I stumbled across the work of Jonathan Jarvis (@JonathanJarvis) the other day, thanks to my housemate and colleague, @zaqintosh. The idea of creating a “design language”, as Jarvis calls it, certainly isn’t new. Visualization geniuses like @Stamen (and here), Hans Rosling, Dan Roam and many others have long argued that a visual language is absolutely necessary when it comes to understanding complex information systems. Even when I was at Origo, and we instituted a company-wide policy to take mind-map style notes and meeting sketches, a few of us took to creating our own “visual vocabularies” (as we called them) to help systematize our visual note taking, making them easily understood by anyone.
Goodbye chicken scratch, hello iconography and flow diagrams.
I think the most compelling piece of Jarvis’ story isn’t that we need to create a malleable visual taxonomy – systematizing is a natural step in any language, and visualization is no different. No, the best part of his argument is that a new class of professionals, “New Mediators” as he calls them, will come to supplant – or blend – the previously separate roles of Journalist, Analyst and Designer.
I’m curious to see how this plays out – now I’m off to brush up on my After Effects skills, since it looks like I’ll be needing them.
(image courtesy of Jonathan Jarvis at www.newmediators.com)
I spent last night at a lecture organized by San Francisco BayCHI, hosted by PARC down in Palo Alto. It was my first BayCHI event, and the group seemed lively enough – both speakers elicited quite a few laughs, and audience members weren’t afraid to shout out comments and retorts during the lectures.
First up was Ted Selker from MIT Media Lab and IBM fame. Ted seemed like a nice enough guy, and his talk tackled the various trials and tribulations he encountered as a technology product designer over the last 15 years or so. It was definitely interesting to see how he used ‘experimental design’ extensively to explore the intersection of humans and technology – and what its future might look like. This open approach to concept development – and their subsequent failures, many of them in fact, to reach market – resulted is dozens of inventions with varying applicability and real-world usability. However, to be fair, Ted has come up with some interesting inventions over the years, which is certainly a testament to his perseverance, even if very few seem to have made production. I would hazard a guess that this is because A) Ted was trapped in big organizations that resisted his avant-garde ideas, and B) he ignored one of his own “3 Principles of product design”, the use of art and aesthetics. In short, everything I saw except for the One Laptop Per Child (for which as I understand it, he designed the keyboard and ears), was a little on the plain, boxy side. If Steve Jobs had a less successful, less aesthetically-obsessed twin, Ted is the guy. All in all, though, his body of work is definitely impressive.
Next up was Dan Roam, author of bestselling book The Back of the Napkin (and here). (more…)
[...] of which, at the last BayChi event I attended, guest lecturer Dan Roam mentioned that hand drawn really is more human: specifically, that we tend to be attracted to artifacts that look like they come from people. So [...]
