Entries Tagged 'Information Design' ↓

Just came across a remarkable interview of Mies Hora (”Navigating Today’s Signs - An Interview with Mies Hora”) (TinyUrl here) by Stev Heller in the AIGA blog. Mies Hora is the founder of UltimateSymbol, which publishes books and usable electronic images of signs (as well as fonts and some other goodies). In a sense, these books make him the heir to Henry Dreyfuss and Otto Neurath.

Pictures of Numbers is one of the websites run by Mike Dickison, an accomplished polymath who’s done some excellent work in information design with scientific and other information. A typical post compares two ways of looking at religious attitudes in a set of countries; his point (if I understand correctly) is that one often has options of putting much richer data into a single information graphic. His solution - entirely workable - would never have occurred to me.

[Readers will notice an uptick in information graphics posts as we are trying to prepare a number of visual aids - initially a set which tries to explain our purpose here at Popular Logistics: to examine the intersection between the sets of policy problems generally named "disaster preparedness," "public health," "environmental policy," "energy policy," "transportation policy," "urban planning," and "terrorism." They've all got common threads - and to a surprising extent, common solutions - and that's what we're here to explain. But we'd like to present a richer version of these arguments - with few words and many more graphics. Hence our return to the precincts of Edward Tufte - and his books, and other information designers. So - we apologize to any readers who regard these posts as "off-topic," but promise that, in time, we'll make clear these connections].

The post which nearly knocked me out of my chair was Graphical Octants - how to, readably, add a third axis to a standard X/Y axis - I’ve been wrestling with how to show three variables - for instance - for disaster preparedness interventions, wanting to demonstrate:

• Cost of intervention (in dollars)
• difficulty of implementation (does it require many people to make big changes in behavior, do something counterintuitive, take complicated or intimidating training, or require a big rearrangement of social status likely to engender resistance). One example - a thesis I’ll be expanding on in the near future - is that the American Cold War shelter program - even after President Kennedy’s promise to make fallout or blast shelters available to the entire population - probably foundered because of resistance to the civil rights movement: any public shelters built after Kennedy’s 1961 statement would have had to be, of necessity, either segregated or not segregated. Not to mention the mixing of the rich and poor in the same shelters. Hence - any government planner who wanted to address shelter construction had to consider local reactions to such issues.
• Time needed to implement (e.g., blast shelters are best built during initial construction, and done that way, would take many years. Encouraging the distribution of AM radios, on the other hand, could be done with public education programs, using existing social mechanisms to distribute them (local governments, religious institutions), using the market (buying large numbers to subsidize economies of scale, exempting them from sales tax).

Dickison has an elegant graphic solution to this problem in Graphical Octants . We hope to update this post with illustrations after speaking with Mr. Dickison.

I’ve been creating a series of diagrams - about  systems, risks, disaster planning scenarios - and also thinking about other ways to model risks, mitigation and response strategies - the ideal solutions of course would all involve open source software. Since the government is already paying primarily no attention to building community based preparedness programs, good data solutions are critical - but so is the lowest possible prices (which is to say: Open Source and free. While I haven’t found or developed what I think will be sufficient, the information design community (that may not be the right name) has in it a very large propertion of very smart people. (The best, and I own every one of his books, is Edward Tufte. Also his dog photos are the best.

So I thought that, as I cast about for the proper data metaphors - I’d note some of the coolest - some of which are just beautiful, clever - and may or may not provide solutions for the planners in our audience. So - for the moment - the New York State power grid via Accuracy & Aesthetics:

Jessica Hagy asks the right question:

From her blog, Indexed.

One of these things is not like the others. Can you tell which one?

Gunnar J Kuepper, Chief of Operations for the consultancy Emergency Disaster Response, Inc., is the author the the paper, “Emergency Management Symbols, History – Meaning – Relevance. A Commentary to the Symbol introduced by NEMA as the New National Logo for Emergency Management.”

Kuepper thinks one of these three logos is quite problematic.

Paper available here.

Also of yellow dots.

From Redundant Coding - Individual Sensitivity Differences

(photo credited by FAA to Armor Tile)

Which is part of a training module on the FAA’s Human Factors Research and Engineering Group website. I’ll cop to it: I didn’t know the FAA had this sort of resource. But this section, at least, is well-written and well-illustrated.

If you’re interested in human factors engineering - and we all are, aren’t we, even if we don’t know it or won’t admit -  it the FAA Human Factors Workbench  is pretty cool. And the more use it gets - the efficiently our tax dollars are used.

Answer after the jump:

Continue reading →

The Point-by-Point blog has this interesting chart:

Alice at Point-by-Point, in an update, notes that the hypothesis of Abu Ghraib knowledge as causal event is vulnerable. We agree that it can’t be proved - but anecdotal evidence suggests that the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (and “black site”) disclosures have strengthened the rhetorical positions of terrorist cheerleaders and recruiters.

We’d like to see the rest of  - here’s Paglen’s description:

Military culture is filled with a totemic visual language consisting of symbols and insignia that signify everything from various unit and command affiliations to significant events, and noteworthy programs. A typical uniform will sport patches identifying its wearer’s job, program affiliation, achievements and place within the military hierarchy. These markers of identity and program heraldry begin to create a peculiar symbolic regime when they depict one’s affiliation with what defense-industry insiders call the “black world” – the world of classified programs, projects, and places, whose outlines, even existence, are deeply-held secrets. Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s “black world” is replete with the rich symbolic language that characterizes other, less obscure, military activities.

Paglen’s onto something. In our (limited) experience of this culture - some of this culture actually has some humor - in the choice of cover names, for instance, which are inside jokes. (We have a couple in mind that we think are pretty clever, but are hard-pressed to think of one we can discuss publicly and responsibly). This doesn’t, of course, detract in the slightest from the coolness of what Paglen has done;

Via Trevor Paglen.

I’ve just stumbled on a site called Visual Complexity. About information design and networks. This may be further proof of Edward Tufte’s proposition that evidence, clearly and honestly arranged, ends up being beautiful.

This image was created by Valdis Krebs of Orgnet- via Visual Complexity

Careful readers may note - correctly - that I’ve yet to demonstrate the connection between our blog’s stated concerns and this post. Stay tuned.