At the conference our Institute ran in 1990, I offered what may seem a simple definition of what information designers do. To paraphrase:

Information designers create and manage the relationship between people and information so that the information is accessible and usable by people.

Note five things about this definition:

1. The terms ‘create’ and ‘manage’ are side by side, suggesting that designers’ responsibility extends beyond the creation of designs. It extends through implementation and monitoring to management over the long term.

2. It’s not just about information, but about the relationship between people and information?what some people today call ‘collaborative experience design’.

3. The most important word in the definition is people. And the word people is deliberately used instead of users, target audiences, or consumers, all of which presume a particular relationship. I make no assumptions about the relationship that people have with information. That is something we discover as part of the collaborative design process: working with people.

4. The term accessible covers what today’s information architects refer to as ‘findability’. But accessible has another implication, one of inviting people in, being welcoming, open, and approachable. I may be wrong, but I see no reference to these all-important characteristics in the information architecture toolbag.

5. The term usable is not to be taken in the narrow functional sense defined by the usability community. That narrower definition came later in works like Jacob Nielsen’s Usability Engineering (1994). My sense of usability is broader, with the implication of being useful and even helpful.

What seems on first reading simple is not. Moreover, it is not an abstract definition, but a practical account of what our practice and research is about. The services we offer our Members leads to accessible and usable information. The research that we do is directed at finding new and sometimes better ways of making information accessible and usable.

This definition has served us well. But it is an incomplete description of the professional practices we have developed, researched, and refined at CRI.

As those of you who are regular readers of this blog will know, I put a great deal of emphasis on evidence: being able to substantiate claims one makes about the effectiveness of communication and information design by appeals to evidence.

If you look at any of our case histories, you will see that evidence collected collaboratively with people plays a central role in the process and determination of the outcome of a project. This appeal to evidence is not an add-on feature but an intrinsic part of our practice, as we have developed it. Our research has repeatedly shown that information design without the necessary evidence of working with people to create the designs is incomplete and almost certainly not of an agreed high quality. We therefore need to update our definition of what information designers do, to reflect this fact. So our newer definition is like the old, but with an important addition:

Information designers create and manage the relationship between people and information so that the information is accessible and usable by people, and they provide evidence that the information is accessible and usable to an agreed high standard.

This definition is a much fuller statement of what professional information designers do.

If you consider yourself to be an information designer and you do not provide this type of evidence, my view is that you are not doing your job properly.

If you are in the business of employing information designers, interaction designers, experience designers, information architects, or whatever you care to call them, and they do not provide you with evidence that their designs are an improvement on what went before from the point of view of the people who have to use them, or that their latest innovation is both accessible and usable at an acceptable level to people, I think you should look elsewhere for professional services in this area.

As a footnote to this little rant I would add that the ‘democratisation of design’ that has got so many designers and their critics agitated, following Bruce Nussbaum’s rant on the subject, misses the central issue of why we need professional information designers, and why DIY design is a bad idea.

A professional designer will provide evidence that their designs work; a DIY designer will not, nor will the legion of traditionally-trained designers not working at this professional level. Moreover, part of that evidence is a demonstration that one has designed with people instead of for people. Maybe the DIY is as good as traditional design. In the absence of evidence, who knows? But I do know that traditional designers who claim that they are better than the DIY designers should seriously think about the evidence they have to back their claim, before they start complaining.

Like Tom Wolfe before him in the early 1980s, Bruce Nussbaum is correct in claiming that some designers are both arrogant and ignorant. Tom Wolfe’s target was similar: the group of émigré architects from the Bauhaus that came to the USA in the 1930s and created the International Style in architecture. Nussbaum is far less acerbic than Wolfe in his attack, and his target is much less specific. So let’s be specific.

There is a tradition of design education, largely in graphic design and architecture, that traces its thinking back to the Bauhaus, a school of design which flourished briefly in Germany between 1919 and 1933. Its founders had big and sometimes worthy ambitions, but they were predominantly arrogant, ignorant and in some cases wacky. The tradition they established produced generations of arrogant and ignorant designers from design schools throughout the world.

But it is a tradition on the wane. We are seeing some design schools taking a much broader range of ideas and thinking to guide their teaching. The designers emerging from these schools are neither arrogant nor ignorant. Indeed they are highly-skilled, innovative, well-informed, and thoughtful people who work in teams and punch way above their weight when it comes to business ROI. I know these people exist because I work with them and employ some of them. They are responsible for highly successful design projects, and they lead the way in advanced research into design that an Institute like ours undertakes. They are usually trained as information designers but not necessarily called that.

Sadly, there are still many designers locked in the Bauhaus tradition of designers as heroes: individuals endowed with unique aesthetic sensibility that transcends mere mortal sensibility and creates objects of lasting value, beyond criticism. Graphis Press has been celebrating these ‘heroes’ for decades. Not surprisingly, to the rest of us, they seem arrogant. And the relatively hermetic way in which they are trained—with a predominant emphasis on studio work—leaves them ignorant of the wider world in which they look for work.

All this backward-looking commentary and criticism in the press and blogosphere misses what designers at the leading edge of the profession are achieving, what the research on design methods and practices has achieved, and what it may lead to in the future. For example, at the Vision+ conference in July 2007 business, government, and designers will see what is happening at the leading edge: designers not only make measurable improvements in an organisation’s performance and ROI, but are now at the point where they can specify and achieve measurable minimum performance standards for new designs. This will have a significant effect on professional design practice and on the expectations of business practice regulators, who will start to require these high standards from business.

If I were in business or the business press I would stop whinging about the inadequacy of the previous generation and look at what is happening now.

Surely not?

There is so much corporate enthusiasm for the BIG D, how is it possible that the BIG D may be facing the BIGGEST D of them all.

High-powered design courses are displacing MBAs. On the lips of many executives, and of even more design consultants, words like ‘design’, ‘innovation’ and the all-important money word ‘strategic’ are recited like a mantra.

This is the age of DESIGN with a BIG D. For those of us in the biz, our D cup runneth over. But booms can all too quickly turn to busts, as it were. And as sure as night follows day, so the big D is followed by the big E. No, not enthusiasm, not excitement. We have those aplenty now. I mean the biggest E of them all, the grim reaper of EVIDENCE.

One of the main characteristics of the current overheated, feverish interest in design is the absence of real evidence. I don’t think those involved in the delirium realise how serious this asymptomatic condition is.

In 2003 there was a high-powered online conference about a proposal to run a new undergraduate and postgraduate program in design at a leading university. Some of the best minds in the field were involved in the construction of the courses and in the conference. All the key buzz words were on the table: ‘sustainability’, ‘customer focused’ etc etc. But one term was absent. You guessed it, the big E, evidence. When asked for evidence that could be used in support of the proposal to demonstrate the benefits of design, there was a deafening silence. This is not unusual in design circles, and it is the most telling symptom of possible death following deliriums of over enthusiasm.

The big D may turn out to be just another business fashion and die like its predecessors. That would be a great shame, but it will happen unless its promoters take the time to collect the evidence that the design process leads to all the things we want: sustainable, humane, productive and profitable outcomes that transform our lives. Without this evidence, design with a big D is dead.

A long break since my last blog. No shortage of things to write about, but lots of other commitments that take me away from this particular enjoyable task, both mentally and physically.

One of these commitments was an in-depth review of Content Management Systems (CMS) software and design.

A CMS is a web-based framework, like this blog, into which we scribblers can pour content or any other material that can go on the web. The CMS makes sure that my scribblings are properly dated, catalogued, archived, and, most importantly, made available in an easily accessible and readable form. CMS create the framework for conversations between organisations and individuals on the internet. They provide the themes, styles, formats, layouts and general management of websites for people who otherwise have no knowledge of how websites are structured and organised.

CMS, over the last few years, have become the preferred framework for many large and small-scale websites. They have become the link between organisations and individuals, allowing organisations to have conversations with their publics. Our own website uses such a system for our publications, courses, and, as I have just pointed out, my blogs; and we are in the process of progressively moving our entire site over to such systems, as time and funds permit. But we are a minnow compared to large-scale use of such systems by corporate organisations. My review was prompted partly by our own needs and partly by the growing number of our members who seek our advice on such systems.

I won’t bore you with all the technical stuff, but three things strike me from a communication and information design point of view, that might interest you: one positive, and two problematic.

The positive is that most of the best of these systems are created as open-source software. Vast networks of developers give many hours of their own time to collaboratively develop, refine and debug the software through a process of peer review. The outcomes of this collaboration are freely available from the internet to download and use.

That is the positive face of open-source CMS: they are being developed in a public context for public usage, and consequently have the potential to be more sensitive to the everyday needs of non-technical users, which is less likely for systems that are developed behind closed doors away from the public.

The two problematic issues arise from their relative newness.
First, at this stage they are crude and basic, like pidgin languages concerned with a very limited set of transactions. But unlike pidgin, which can develop quite rapidly into a comprehensive, complex language of its own in the cut and thrust of everyday exchange, the exchanges that occur via CMS are remote from each other, and misunderstandings are not so easily corrected. Refinements to improve and subtly enhance the dialect are painfully slow.

Second, underlying any graphic system is the practice of typography ? with web-based systems like CMS it is the typography not of words on a page, but words on a screen. Over the past centuries, typographers have been continuously creating and modifying typefaces and layouts to suit all contexts. But it is clear that many (though not all) involved in designing CMS have a fairly primitive understanding of typography and how to effectively organise words on a screen so that they are both legible and usable. Few end users of these systems have the knowledge to judge the designs; they take the packages on trust, take them straight out of the box, and pick a theme or set of templates off the shelf. Thus the poor typography in the original designs carries through into the many manifestations that are the norm now throughout the web.

I took a close look at some of the typographical specifications for a number of these systems, most of which are in the Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) and templates which are used to control the appearance of text and graphics on the screen. Using fairly conventional typographical principles, I found that most of the out-of-box designs could be significantly enhanced not by adding features or changing them, but by REMOVING them.

Most of what I removed were lines, boxes, and spaces. CMS uses lots of boxes to demarcate between the many functions on a screen. Now, there are one or two bad reasons for using boxes as a graphic device, and many good (aesthetic and practical) reasons not to. Alongside what the principles of typography say about such devices, research shows that the use of graphic devices such as boxes to highlight something on a page or screen can have the opposite effect.

But the use of boxes is just one of many detailed points at which this emerging symbolic system falls short of what is possible through the simple application of known principles and findings. I said in an earlier blog that the performance of many websites falls below that of printed material. It seems that part of the reason for this is inherent in the underlying CMS systems on which they are built.

Dysfunctional conversations between organisations and individuals are remarkably persistent, as any individual who has to deal with governments and many large corporations knows. It would be a shame if such open collaboratively-developed systems such as CMS aided in maintaining those dysfunctional practices rather than in releasing us from them.