Information Design

by Robert Jacobson

Publisher: The MIT Press
ISBN: 026210069X

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Book Description

Information design is the newest of the design disciplines. As a sign of our times, when the crafting of messages and meaning is so central to our lives, information design is not only important—it is essential. Contemporary information designers seek to edify more than to persuade, to exchange more than to foist upon. With ever more powerful technologies of communication, we have learned that the issuer of designed information is as likely as the intended recipient to be changed by it, for better or worse.

The contributors to this book are both cautionary and hopeful as they offer visions of how information design can be practiced diligently and ethically, for the benefit of information consumers as well as producers. They present various methods that seem to work, such as sense-making and way-finding. They make recommendations and serve as guides to a still young but extraordinarily pervasive and persuasive field.

Customer Reviews

The Whitehouse article on Lighthouse wayfinding anticipates the concentration on participatory research that is so prominent in contemporary dialog. This article alone is worth the price of the book. This book is not a "How to" in Information Visualization it is a compendium of perspectives on the role information plays in culture. And it does that very well.

Unlike the previous reviewer, I actually read the book and especially its introduction. INFORMATION DESIGN fulfills its promise: it reveals what it means to be an information designer at an ethical, even emotional level. I was especially impressed by the diversity of the contributors and their willingness to express doubts as well as hopes for this emerging profession. INFORMATION DESIGN isn't exclusively a how-to book. More importantly, it helped me to understand what information design is and why it's done in the first place. This is a must-read for those of you who aspire to become or already are information designers. You have your work cut out for you!