I just received an email this week about the triangle of life, wich explains what is the smartest way to locate oneself in case of an earthquake. Although the visual information was not designed by a professional designer (I guess… and hope!), it is a very effective result.
Click in the image to enlarge:

These are two good examples of information design in audiovisual format. The first above es one the Sprint ads (cellphone service), it might be difficult for us “humans” to process the statistics but the goal is persuasion and the designer wants to show us how reliable, fast, and popular is the service, not to make information understandable at all. The ad is beautiful and very dynamic, which is great and enjoyable.

The other example below is the last video clip of the Story of Stuff. I love it because with very simple graphs they explain complex concepts. In audiovisual information, audio is part of the tools available to solve information presentation and the oral explanation of the presenter helps a lot.



Both clips are rich in rhetoric tropes, one of the design tools in which I am very interested. I think that the first one for TV teaches us that short persuasion is a powerful tool. Sprint wants to sell, but how can we use this persuasion tools for social change? The second one can be the answer, but I wonder if people stay passive that long.

PS. Gui Bosiepe is from who I heard first the concept of audiovisual rhetoric and you can read it here

Korean Alphabet

After my trip to Korea, many things amazed me from the country. Seoul is a crowded city, but people do things with delicacy and care. For example food, crafts, information, services and so on. In contrast you might feel crushed and pushed in the crowded subway and some places in the city are disorganized. In this post I want to highlight one information design related thing: the Korean alphabet. The Korean language did not have alphabet until fifteenth century when the king Sejong the Great developed a writing system. He was an smart designer because he created a complete one-to-one correspondence between graphemes (symbols) and phonemes (sounds). You can actually say your name to any Korean speaker and he/she can write it in Korean. That is good! I’d say that king Sejong was a good user-centered designer, language rules are easy for people. I am native in Spanish and I’ve complained about English because there is a greater of difference between symbols and sounds compared with Spanish, but Korean is outstanding in this. The concept is that good that Cia-Cia language (an Indonesian dialeact) adopted the korean alphabet!

Korean Signage

Photo Dario Cardona, La Patria, Colombia

The last decade in Manizales, where I live in Colombia, there has been a proliferation of call centers that offer customer services of different companies in Latin America and Spain. This make me wonder if the solution for bad information design and corporate communication has cause this call center increment. I also have felt that every year I use more call centers, to clarify services, make questions or whatever according to circumstances. Of course, I don’t have evidence about the correlation between bad information and the increment of call centers. But I do know that many information need a better design. See example below about phone company bill from Manizales (Emtelsa).

If you ask a designer which part of this visual information has the highest visual hierarchy, probably he or she would say that the number “51″ and text “Monday through Friday”. According to visual hierarchy design principle size, contrast and position define the order of visualization. However, designers always see through designers’ glasses; real world interactions are different. In a brochure with 3 tables like this above (Monday-Friday, Saturday and Sunday) I have asked people to find Saturday schedule and write down a departure time to arrive at 2pm to a destination.  Most of them focus on time tables and have written Monday-Friday time and then they realize later of the mistake correcting the answer. Some people even realize the mistake.

This means that a given goal changes the visual hierarchy principle. This issue leads me to think that visual hierarchy might be not a principle at all because people in real world interactions, that usually have a goal to achieve, definitely is not to see how the design manages contrast, size and position. I have found myself missing tittles or subtitles when I read journals, books, websites and so on. So, design research has a lot to do to study the traditional design principles that have been established for so long in the design schools.

PS A final thought: should high hierarchy information be part of details and pop up from them?

Part of my current summer fellowship is that subjects have to find a room inside a building. It is biomedical informatics 125, which is in floor 10. Subjects can not ask anyone for directions. I designed the experiment hoping that user will go an look at the directory, study it, and go to the correct floor; however, subjects forget biomedical informatics, and look for room 125 in the entrance level. The directory becomes noise and most of the people start to look at every room number in the 1st floor. Of course, there is a serious problem with the experiment design. I did not realize that the 100 number is a very strong standard in the people for first floor. Indeed, this reveals a numbering problem in the building.

Besides, I have seen that many people relies on others to find places. Why bother trying to process visual information if you can ask people everywhere that have very good mental maps because the are everyday users? This issue leads me to think that the design of signage is a very complex problem that designers poorly have solved. The everyday users of the directory have different rooms to go; but there is still much to learn to make visual information more versatile for people.