IIID Conversations

As the name suggests, they are conversations as much as talks. The speakers make short presentations of their work or ideas, then the conversation will open out to include everyone.

IIID Conversations is a series of informal events. As the name suggests, they are conversations as much as talks. The speakers make short presentations of their work or ideas, then interview them and the conversation will open out to include everyone.

In 2021 we consulted our members on what they would like to see. Their answer was ‘community’ – most wanted to feel more connected to others in their profession, to gain insight about practice, and to gain new knowledge about the various different types of work information designers do.

IIID Conversations is free for IIID members, and €5 for non-members.

Coming up:

1 December at 1500 UTC

Rupesh Vyas Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

5 January 2023 at 1500 UTC

Rodrigo Ramírez, Information Designer, Associate Professor at School of Design, UC Chile (Diseño UC).

Previous Conversations:

Carlos Rosa, IADE – Faculty of Design, Technology and Communication, Lisbon, Portugal: Moving Pictograms

Will Stahl-Timmins, Data Graphics Designer at The Britisch Medical Journal: A picture of health: Visualising medical information for doctors.

Rob Waller (Simplification Centre, UK), discussing the Information Design Summer School – how it works, who comes and how it links theory and practice through critiquing and practical projects.

Oliver Tomlinson (TDL Creative, UK). Oliver uses information design and visualisation in the construction industry, and will talk about the contribution information graphics makes to successful bid documents.

Alex Tyers (Transmission Design, Australia). Alex’s practice includes financial information, medicines information, forms and other complex information.

Conversation with Carlos Rosa, 3 November 2022 at 1500 UTC

The introduction of motion is an important contribution to facilitate the interpretation of pictograms and to enable them to develop in other ways,

Moving Pictograms

The introduction of motion is an important contribution to facilitate the interpretation of pictograms and to enable them to develop in other ways, for example, to encourage civic behaviour, enhance the content of a message and to create emotional ties.

Carlos Rosa, with colleague Maria Diaz, won an IIID Award in 2020 for their fascinating work on moving pictograms. For years we’ve assumed pictograms are static, but digital channels allow them to move. The introduction of motion makes pictograms easier to interpret, and also encourages compliance with their message, and creates emotional ties. Carlos will present this project, and data that demonstrates significant improvements in comprehension.

Carlos Rosa is an independent designer, researcher, and design professor. He is Director of IADE, the largest and most reputed creative school in Portugal. His research project explores the knowledge in the exercise of design applied to universal communication systems. He has received a Portuguese Design Award, and he was described as “Design Icon” by Computer Arts magazine. Carlos writes and illustrates regularly for Portuguese newspapers. He is father of Simão and Joana, has written a book and has also planted a tree!
Carlos Rosa Design

Registration

Conversation with Will Stahl-Timmins, 6 October 2022 at 1500 UTC

At the BMJ we use infographics and data visualisations to convey the information we publish to busy health professionals in an efficient and engaging way.

A picture of health: Visualising medical information for doctors

At The BMJ (British Medical Journal) we use infographics and data visualisations to convey the information we publish to busy health professionals in an efficient and engaging way. In my talk I’ll introduce the kinds of graphics we make, including full page “visual summaries”, interactive graphics, and visual abstracts.

Grid of 16 colourful Infographics, none of them are readable in detail.

Registration link to be updated shortly

Will Stahl-Timmins is Data Graphics Designer at The BMJ. His background is in graphic design. He holds a PhD in the use of information graphics in health technology assessment from Exeter Medical School. Outside work, he spends a lot of time playing with his daughter (currently age 2), cooking, gardening, and playing board games with anyone who he can get to the table.

Registration

Conversation with Alex Tyers, 3 May 2022 at 1300 UTC

Information design for financial communications

The next in our series of IIID Conversations is with Alex Tyers of Transmission Design, one of Australia’s leading information designers. With over 20 years experience of every variety of information design, he is an expert in instructional design, forms, customer communications and plain language.

During this session I will be talking about information design for financial communications. Most people I talk to express surprise that a bank statement, form or insurance letter is even designed at all, maybe because they are often so bad. However, I can confirm that – yes – financial communication design is a thing. I will be discussing how financial comms can be improved, and what can hold this back. I will be showing examples from projects I have worked on for financial organisations and highlighting some of the things I have learned. I look forward to chatting to you soon.

Registration

Alex Tyers is one of Australia’s leading information designers. With over 20 years experience of every variety of information design, he is an expert in instructional design, forms, customer communications and plain language.

Transmission Design

Conversation with Oliver Tomlinson, 26 April 2022 at 1300 UTC

The hidden graphics

Oliver will reflect on his experience of creating diagrams for large corporate bids and tenders. He will discuss how business ‘authors’ work with his team of information designers, creating diagrams to work alongside text in a hidden world of huge commercial contracts.

He will also reflect on the diagrams produced behind the closed doors of businesses, often created by non-designers but a key element in explaining processes, theories, research and initiatives.

Registration

Oliver Tomlinson is the CEO and founder of TDL-Creative, a design consultancy based in London that specialises in information design. TDL-Creative was set up in 2011 and is now recognised as an industry-leading agency in bid design and diagramming, producing designs for some of the largest procurement opportunities in the UK. Oliver works predominantly in Powys, Wales, dividing his time between family, diagramming, design workshops and falconry.

Summer School conversation – video trailer

Dates: 19 April – 26 May 2022

Running since 2013, the Information Design Summer School has gained a reputation as the best place to get a fast introduction to the concepts, principles and challenges of information design. It’s back online for 2022.

Fees

The cost of the online summer school is:
Regular fee: £375 (approx €445/$510)
‍Student fee: £175 (approx €205/$240).
To ensure the course is viable, there are only 3 student places available.
Cancellation policy: if you cancel after 1 April, we will not refund your fee, unless you can find someone to take your place.

More information: www.simplificationcentre.org.uk

Any questions? Please write to: info@simplificationcentre.org.uk

Conversation with Rob Waller, 7 April 2022 at 1400 UTC

Rob Waller is the speaker at the first of our new series of IIID Conversations. He will talk about the Information Design Summer School – its history, how it works, how it integrates (only useful) theory with practice, and what kind of people attend. The Summer School has been running since 2013, as a fast-track induction into how information designers think. It’s attracted people from many backgrounds – engineers, medics, lawyers, statisticians, technical writers, educators, as well as graphic designers wanting to specialise in information design. It’s usually an intensive week face-to-face, but in 2021 it went online. Most projects are set by real clients, and Rob will show some of this work.

Registration

Rob Waller is the current President of IIID and organiser of the Simplification Centre. He is semi-retired from a long career in information design, which has taken in research, teaching and practice. His clients have included many well-known names in financial services, energy, government and publishing. His personal website is www.robwaller.org

International accessibility symbol design competition

The International Union of Architects (UIA) and Rehabilitation International (RI) are jointly inviting submissions for a twenty-first century symbol of accessibility to represent their core values of rights and inclusion, independence, physical and virtual accessibility for all, including people with disabilities.
The challenge is therefore to develop a new symbol of accessibility that better represents the variety of people who use buildings and other types of built environments. The competition invites professional architects and graphic designers as well as architectural and graphic design students to design a new graphic symbol of accessibility, to be proposed to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for adoption as the new international symbol of accessibility.

More information

Competition brief download

idj special issue Information Visualization

A special issue of the Information Design Journal with contributions by presenters of Information+ 2018 is now online under an open access license.

A special issue of the Information Design Journal with contributions by presenters of Information+ 2018 is now online under an open access license.

From the editorial by Marian Dörk & Isabel Meirelles:

We are very pleased to introduce the new Information+ Special Issue of IDJ, featuring nine peer-reviewed contributions which expand on the authors’ presenta-tions during the second Information+ conference, held on 19th–21st October 2018 at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam (FH Potsdam) in Potsdam, Germany. The conference brought together 261 researchers, practitioners and students working at the intersection of information design and data visualization to discuss common questions and current challenges. Our main goal was to stimulate cross-disciplinary exchanges and knowledge sharing while nurturing research and innovation that is relevant to academia, industry and government.

idj: Information Visualization

Shi Ji: Design Education. Part 1

She Ji, the journal for Design, Economics and Innovation, has published its issue 6/1, dedicated to design education and guest-edited by Guillermina Noël.

She Ji, the journal for Design, Economics and Innovation, has published its issue 6/1, dedicated to design education and guest-edited by Guillermina Noël.

The journal is open source, you can download the whole issue or select articles of your choice under this link:

Shi Ji: Design Education. Part 1

Authors are:

Ken Friedman Tongji University, Shanghai;
Guillermina Noël University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland;
Michael Meyer and Donald Norman, University of California at San Diego, USA;
Peter Jan Stappers et al, Deft Technological University, Netherlands;
Gjoko Muratovski, Ullman School of Design, University of Cincinnati, USA;
Johan Redström, Umea Institute of Design, Sweden;
Gunnar Swanson, California State University, USA;
Jorge Frascara, Formerly University of Alberta, Canada, and now University of Applied Design and Art, Lucerne, Switzerland. He interviews Richard Buchanan, Meredith Davis, Ken Friedman, Willard McCarty, Ezio Manzini, Donald Norman, Sharon Poggenpohl, and Saskia Sassen.

Comment on Corona data quality

Comment by Andreas Schneider, Institute for Information Design Japan, on the quality of data provided by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at John Hopkins University, basis for the “Corona Navigator” featured in a previous post.

As these data are consumed more and more by non-experts without understanding inherent limitations, significant misinterpretations may happen.

The full comment is available on the IIDj website.

Announcing the 54th SDA Award

The Japan Sign Design Association Award (as known as SDA Award) was established in 1966 for the purpose of promoting and educating the public about the sign design through presentation of signature design works to the wide society.

It continues to be the only award program for sign design in Japan. Signs today are considered as an interface that connects urban space or corporate activities with consumers, or as information that is indispensable for revitalizing the environment and establishing communication, and their examples are seen with more diverse variations.

The Japan Sign Design Association invites applications for awards from signature design works with high quality.

Information, registration and more on the SCA Award website.

Information+ Conference postponed to 2021

Information+ has been postponed for one year, until fall 2021.

Hopefully, in the fall of 2021, a new version of the conference at Georgia Tech will be carried out with as many of the existing components as possible.

There is one positive update: the special issue of the Information Design Journal with contributions by presenters of Information+ 2018 is now finally online under an open access license: https://benjamins.com/catalog/idj.25.1

Changes to IIIDaward 2020

Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. Under the given circumstances we have made some changes and adaptations.

Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. Under the given circumstances we have made some changes and adaptations.

The jury meeting is postponed to May 15/16, will be held face-2-face or online, depending on current developments.

The category “emergency” is dedicated to covid-related entries for only 30,- euro each.
Until April-15, there is a 2+2=2 promotion.
The final deadline for submissions is April-30.
Awarded projects will be announced on May-19.
The IIIDaward-book will be thicker than ever.
The IIIDaward exhibition tour will be expanded to as many as possible places.

Let us show the world the impact of excellent information design. If you have any further suggestions, ideas, please contact us.

The more, the better: our ambition is to have as many cases as possible giving evidence of the importance and relevance of information design.
So please submit two entries and get two more for free.
Promotion ends on Wed. -15th of April.

For details and submissions, please visit the IIIDaward website.

Corona Virus Navigator – update 2020-03-23

Although we are constantly updating and expanding our visualizations around the developments of the spread of the Corona virus, we are painfully aware of the underlying limitations and the risks of statistical communication. Numbers, exuding a certain authority, may draw attention in ways that are not appropriate to the issues they claim to represent.

While it is extremely important to put quantitative information in context, we lack the detail to do so in a meaningful way: the number of tests performed, population, demographic profiles and many others.

We have added a new view, charts, which should help to better understand the dynamics of development at each location. These diagrams are scaled to facilitate comparative reading – they do not allow quantitative comparisons in any way.

Corona navigator charts, comparing development is various countries. — We have added a new view, Charts, which should help to better understand the dynamics of development at each location. These diagrams are scaled to facilitate comparative reading – they do not allow quantitative comparisons in any way. https://api.iidj.net/cv/charts

3D visualization of the corona timeline with bars expanding from points on the globe. — The performance of 3-D Views has been improved: https://api.iidj.net/cv, https://api.iidj.net/timeline

Data collected and managed by Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at John Hopkins University – Great Work! https://url.iidj.net/arcgis_75MX

Andreas Schneider
Institute of Information Design Japan iidj
2020-03-23.