Interaction Design
State of the Art and Future Developments. An Argument for Information Design.
Introduction to: Multimedia Graphics. The inter-national sourcebook of interactive screen design. / Edited by Willem Velthoven and Jorinde Seijdel. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers, 1996. (US: Chronicle Books; Germany: Friedrich Schmidt Mainz; rest of the World: Thames and Hudson).
Read the essay in digital form (download pdf)
Look inside the Book at Amazon
Everybody is complaining about an epidemic of information overload, but people don’t seem to realize that the resulting information fatigue is largely a functional design problem. To whit: good design makes information visible and manageable, but we are still at a very early stage in our understanding of information design. We are all whining about crude screen designs, hierarchical menus, and maze-like hypermedia structures, whereas we need to start by addressing the general question of dynamic information design. In this paper, I argue that interface design and computer graphics should transmute into a discipline I would refer to as ‘information design’. Good information design will offer us the means to manage both new media and new paradigms of communication.
Florian Brody