The Swedenborg Society
20-21 Bloomsbury Way
London, England WC1A 2TH

From decoration to atmospheric treatment, branding and information design, exhibition graphics have a range of roles to play. The talk examines how these positions can be explored to achieve a strong 'visual voice' as integral part of the spatial narrative.

Jona Piehl joined the London-based design consultancy Land Design Studio in 2005 and has since developed visual strategies and graphic concepts for exhibitions and museums in the UK and abroad. She is currently completing the work on the new model boat museum in Chatham Historic Dockyards.

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Thursday 14 January at 7pm
Exhibition preview from 5.30pm

Bridewell Hall, St Bride Foundation, Bride Lane, Fleet Street, London EC4Y 8EQ

Admission £7
Concessions (including IDA members) £5
Book online at St Bride events

Paul Stiff, Paul Dobraszczyk, and Mike Esbester suggest that many interactions of everyday life in the nineteenth century were conducted through, and recorded by, ephemeral printed documents, the varied texts and graphic configurations of which made new demands on newly literate audiences.

They think that Victorian 'information design', done before the emergence of professional designers, is an intelligent but little known ancestor of today's graphic design. They aim to show what can be learned about and from it.

Their project explores three themes: time and travel (such as diagrams and timetables); selling and buying (such as catalogues); and questions and answers (such as tax forms). They analyse these artefacts for production and dissemination, and especially for evidence of reception - reading and its consequences.

They are at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, and together work on 'Designing information for everyday life, 1815-1914', a research project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

More at the project blog

The exhibition runs 11-29 January 2010
Exhibition room, St Bride Library

Wednesday 18 November 2009 at 7pm
In the Bridewell Hall, St Bride Foundation, Bride Lane, Fleet Street, London EC4Y 8EQ

Admission £7
Concessions (including IDA members) £5
Pay on the door

From hieroglyphics to Isotype Matthew Eve
Between 1942 and 1945, Otto Neurath drafted a 'visual autobiography', an innovative attempt to document his life and work through its visual influences, and culminating in Isotype. This talk describes the shape and content of Neurath's text, his intentions for its publication - not realized at the time - and work now underway to give it published form as From hieroglyphics to Isotype.

'They are wizard books' Sue Walker
Graphic explanation for children is one way to describe the children's books designed by the Isotype Institute from the 1940s to the late 1960s. This talk will offer an account of the making of these books and show how the Neurath's brought a child-centred approach to book design, and how Isotype principles were used to enhance accessibility.

Isotype in Africa Eric Kindel
In the mid 1950s, some ten years after Otto Neurath's death, Marie Neurath, director of the Isotype Institute, travelled to West Africa to consult on public information initiatives in several countries emerging from British colonial rule to full independence. This talk will review Marie Neurath's trips to Nigeria, Gold Coast and Sierra Leone in 1954 and 1955, before looking in detail at Isotype work produced in support of social democracy in the Western Region of Nigeria.

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Chris Campbell will speak about Mapping international crimes: the use of information graphics by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

Wednesday 4 November, 2009 at 6:30pm

The Swedenborg Society
20-21 Bloomsbury Way
London, England WC1A 2TH

The talk will look at the benefits and challenges of using information graphics to aid the investigation and prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Since 2007, Chris Campbell has worked at the International Criminal Court in The Hague as the Infographics Designer in the Analysis Unit of the Office of the Prosecutor. He has produced infographics for all the cases currently going to trial as well as for those situations under preliminary examination.

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David will speak on The Communication Benchmark Project.

Monday 29 June, 2009 at 6.30pm

Cass Business School
106 Bunhill Row, EC1Y 8TZ
(Exhibition viewing: from 5.30pm on the Lower ground floor  
Talk: 6.30pm in room 2005, level 2)

The Communication Research Institute (CRI) has been undertaking benchmarking research in information design for 20 years. David Sless will explain some of the background to that work and some of their findings.

Earlier this year CRI put together an international group of volunteers who have now completed the first of what they hope will be many future Communication Benchmark studies.

The subject of this first study was credit card statements--a type of document that has attracted a lot of recent political interest worldwide, as a result of the current economic mess. David will share with you some of the results of this study and their implications for information design.

communication.org.au

Please come along earlier in the evening to see The Business Mystery MBA exhibition...

The Business Mystery MBA elective was conceived in 2004 with the aim of applying perspectives from the arts as a route to gaining insights into management problem solving. It involved treating the arts as a lens or perspective on management. It also overtly sought to redress the lack of right brain emphasis which is endemic to MBA programmes internationally.

The course consists of 5 experiences on a theme and usually in a specific space, in 2009 these include the Barbican Art Gallery (Corbusier), the streets of London (Flow), A recording studio in Hackney (Composition), the Whitechapel Gallery (Integration) and the Drill Hall Theatre (Performance). It was decided from the very beginning that there would be avoidance of formal lectures, leading to the idea of "learning without teaching". Students are immersed in the experience and have to carry out site-specific tasks and achieve results by the end of each session.

Coursework 1: Describe the experience in one specific week taking one of the following roles: critic; supporter; employer; response to cynics
Coursework 2: Keep a continuous sketchbook of your learnings
Coursework 3: Produce an artifact which sums up either the elective, the MBA year or your career
The work will be on display at this end-of-term exhibition.

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Topics included:

• Wayfinding and signing
• Interaction design
• Health information
• Instructions and explanations
• Designing online learning environments
• Design models, theories and techniques
• Information design history

All of the lectures were recorded and it is our intention to modify the IDC2009 part of this Web site to make presentations, papers and audio available as soon as we can.

Per Mollerup will speak on Organising knowledge: a few suggestions.

Tuesday 10 February, 2009 at 6:30pm

St Bride Foundation
Bride Lane, Fleet Street, London EC4Y 8EQ
(in the Farringdon room)

Having run the Copenhagen-based design consultancy DesignLab for many years, Per is about to take up an appointment as Professor of Information Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Per is the author of a number of books, including Wayshowing: A Guide to Environmental Signage Principles and Practices.

www.designlab.dk

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Having run the Copenhagen-based design consultancy DesignLab for many years, Per is about to take up an appointment as Professor of Information Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Per is the author of a number of books, including Wayshowing: a guide to environmental signage.

The big event of 2009 for the IDA will be the Information Design Conference IDC2009 on 2nd and 3rd April, on the riverside campus of the University of Greenwich. Submissions for papers and presentations have been rolling in and the programme will be determined in mid-January. Deadline for submissions is 31 December -- read more...

Taking stock domestically and internationally, across the web, TV and print, we will look at what is working and also some areas for improvement.

Max Gadney led the multi-award winning BBC News Website design team from 2000-2007. He now works in digital strategy for BBC Television and in his spare time writes and illustrates for WWII Magazine in the US. www.maxgadney.com

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This talk will look at ways to visualise the structure of text. The two speakers bring different approaches to a similar issue:

Stefanie Posavec, Penguin: "'Writing Without Words' was the project completed for my final year on the MA Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. The intention of this body of work was to explore various methods of visualising literature without using words. I wanted to find a way of communicating the complexity found in literature as well as highlight the similarities and differences in the writing styles of various authors.The structure of a novel, punctuation, parts of speech, and words per sentence were used to generate the final complex patterns.
Any piece of literature can be visualised using these approaches, but I chose to focus on the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, because of its importance to me growing up in Denver, Colorado - a key city within the novel."

Piotr Michura, a doctoral student at Reading University: "Text visualization is a term coined to describe the application of information visualization techniques to textual material. It is defined as an attempt to reveal structures of texts analyzed by computer applications and present them in a meaningful way. It allows the researcher to track patterns of data otherwise difficult to extract from the multitude of data produced by a computer. Using text mining tools the researcher can extract specific information, find unpredicted relationships or deviations from usual patterns, find gaps, and generally explore the data. The outcome is the creation, validation, or rejection of novel interpretations of literary texts. There is a constantly growing amount of textual material available for literary researchers in forms of digital archives, libraries, collections. Within the community of literary scholars dealing with these kind of resources there is a growing interest in applications able to support complex tasks, which go far beyond merely accessing, searching, and retrieving relevant documents from the collections."

Feeds, APIs, widgets, facebook apps, mobile and instant messaging mean that there are many ways for users to interact with a service without them having to visit the main website. When we first talked about building Dopplr, we wanted give users more choice about how they get their information into and out of the application. In this talk, we'll describe how the site at dopplr.com is just one manifestation of a many-headed internet service. We'll talk about how this affects the user interface design, information design and the data modeling, and how it strengthens the relationship between designer and developer.

Matt Jones is a designer. He was creative director for the award-winning BBC News Online and Sapient's London studio in the first boom, then returned the BBC in 2001 to design the BBC's web search and a geo-located social network. From 2003, he joined Nokia in design research, then as a Director of UX Design.He is one of the founders / lead designer of Dopplr.com, a service for frequent travellers. He has written on interaction design and planetary-scale self-replicating robot dogs for 8 years at http://www.blackbeltjones.com.

Matt Biddulph is the nomadic CTO of Dopplr, the social network for intelligent travellers. He started out in 1994 building search engines on CD-ROM, and now specialises in digital media, social software and putting data on the web. In past lives he was a creative technologist for hire, working with companies like Nature, Joost and the BBC to bring cutting-edge technologies into the mainstream.

Legible London is a groundbreaking scheme to provide better information throughout the capital for people who want to walk.

A study conducted three years ago drew attention to the ineffectiveness of the present multitude of pedestrian sign systems in central London, and the consequent over-reliance on the tube map to help people navigate above ground. Since last November, a prototype of a pan-London scheme has been introduced around Bond Street tube station, in nearby streets and on bus shelters and on exit from the tube station. They show the direction to walk, how long it's going to take, and notable landmarks along the way. At the same time, 43 pieces of street signs and clutter have been removed. Tim will explain the thinking behind the scheme, and how the prototype was received. (www.legiblelondon.info)

Health information creates a relationship between the health industry (NHS, medicines) and its users (not all of them patients). This implicit relationship is clearly embedded in documents and information that the health industry produces - complex language, authoritarian instructions and poor design make up a dangerous cocktail, and there's little doubt it could be harmful to our health.

Looking at examples of forms, instruction leaflets and other healthcare resources, this talk will examine how we can create a healthier relationship, and the potential role of information design in improving health.