Information graphic design and the limits of what we have now
Posted Aug. 8, 2008 by Gabriel Hurley
In an ironic twist, while writing up my entry about User Interface Design, one of my business partners was watching a video promo by Jeff Howe for his book Crowdsourcing (view the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0-UtNg3ots ). What struck me as he's talking about the internet enabling "the crowd" to do all the tasks that were formerly the domain of experts and corporations (he particularly hones in on the example of photography) was that everything he's presenting as having made things so easy and usable are the exact types of terrible designs that Magic Ink denounces as a failure of the platform and tools.
So what I'm left with is the idea that we're pushing a limit in information graphic design right now. The explosion of crowdsourcing and user-generated content--essentially the exponential growth of pure information being put out into the ether--is starting to overwhelm the tools available to display it. Tables, input forms and manipulation interfaces that are context-devoid (as Paul McMillan likes to point out: why the hell doesn't Facebook use timestamp data or geotagging information when uploading photos?!) are insufficient for going much farther than what we have right now. Regular users aren't programmers and don't think in mechanical models. Another level of abstraction needs to be placed in between to seamlessly integrate the raw information that IS AVAILABLE NOW with tools that ordinary people find accessible.
So we need new tools. We need a stable platform (for example, CSS is a complete failure as both a platform and tool; it is so complicated that it has never been fully implemented correctly or uniformly) that is separate from the tools, and tools that interact seamlessly with the platform without requiring the designer to think like a machine.
Damn, that'd be nice. I'm so tired of dealing with website design tools that can't even draw a circle, or a curved line. Nature isn't about boxes, grids and tables. Our evolutionary history has not taught us to process these structures effectively. We need tools that facilitate more natural design.
You might want to check out the work of Edward Tufte. I'll lend you his book when you're back.
Also, openID is still broken.
OpenID seems to work for me... What problem is yours having?
When I put in my open id, it takes me to the confirmation page, goes through that process, and then says "We were unable to authenticate your claimed OpenID, however you can continue to post your comment without OpenID:"
Not sure how to debug that. Works fine on my own blog.