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:

It’s a couple of weeks now since my wife and I have played eRepublik. It is a MMOG game, “a mirror world where players, referred to as citizens, join in local and national politics, set economic policy, start businesses and wage wars with other countries.”

This game proves that there is not need of complex visual graphics to engage players. Today, there are more than 350.000 citizens! The game has a clear goal of entertainment and the creators have clear profit goals. However, it seems to me that the game have a powerful potential of learning social competencies. Reading some articles and discussing with my wife we found core mechanics that strongly review and reinforce social competencies.

One is described by Alexis Bonte, one of the cofounders in the game, in an Spanish newspaper interview. He described that some time ago the president of France reduced taxes to zero and the companies collapsed. Then players migrated. Bonte says that players auto regulate themselves, which is a relevant social competence.

Besides, talking with my wife, she concluded that essential social values such as recognition of others’ differences and citizen identity are reinforced. She for example compared political invitations between political parties in USA and Colombia and understood cultural differences in how people invite and promote membership. We also have done metacognitive analysis of our social potentials wondering whether or not we are able to participate in certain career paths like army, politics or business. Although the game offers you an option to try with low risks, you make decisions from your capabilities and how you better can support the community.

I wonder if the game has more potential for adult learning because children and youths might not be interested in a text-based game. Anyway, the growing alternatives that non-serious game industries offer can fit serious game needs in the future. Serious games aims could be achieved more effectively with instructional/interaction design than with game design and development.

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

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?