The culture of information

Being an editor

By Willem van Weelden

The practice of today’s politician in at least one point resembles that of the information designer: the daily routine of establishing a workable compromise. An information designer is primarily concerned with the task of interpreting and communicating complexities, by abstracting information from an immense pool of raw data and by representing them visually in a 2D space. This ‘tour de force’ cannot be done without some sort of compromise, simplification and choice, nor without leaving behind an editorial signature in the design. Information designers are often not keen to admit to this; their goal is, so most of them will say, to achieve as much transparency and neutrality in the rendering of the information as possible.

But alas, information design is not a value-free trade. Any information serves some goal, in designs ranging from the utterly trivial (as in ‘indicate the spot where a landscape is best photographed’) to the extremely critical (‘design a ballot paper that accommodates the illiterate’). The act of informing is in itself of great cultural significance, bearing in mind not only society’s ever increasing dependence on information, but parallel to that its ever growing reliance on design. Information and communication structures determine to a large degree not only what we know about the world, but also what we think of it. These structures are ‘the economies of signs and space’ (Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of sign and space, 1994).

Editing complexity
Richard Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion map

With this responsibility for interpreting the world, enter the editorial politics of compromise and choice. An information designer has to take into account the dominant forms and traditions of representation, before something new can be developed. Readability, recognition, accessibility of information hinge on strictly observed representational patterns, which are endlessly repeated. If not, a lot of the information would simply be lost due to the fact that most people would not be able to recognize it as such. Most of what is commonly understood as information design routinely takes refuge in these traditional ‘tricks of the trade’, allowing information to be, on the one hand, accessible and compatible, but on the other hand reaffirming a rigid vocabulary of forms and content that leaves little room for alternative values and new ideas, nor for reflection on both the information and the design at hand. Moreover, next to the endless recycling of these representational ‘evergreens’, an information designer has to make a design which fits solid standards of communication: the standardized protocols, the standardized software, the standardized hardware, the standardized printing techniques, etceteras.  All of this in bewildering contrast to the growing amount of design savvy individuals around the globe, who rely heavily on the flashy blessings of ‘new’ design to ‘express’ their individuality.

 Pierre di Sciullo

If information design is the hammer and the information to be communicated the nail, what could be the cultural significance of the act of nailing? In terms of today’s communication, it is probably less about nailing down definitive messages and more about offering a choice of perceptions, that is, about interpretations. Of course, information needs to be structured, and sometimes unequivocally so, but in terms of its cultural effectiveness an at least equally important question is whether it can function beyond such strict functionality.

The world as flowchart
In his argumentation underlying the Catalysts! exhibition, Max Bruinsma refers to the tendency of information of becoming a ‘hypertext’ of cultural references as soon as it is designed. The association that each and every design upon reading will ‘unpack’ into something like a hypertext of cultural references tells something fundamental about the shifting roles of designers and the shifting nature of their work. The paradox involved is that on the one hand information designers can no longer claim neutrality of their work, and as a consequence become more like authors, or at least editors of the communicated information, but on the other hand, by the sheer opulence of choices which are in play (both for designers and readers), the information designer as author is highly dependent on the way the work is contextualized the recipient of it, the reader. Seen in this light, the designer becomes even less ‘authoritative’ than he already was, and should rather be understood as a co-editor, together with the actual provider of the information and the receiving audience. The design, then, becomes a mapping of the world as flowchart — an interactive pathfinder through a shifting landscape of signs waiting for interpretation. It not only shows the flows of information in their cultural embeddings, but through its use it makes clear what the world wants to know about itself — or what you want to know about the world. Here, information design becomes cultural representation, a reflection, not merely on how we deal with data, but on how we construct our views to the world by assigning meaning to information which is structured in specific ways.
The attention in judging a work of design shifts from the traditional triad author / work / tradition, to another triad, which is constituted by text / discourse / culture. Linearity, or better teleology, gives way to contextuality, interactivity and reciprocity. Information design is to be assessed by the way it is embedded into the context it was meant for, and by the effects it stirs up. For in the end it is the public that determines the way the work finds a specific cultural embedding, even when the design directs its own ties with its surrounding culture. 

 Harry Beck, London Underground map, 1933 

In sum: information design should be understood as an intertextual sign system, which, as the most salient effect of this strategic insight, frees the profession from psychological, sociological and historical determinisms, opening up to an apparently infinite play of relationships and meaning — of interpretations. Information design has become a cultural expression in its own right. In practice, intertextuality may not completely replace the traditional evolutionary or teleological model of design, it certainly enriches it with a synchronic model of design as a sign-system. It is this decentering quality, which allows design to become more dynamic and versatile in the sense that it opens up the possibility of consciously merging cultural perceptions of information with the economies of distributing and consuming that information.

The true catalyst aim of information design would be, then, not only to create a network of cultural hyperlinks tied in with the world as flowchart, but to transfer to the recipient the editor’s concern to ‘read between the links’.

anonymous

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