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- Volume 21, Issue, 2014
Information Design Journal - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2014
Volume 21, Issue 2, 2014
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Design Education: Creating diagrams to help students understand complex problems
Author(s): Guillermina Noëlpp.: 88–98 (11)More LessAlthough designers use diagrams as an aid to think and to communicate problems and situations in their practice and although some leading institutions have used them in their teaching, many design schools have not yet incorporated diagramming in their programs. This article proposes the use of diagrams to quickly facilitate the understanding of complex problems to design students. It proposes that creating diagrams helps students integrate information gathered from different sources and communicate their understanding to the class. The paper illustrates the concept describing a three-hour workshop with students from medicine and communication design, and analyzing the benefits of using diagrams in the class.
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Visualizing science and technology across cultures: Results of a pilot study
Author(s): Rosário Durão, Marta Pacheco Pinto, Kristina Henneke and Karen M. Balchpp.: 99–114 (16)More LessScience and technology (S&T) visuals seem remarkably alike across cultures globally. Yet, individual and cultural experiences of scientists and engineers vary before they master the tools and techniques of their disciplines, and different parts of the world have different understandings of S&T. This disparity led us to conduct a pilot study with five S&T students at New Mexico Tech. We concluded that S&T visuals vary across cultures, the variations between designs comprise a spectrum of visual-textual and textual-visual correlations, and the similarities and differences between the visuals are caused by diverse individual and contextual factors.
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A guided approach to conceptual design in the information design process
Author(s): Sheila Pontispp.: 115–128 (14)More LessConceptual design is often overlooked and underestimated by information designers who tend to be more focused on implementation and concerned with aesthetic qualities. Consequently, there is a lack of thorough thinking and understanding during the conceptual part of the design process that results in a recurrent development of unintelligible diagrams in information design practice. Bringing awareness to conceptual design can help designers realize its function and importance for the development of effective diagrams. To address this situation, this paper proposes the adoption in professional practice of a conceptual design tool with a guided approach, e.g., MapCI Cards. Working with this approach may aid information designers in the preparation of diagrams by guiding conceptual design tasks: understanding the diagram purpose and intended-audience, analyzing and simplifying information sources, identifying subject areas and information types, and defining their organization into a hierarchical structure. We describe this type of approach and discuss its usefulness for information designers, explaining how it could support their conceptual design decision-making. Then, we present scenarios in which working with the approach could be beneficial, followed by recommendations to use this approach in professional practice.
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Effects of cognitive design principles on user’s performance and preference: A large scale evaluation of a soccer stats display
Author(s): Hans Westerbeek, Marije van Amelsvoort, Alfons Maes and Marc Swertspp.: 129–145 (17)More LessWe present an analytic and a large scale experimental comparison of two informationally equivalent information displays of soccer statistics. Both displays were presented by the BBC during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The displays mainly differ in terms of the number and types of cognitively natural mappings between visual variables and meaning. Theoretically, such natural form-meaning mappings help users to interpret the information quickly and easily. However, our analysis indicates that the design which contains most of these mappings is inevitably inconsistent in how forms and meanings are mapped to each other. The experiment shows that this inconsistency was detrimental for how fast people can find information in the display and for which display people prefer to use. Our findings shed new light on the well-established cognitive design principle of natural mapping: while in theory, information designs may benefit from natural mapping, in practice its applicability may be limited. Information designs that contain a high number of form-meaning mappings, for example, for aesthetic reasons, risk being inconsistent and too complex for users, leading them to find information less quickly and less easily.
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How bulleted lists and enumerations in formatted paragraphs affect recall and evaluation of functional text
Author(s): Frank Jansenpp.: 146–162 (17)More LessThe influence of the bulleted list format on recall and evaluation of functional text (i.e., health flyers, direct mail letters, and recipes) is investigated in five studies in which the same series of components, formatted as enumerations in a paragraph, function as the control condition. In three studies, the bulleted list format has a positive effect on the reader’s ability to recall the content of the items of the series. This positive effect is mitigated if the components are heterogeneous. In two studies, bulleted lists have a negative effect on the recall of content presented in the surrounding text. In another two studies, bulleted lists have a (positive) effect on the reader’s evaluation of the text.
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Hypertext in online news stories: More control, more appreciation
Author(s): Luuk Lagerwerf and Daniël Verheijpp.: 163–178 (16)More LessNews websites struggle tailoring news stories to divergent needs of online news users. We examined a way to bridge these needs by representing sources in hypertext. News items were designed to be short and concise, with hyperlinks citing sources. Readers could either ignore hyperlinks or explore additional information from the hyperlinked sources. We expected that appreciation for these news stories would be moderated by personal characteristics, namely hypertext comfort and desirability of control. In a 2 (hyperlink presence) x 2 (directness of speech) experiment, two news stories were manipulated for a Dutch national news website (NOS.nl). For each story, four variants were developed: Text containing hyperlinks, plain text only, citing the sources directly, citing in the words of the journalist. Dependent variables were perceived control, appreciation, and absorption in the story. Results showed that news stories with hyperlinked sources affected perceived control positively, especially for those with a high desirability of control. Directness of speech did not have any effects. The relation between hypertext and appreciation was mediated by perceived control.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 29 (2024)
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Volume 28 (2023)
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Volume 27 (2022)
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Volume 26 (2021)
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Volume 25 (2019)
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Volume 24 (2018)
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Volume 23 (2017)
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Volume 22 (2016)
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Volume 21 (2014)
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Volume 20 (2013)
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Volume 19 (2011)
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Volume 18 (2010)
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Volume 17 (2009)
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Volume 16 (2008)
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Volume 15 (2007)
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Volume 14 (2006)
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Volume 13 (2005)
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Volume 12 (2004)
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Volume 11 (2002)
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Volume 10 (2000)
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Volume 9 (1998)
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Volume 8 (1995)
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Volume 7 (1993)
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Volume 6 (1990)
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Volume 5 (1986)
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Volume 4 (1984)
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Volume 3 (1982)
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Volume 2 (1981)
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Volume 1 (1979)
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