YOU ARE HERE - THE DESIGN OF INFORMATION Ends May 15th
"How can we communicate without words? At a time when we have to absorb more and more visual information to navigate our increasingly complex daily lives, the Design Museum is exploring the history of information design. From 18th century orreries and Florence Nightingale's pioneering use of diagrams to relay information during the Crimean War, to the work of modernist heroes, such as Herbert Bayer and Buckminster Fuller, and totems of daily life like the London Underground map, AtoZ and 1960s British motorway sign system, You Are Here - described as "a wondrous exhibition" by The Times - decodes the ingenious use of visual information that guides us through daily life."
I originally heard about this on Radio 4, the panel didn't like it much and found the exhibit quite badly designed but for people with a particular interest in Information Architecture I thought it might be be interesting.
I actually visited the 'You are Here' exhibition on Saturday. Even though I work in the field of Information Design and the field of Geographic Information Systems I found the exhibition quite disappointing.
The exhibition contains quite a lot of interesting stuff, from early sketches of the London tube map design to funky clocks (which seemed more art than information design and of questionable relevance to the exhibition). There was quite a lot of old stuff there, like old maps of the world, and some of the clever and expressive information design examples Tufte uses such as the diagram showing the troop losses during the Napoleonic Russian Campaign. I was very surprised to see examples of Florence Nightingale's Information Design exploits and to discover she was a pioneer in this field too.
However, on balance I was quite disappointed not to see a chronology of how information design has evolved, right up to modern techniques for visualising information. In particular, I was very surprised to see a severe lack of coverage of the state of the art, for example, the excellent work of Ben Shneiderman'sgroup's work on Visualization of huge amounts of data in novel ways.
No trip to the design museum is complete without noticing how little thought is put into designing the User Experience for the customers! This always surprises me about an organisation devoted to design. The first problem is finding the place from the instructions on the website - not very obvious at all, even though I've been several times before. Another example was the exhibition of the shortlisted "Designers of the year". People were encouraged to vote on which of the four designers they thought best. We really couldn't quickly figure out where the different designers works were in the exhibition nor how to vote for them (though re-reading our ticket on the train later revealed a map). One of those shortlsted was apparently for a multi-media based exhibit, though this was multimedia running on Windows (which I noticed from the error message sitting displayed on one of the terminals which some 'customer' had tried to add a print driver for and failed). Quite ironic to witness such crude errors left on the screen of an exhibit of the works of the shortlisted "Designer of the Year" in the Design Museum. If this is the best it gets, I'm thinking we are not there yet with this User Experience thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not really seeking to point fingers and sling mud, I'm in this profession too and feel partly responsible and embarassed that this is as good as it gets.
Posted by carl.myhill at March 13, 2005 11:22 AM