Information Design Journal - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2008

This article1 reviews the navigation system developed for Santiago de Chile’s new public transportation plan “Transantiago” which considers a radical change in the way million of users navigate the city. It introduce some of the particular variables that affected the way the project was conceived, designed and implemented, presenting two of its main components: the Transantiago’s Typeface System and its Network Map.

Colour and lighting play important and unique roles in the way people enjoy environment or spaces.There is a constant interaction between people and the colours that surround them which not only affects the way they move around within the space but also determines how safe, secure and confident they feel when doing so. In addition, colour can help people determine which route to take, and what potential hazards or obstacles they may encounter. Lighting plays an important role in how different colours and combinations of colours are seen and experienced.Whilst this is true for all users, for people with sensory impairments, being able to navigate and to identify features is critical to their ability to use an environment or space without undue effort, in safely, with confidence and, wherever possible, independently. For partially sighted people, maximising the effectiveness of their residual vision through the use of environmental factors such as visual contrast and lighting can also have a major impact on their sense of well-being and on their ability to make decisions about how to use the environments they encounter. In considering the light reflected from a colour – known as its light reflectance value (LRV) – it is possible to specify levels of visual contrast that are appropriate to meet the needs of many partially sighted people. Linking this to an understanding of the search and navigation strategies they adopt when using buildings and space means it is also possible to create interesting and innovative designs and decoration schemes that assist partially sighted people without creating environments that are unacceptable to other users.

Route guidance systems in vehicles has started to use an oblique, slanted view of the map, mimicking something of the egocentric perspective the driver sees through the windscreen. Is this an effective strategy? What is the most effective map design to convey route guidance to drivers, and how can this be measured? In an experiment with four different modes of map displays the speed of decision making and accuracy of navigation have been tested. The four map types were: the traditional paper map, the northup electronic map with position plotting (the symbol of the vehicle moving in the static map), the head-up electronic map (map moving, the position of the vehicle static and facing up) and the egocentric view map display, a 3-D scenery mimicking the world outside the wind screen. The experiment showed clearly that the egocentric 3-D view was the most effective.

This paper is about the application of professional information design practices that have grown out of research conducted by the Communication Research Institute (CRI), formerly the Communication Research Institute of Australia (CRIA), and others. In particular, it focuses on the role of testing in studio practice.Starting in the mid 1980s, CRI undertook a number of large-scale applied projects funded by government and industry to improve the quality of communication between large organisations and the public. The research focused on discovering the best methods for designing information for public use.The CRI research was able to draw on a substantial body of prior research in design methods (e.g. Jones 1970), document designs (e.g. Felker et al 1980) and specifically in information design (e.g. Easterby & Zwaga 1984). Moreover, a growing number of significant case histories published in this journal have provided an emerging view of professional practice in the field (e.g. Goodwin 1984, Tomaselli & Tomaselli 1984, Waller 1984)This early work suggests the possibility of a unified set of highly productive information design methods, and was foreshadowed in the important contributions of Pat Wright (e.g. Wright 1979). The work started at CRI in the mid-1980s focused on unifying information design methods and demonstrating their productivity (Fisher and Sless 1990). By 1992, it was possible to suggest that the resulting design methods had a wide general application to information design (Sless 1992). However, it remained to demonstrate that these methods could be applied consistently across a range of information design problems and that the resultant designs could consistently perform at an acceptable level. This paper reports on that demonstration. In particular it shows through practical examples how testing and measurement of a design’s performance has become an integral part of professional information design practice.

This article is based on a presentation given at the IIID Vision Plus 12 conference ‘Achieving measurable results’ in Schwarzenberg, Austria in 2006. The following text provides an outline of a single perspective on the circumstances in 2008. There are many stakeholders involved in the development of information about medicines, and all have different concerns which influence contents and design. A single article cannot do justice to the wide variation of perspectives.

In May 1999 Rune Pettersson, Ph.D, was appointedProfessor of Information Design at Mälardalen University in Eskilstuna, Sweden. Before that he worked in publishing, in R&D, in technical training and in university teaching and research. He has published 218 papers and 75 books. Among his books is Information Design: An Introduction (John Benjamins, 2002).Rune Pettersson has been active in several international organisations, such as Vice President of the International Visual Literacy Association, IVLA (six times), and President during 2000–2001; and Vice President of the International Institute for Information Design, IIID, 2000–2006. He has also been an International Advisor for the International Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, as well as a board member in several other organisations. For nine years (1987–1996) Rune Pettersson was an Affiliate Research Professor of the Institute of Business Graphics at the College of Business Administration, Pennsylvania State University in the USA. For five years (2000–2004) he was an Adjunct Professor at Appalachian State University, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, in the USA.

We are increasingly communicating with robots, and the design of lifelike humanoid robots will face at least five challenges. 1) Robots should meet social needs – people are getting older, lonelier, and are looking for alternatives to face-to-face contact, for instance, in coaching and therapy. 2) Robot designers assume that the better they can simulate social and affective behavior, the more effective the robotic partner is. Yet, it is not always clear what natural behavior is, nor whether maximal humanlikeness equals optimal user satisfaction. 3) Multidisciplinary design teams require transdisciplinary theory to create mutual understanding and cover the wide-ranging facets of robot design. However, combining diverse theories from different domains means confronting major unification problems. 4) Empirical approaches to robot design usually miss out on logic consistency within theory. Conversely, formalization and mathematical modeling often lack external validity. Verification before validation seems to be the new way to go. 5) Finally, if it is actually possible to create lifelike, affective, sociable androids, the cognitive models underlying their behavior may be open to abuse, for example in malicious software that spies on people.

The Cure4Kids Website (www.Cure4Kids.org) brings the latest medical knowledge and continuing education on the treatment of pediatric catastrophic diseases to thousands of health care providers worldwide. The website offers a digital library, on-demand seminars with slides and audio in several languages, and online meeting rooms for international collaborations. In this paper, we describe the design challenges of the Cure4Kids Website as an online learning and collaboration center, including the web interface design, content organization, and usability. The solutions to these design challenges may help other web designers facing similar issues in the design of international web-based projects.

This paper was originally given as a keynote presentation to the IIID Vision Plus 12 Conference held in Schwarzenberg, Vorarlberg, Austria in 2007. Presentations are not papers and in some respects they do not translate one into the other. I have edited it for this Journal as a stand-alone piece; at least that is my hope.