experience for our entire class, as we are designing applications for the iphone operating system. 

We are beginning with one of the subcultures that our class has researched into. Since I chose the bike commuter subculture for the last User Experience project, I'll be designing for the sustainable DIY subculture. 

After reviewing the DIY research book, particularly to the task analysis, and reviews, I brainstormed and considered a wide range of topics to gear this new application toward. In the end, I've decided to create an application assisting DIYer's in joining together in collectives and organizations. DIYer's naturally work on an individual basis, but there is a hidden desire to work together, share knowledge, and above all contribute to society. My application will make a community where DIY users can easily group together based on individual interests, skills, location, etc., and help them find opportunities with volunteer organizations such as those assisting with natural disasters and even community issues on a much more localized level. 

Designing for the iphone has proven to be a difficult and interesting experience thus far. The screen is far smaller than your typical computer screen, and legibility and organization seem to be major concerns. I'm hoping to capitalize on both the gestures used to interact with the iphone interface and icons to help maximize screen real estate. 

Here are the 5 points I found most interesting from the first 2 readings on the subject of designing for the iphone platform.

1. Gestures Reading: Supported Gestures

The 8 listed gestures listed under the table section were a great reference. I haven't had much experience with the iphone, so it's nice to know the simple interface options that bridge hand and software.

2. Icons Reading: Immediacy

Icon immediacy is imperative to icon effectiveness. The examples of the brush were great in showing excess detail, and the importance of simplification in form. 

3. Icons Reading: Standard Icons

I thought this section was the most helpful of my listed 5. Knowing what icons are used across the iphone platform is infinitely helpful. It was also interesting hearing that they are used in many different situations.

4. Icons Reading: Cohesiveness

Cohesiveness is a design essential. You don't want a finalized design solution to seem pieced together and mismatched. The series of balls was a great example in following a similar theme as well.

5. Gestures Reading: Custom Gesture Tips

The custom gestures section shared some great information on capitalizing on the iphones touch interactive features. It also never occurred to me that fingers of the user do cover a good portion of the screen space. It's important to consider that in the design.

Type 4: Experimental Type Reading

Experimental Typography. Whatever that means.
This reading was quite an insight in the term "experimentation". I've never really stopped to consider just how much design relies on that word, and to just what extent experimentation actually occurs in the design process. This article discussed experimentation's scientific roots as a term, and related that to the percieved definitions we designers attach to it. From the designers that were surveyed, it seems most consider experimentation to represent new or groundbreaking outcomes that haven't been seen or done before. Of course part of me wants to admit that just about everything has been done, but with new technologies making their debut each year, designers have an every increasing platform for our own "experiments". Experimental typography in particular seems a science in itself. Linguistics and the symbols that make a language possible are a system, and for the typography that works with that system to stray and take on new forms and meaning is an experimentation, scientific or not.

The act of process is the origin for experimentation. As a designer, I love process. It is just important to me as the ending product, and there are infinite possibilities in reaching a final design solution. Typography is no different. It can be created in many ways, read in many ways, not read at all in many ways. The article briefly covers a few opinions that don't accept projects that have been done in the past to be experimental. I disagree with them. While it's true that a completely new process is experimental, each person has their own design experience to flesh out. What one person has done thousands of times is something completely new to another, and that process can always be done in a different way.

The Typographic Experiment, From Futurism to Fuse
This reading was a bit hard to sift through, but has some great discussion on the experiments occuring in typography today and in the past. Typography is more than just letterforms. The space, materials, the language itself, and many other elements all influence the readers experience. When a designer steps into that relationship and alters the text, it creates something unique that stands out from the typical typographic rectangle on a white page. Language and communication is broad, and a letterform not only has form, but a sound and other meanings society pins onto them. A group of letterforms interact with eachother, holding encoded messages we have learned to understand. If our symposium is going to hold a wide range of type experiments, we would be wise as designers to look past the simple fact that letters are shapes, and dig deep into just what a letter is and how it works when altered.

What did you think of these readings?
I thought both of these readings related to our current point in the symposium process, and were a great introduction to the possibilities of working with letterforms and the written language. I'll certainly keep them as a reference for later typographic work.

Does their definition of "experimental" match what you previously thought of the term?
Yes and no. While I do agree that experimentation is primarily the process of design, I don't believe it has to be new. It boils down to the experience and learning something you haven't done yourself. Learning first hand is always better than simply reading about someone else's work on the subject, and there's always the possibilities of new variables when you experiment yourself.

Is it really useful to experiment if it doesn't have real application?
Definitely. Experimentation above all is a learning process. The experience of doing something new might be a bit intimidating, but we learn from doing more than seeing. While there is a lot to gain from analyzing the finished product, how we arrive at those finished products is the real story.

User Experience: Reading Responses

As we proceed forward in our subcultural awareness campaigns, we've been asked to read through 4 different readings and relate them to our current project. I'll start with the reading in Megg's Type and Image, under the "Audience" section. 

In this section, Megg discusses the necessity and problems that come with using pictographs, ideograms, and petroglyphs. In the process of using these each viewer, or the audience, has a different perception of the visual language being used. This perception is formed by many things, including their culture, age, gender, location, and past experiences. As a dominantly visual art, graphic design faces this problem at every turn, and is very much intwined with  it. Our current project is specifically designed for a particular subculture; in my case, it's the bike commuter subculture. By using our past research guides and techniques, we've discovered a wide range of visual and verbal language and signifiers that they identify with. These function in a similar if not identical way to Megg's mentioned pictographs, ideograms, and petroglyphs. However, since our audience is not near as broad and their perceptions, though still remaining different, will be within a similar mindset. The bike commuting community all share a graphic landscape and way of communicating and acting in society and it's my job to design for that community to illeviate any communication noise that would step between them and the design's message for my campaign. By using the audiences visual and verbal language, a designer can get his or her message across much more effectively. 

The next reading was  Graphic design in a Multicultural World by Katherine McCoy from How Magazine.  Katherine McCoy begins her discussion by bringing the idea of mass design to light. With computers doing much of the older design work and methods, universal design is slowly dying out. In today's society, mass communication and technologies have begun to globalize information and mix culture. Communities have as a result, split into smaller groups and subcultures. This not only pertains to the civilian, but corporations as well, as they shrink and better tailor there business strategies to a particular audience, location, or culture.  These subcultures form a sense of pride and create a visual landscape around them. As mentioned in my response to Megg's section, the visual and verbal language these people adopt is an essential element in tailoring any design to a particular subculture. This creates design from the inside, and the audience is much more likely to listen to someone that understands them as a subculture. The bike commuter subculture for example would rather be exposed to design from other bike commuters or a company that has tailored their product to their needs and style. A universal corporation or group's design on the other hand would likely be disregarded altogether since they are outsiders, and their design won't utilize the right channels to target that subculture. This is where design research comes in. Today's designers absolutely must be able to employ a wide range of research techniques so that we understand the receiving end of our design on a much more balanced level to the sender's role. Particularly in corporate design when we work for a particular client, we often focus too much on the sender's role in the designs outcome when it should be the receiver or audience that should always come first. The location, the visual and verbal language, the channels, the style, the rhetorical tropes in play, and any symbolism and imagery must all be considered when addressing a particular audience. Otherwise, the design isn't speaking or coming across well with the user.

Next was an article named Local Lingo by Alice Twemlow from AIGA Voice. Design research is the overall subject of this article. It covers ground I haven't been exposed to however, in that it discusses the need for a designer to immerse themselves in the location. With global travel available and widely used, graphic designers are now employed by companies all over the world, many of them overseas at other branches of their design company or working in the field of a design target location. Design research can only get you so far over the computer. A designer's research techniques should not be restricted to only books and online material. There has to be a connection and experience on a personal level, and that means that for the best design solution for a particular audience or subculture, the designer needs to visit the target location and experience it for themselves. Alice Twemlow mentions that "the climate, materials and physical constraints of a particular region" are all necessary to understanding how the targeted subculture works, acts, thinks, and communicates. By following the subculture and participating in their activities we can better construct our prototypes and discover areas that need to be worked on. Through task analysis, we can also find problem areas within that subculture that could be solved through tailored design solutions. 

The final article was Pop Artist by Linda Tischler from Fast Company. This article covered David Butler's new design systems for the Coke corporation. Linda Tischler reviewed the companies decision for a new system of machines to distribute coke worldwide, and the use of a modular design system from Butler. It was an interesting insight into designing for a company with so much change, yet so little. While Coke's product remains the same, their logo has undergone minor refinements throughout the years, and their product design has gone through major design shifts. Butler began by looking through thousands of past coke designs so as to understand where the designs started. In this way Butler placed himself inside the companies design roots so he could understand how the company started and gauge what has already been done in the company's past. Butler has employed a massive system of systems. The new coke machines that will soon be used in resteraunts and other locations around the globe will use a new interface, allowing the user to interact with a screen. Language, product, and occasion have all become selection options on these new dispensors, and the machine prints a wide variety of designs from around the world (over 8,400 so far and climbing).  Coke also has the ability to upload new designs to the machines very quickly and can use these new designs to better appeal to customers on a local and cultural level. My interest however comes from the machines ability to record user information. It keeps records of product choice and popularity, times of purchase, and much more. This helps Coke to better observe buyer trends and patterns and can better tailor their product's application. In a way, their machines are doing a basic form of design research constantly throughout the day. Butler has made a great use of new technologies in todays digital landscape, a bold move that graphic design has supported from the beginning. I hope that Butler's machines go over well, and will strive to adapt my future design to new platforms as well.

Type 4: c/id Reading

So after reading through a few of these museum and space exhibitions for design identity possibilities for our type symposium, a few thoughts come to mind.

The Frieze Art fair's identity worked much like a typographic template. The photography was interchangeable throughout their formats and was the star of the layout, with the type functioning as a secondary aesthetic element. Now don't get me wrong, I love their photographs, but in our type symposium, type is the star. So I believe that some merging of our type with this possibility of photography could create some dramatic and alluring imagery for our symposium's identity.

For the MoMaQNS, I thought their identity was a little busy, but I thought their concept of showing motion was an interesting design choice. Their system, much like Frieze's, is tightly bonded with their navigation at the event/ venue, and I thought Base Designs designing for the nearby subway stations was a brilliant move. Now assuming we had a budget for some massive signage, that might be something we could reach, but dealing with our realistic budget, it's better to other things from this. 1. Our design could relate in some way to the area it's being distributed or shown in and 2. Movement of the viewer in relation to the object can be used as a strength. They don't have to be standing still to view the piece.

The Mori Art Museum of Tokyo, Japan had some incredible imagery for their venue as well. It functions in the same way the Frieze's identity does. Their Type is a little more involved and up front however, rather than residing in the photo's quiet space. Our typography should be bold, and utilizing some dramatic imagery will help grab the freshman and high school audience we are seeking. Their swag is also well designed, and sticks within a limited color palette, which helps to create unity in their design, even though it changes between swag articles.

The Stedelijk Museum CS in Amsterdam was my favorite of the sections in our reading. Experimental Jetset did some awesome work in using a color scheme and type arrangements to create a modern and poppy feeling that would surely reel in many of the high school crowd. Their identity is an adaptable system that is modular and interchangeable by using the sleeves, and I think this idea of modularity could be a nice subject for our type symposium. I think that challenging the viewers ability to read the text is a great way to grab their attention and really get them asking questions on typography's potential to be more than a font or a page of information. We need to show them that typography is visual language in itself, and can be used in many different and interesting ways. By using a common color scheme, their designs, although differing significantly in terms of arrangement of type, are all unified. They are simple with typography as the main interest, and rely on composition to grab the viewers attention.

I didn't really enjoy the Walker's identity as much as the others. While their concept of stringing together a system of words in a linear order is awesome, their graphic execution is a bit boring to me, and reminds me of caution tape.

All in all, these were great reads, and I hope our symposium's identity turns out just as unique and successful.

Visual Language: Shannon and Weaver Model Reading Response

In Visual Communication From Theory to Practice, they first cover the Shannon and Weaver communication model. At the time, it was created in relation to telecommunications, but was found to be applicable to all forms of communication. 

Their model was extremely simple, with a spot for Source, Transmitter, Noise, Receiver, and Destination. There was no section for feedback, which they continue to describe as a necessity in design and advertising. The presence of a beta testing stage allows for a test run, a period to iron out the wrinkles in the project. It also is a great way to gauge public reactions, and to take estimates on statistics like sales figures and the effectiveness of the message being conveyed. It's much like public speaking. When giving a lecture, it helps to see nods or other bodily gestures as feedback to know that the audience is understanding the message. If there is no feedback, you can't know that your message is getting lost, or going over someone's head. 

The noise was also an interesting section. Listening to a professor talk while they make far to many hand gestures is difficult. The extra fluff or stuff that gets lost creates a barrier that the viewer or listener must deal with. They mention the arts and crafts movement and the movement away from redundancy. This moved into modernism and the push for minimalism. Function over aesthetic. However, in transmission, and the sending of information, redundancy helps to cement an idea or get it across faster. This I agree with to an extent. There is certainly an extent to where repetition of an element is too much. Repetition generally causes a design to lose it's initial sparkle. 

Visual Language: The Berlo Model Reading Response

Berlo's model was by far more interesting to me. There were many details not included in "A Communication Primer".


The model starts with listings of elements beneath the 4 main parts of Sender, Message, Channel, Receiver.

Sender: Communication skills, knowledge, social system, culture, attitudes

Message: Elements + structure, content, treatment, code

Channel: Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting

Receiver: Communication skills, knowledge, social system, culture, attitudes


Sender and Receiver both share the same qualities because they are essentially the same, especially when feedback becomes part of the scenario. We are all sending and receiving data constantly. The schematic still focuses on the relationship between a 1 on 1 sending receiving situation rather than a mass of people.

In the section under Sender, which also applies to receiver, Particularly thought the section on communication skills was the most important. The other 4 seemed new to me though, and they were interesting reads. The knowledge of the content that is being sent or received is completely imperative. If I were to receive an essay written by a scholar on a subject I wasn't familiar with, the terminology and level of writing would soar over my head, creating noise and distance between me and the message. The same can be said for social systems. With each generation comes a new barrage of slang terms. These words become noise between that generation and other generations without understanding of these terms. The writing style also fits in here. If I were to read The Divine Comedy, the writing style and wording particular to that time period are going to become a barrier between me and the content I'm interested in.  Attitudes also become a big deal. If the receiver has no interest in the message being sent to him, such as spam mail in our inboxes, then the end result will be far from what the sender originally intended for that person to receive. The most interesting point however was his mentioning of touch used in social communication between the British and the French. Touch in that situation becomes an additional level beyond spoken word and even body language. With multiple channels conveying information, the message can be both more concrete and easily understood, or distorted by misunderstanding of the channel and it's intentions behind it.


The Message section explained the importance of encoding. In the encoding process, the sender must consider which code will be used, how it will be encoded (in order), and with what means. If using images, icons, symbols, or anything based in a worldwide acceptance of meaning, the sender has to consider with what extra information and contexts that message will bring to different cultures. Hierarchy also plays a major role. The elements that become placed in front of the others by aesthetic techniques or subject matter are going to come across to the viewer in the same way, assuming that the receiver has the same level of interest in the elements.


The Channel is a very broad section. The fact alone that he classified channel in terms of our senses limits this down exponentially. I loved that. Rather than rooting channel in what is currently available to us, such as television, computers, verbal language, writing and books, music, etc., the senses keep this nearly limitless amount of possibilities as a simple and timeless experience. Rather than you experiencing the message through email or what's on your screen, you receive the message through sight of the information on the screen, which is being encoded to you through the eye.

Visual Language: A Communications Primer Response

So, starting off the next project, we have started studying communication, and the process of broadcasting information. This video on laughingsquid.com is a 1953 instructional film for IBM, explaining this process and the noise that interfeers with this transmision.
http://laughingsquid.com/a-communications-primer-1953-by-ray-charles-eames/

In todays world  communication is sent in infinite ways, be it by computer, music, television, by mouth, by body language, by icons and symbols, or even the signals your brain intercepts and decodes when interacting with any of these communications. This video did a great job of bringing this complex process into a simple diagrammatic experience.

Using this diagram, explains the information transfer process in a nutshell.

1. The Sender has information
2. The Sender encodes the information
3. The Sender transmits or sends the information
4. Various noise, be it audio, visual, physical, mental interfere and alter the information
5. The Receiver gets the information
6. The Information is decoded
7. The Receiver then attempts to understand the information

However, it leaves out a major aspect of the broadcasting process. The feedback.  In a game of telephone, it's crucial that the beginning sender gets feedback, or return information from their receiver. This allows for mutual understanding unless the noise is so great that the feedback is also distorted. With feedback, a person can attempt to fix the noise, or the connection, and can correct any mistakes made in the encoding process that may have become noise itself. 

The simplicity of this diagram also leaves out many aspects of our decoding and encoding process. All aspects of our lives such as politics, culture, social constructs, etc. effect how we send and receive information. In the film the narrator mentions if you speak chinese to him and he can't speak or understand chinese, then he can't understand the message. Well beyond that, there is a further level of understanding. Through the process of understanding the chinese, there is a barrier or translation that must be overcome. A word in one language might have other meanings or contextual information that comes with it that the receiver misses out on. If you watch a Japanese move that has English subtitles or has been swapped with English dialogue, there is information lost in that transition of Japanese culture and linguistics to the English dialect. This can be said of any communication of differing culture or mode of communication that hasn't reached a worldwide agreement of meaning. 

Visual Language: Tropicana Article Response

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/business/media/23adcol.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

I thought this article brought up some valid questions that I've considered myself a few times. While it's true that a company should always look at new personas or ways to present themselves to the public, there are certain elements of ethics that can sometimes become a safety for the consumer to attach to. When a company has a reputation and has existed for a long time, people become comfortable with their advertising and design elements, and see them as a form of reliability. Companies like Morton's salt that have been around for many years barely change their design, sticking to that sense of nastalgia. However, it's also true that new design can real in a new generation of consumers. While I might not agree with Pepsi's new logo, the generation after me might, and it is securing new generations of consumers that keeps a company going. So while I do believe that keeping old design elements, I find myself a Coca Cola fan. Using their series of products, they've managed to use old design elements for classic products, while using newer ones for new products.

As for the quick feedback that these companies are receiving in terms of their newer designs, I find myself confused as to why companies like Tropicana aren't getting public response on their new advertising and design before spending the money to produce it. I understand the need for surprise to grab an audiences attention and to gain press, but we shouldn't ignore the need for constant criticism from peers and public groups.

Visual Language: Benneton Reading

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0106/voices_kalman.htm
http://press.benettongroup.com/ben_en/about/campaigns/history/

In these readings on Benneton, I found the transformation of the companies message to be an amazing thing. While it's true that their advertising has carried heavy messages, some too hard for people to swallow or accept, Benneton's decisiveness in what they stand for creates powerful imagery, imagery that someone will stop and look at, regardless if they like it or not. While some might hate this tactic to be used as advertising, I embrace the idea. Sure it's rough, but the effectiveness to which the company gets it's viewers attention is well worth it. The David Kerby ad really pushed the importance of aids close to home. In a world where advertising is everywhere, standing out is quite difficult, and the slap in the face sort of advertising they've created over the years has become it's own sort of entity in advertising. One that's not afraid to say "This is happening" and we don't care if you like it or not. I also believe that their strategy of release is brilliant. As they release the images, Benneton's work becomes stronger, and more accepted with those companies or areas that refuse to release their ads. Benneton really has become the epitome of a picture equals a thousand words.

VisCom2: Ellen Lupton Info Graphic Reading "Diagram"

This section was particularly my favorite from the book thus far. I found myself marking several pages for different elements to consider. Both graphic use of line, and the wide variety of ideas was very helpful. She covered a wide range of ideas, and even the brief overview of Edward Tufte's sort of theory on info graphics provoked some thought. I'm torn between the idea of the absolute bare simplicity and minimalism that much successful design pulls from, and the extra fluff that adds character to it.  In the end however, I think I have to go against my initial instincts and love for minimalism and have to agree with Ellen on this issue. That fluff, or "chart junk" as Tufte puts it, is what often draws the viewer in, and really gives the designer the ability to express themselves and their style into the work. With the barebone approach that Tufte supports, the viewer is only approached with a simple graphic that gets the point across, but only leaves them with the knowledge. The designer doesn't leave much of an impact on the viewer in terms of their stylistic approach. And while I agree that the idea of the designer remaining annonymos is something beautiful, it tends to diminish the human designer into a designer, or group designers together as a whole.

A few elements I saw that I haven't really thought about are typography, transparency and overlapping, and being selective in what you show.  One reason why I've been straying away from location based diagrams so far is the showing of the map. There are so many diagrams that use the map. However, a few diagrams in the examples completely blew me away with their simple solution to their problem. One simply placed the dots/ icons on the map, and then deleted the map altogether, leaving only the distance between the points. This created simplicity and really played up typography and the graphic qualities of the colored lines they used.  Another diagram used only a few countries, but rather than using the whole world map, they only used those countries, and left the distance between the countries as an abstract thing by putting these countries that would normally be across the world from each other adjacent to one another.

VisCom2: "How to Think" Response

In Ed Boyden's article "How to Think", he runs over a basic 10 step plan for successful thinking.  On second thought, it's really more of guidelines and tips.  The structure of his time is very analytical and design based. Something I'm quite fond of.  For the sake of the response and my future reference, here are his 10 steps listed under his brief titles:

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly.
2. Learn how to learn (rapidly)
3. Work backward from your goal
4. Always have a long-term plan. 
5. Make contingency maps. 
6. Collaborate. 
7. Make your mistakes quickly.
8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols.
9. Document everything obsessively. 
10. Keep it simple.  

The steps are fairly solid.  I'm a little confused as to how you work backward from your goals.  If one were to need a paper finished for their class tomorrow, then going to a party wouldn't get that paper finished.  I think he might be saying that people should take less enphasis in getting the goal accomplished, and letting it come to completion naturally with your interests in mind.  This might have grounds in particular goals, but when something needs to get done, like constructing a building, it doesn't get built through doing everything but building.  I think the way he worded that step might have just confused me as to his meaning. 
Step 7, was very informative to myself.  I have a hard time jumping off and doing something I'm uncomfortable with, but that usually becomes rewarded in the end as you end up with fantastic and unpredictable results.  I could use a bit more courage in trying new approaches to problems, and quickening the trial process of any new medium or method. 
Step 10 is the most important to me. Keeping things simple is ideal in making progress, as complicated systems usually yield problems.  Simplicity also helps to weed out the fluff to get to the purest form and function of an object. 

I'll be sure to put many of these steps into practice.