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The Information Age is History
By John Waters, Design Director, Waters International, Inc.
An excerpt from The Real Business of Web Design, published
by Allworth Press
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| John Waters |
Sirens are screeching, car horns are blaring, and a bullhorn is
bellowing for people to clear the street just outside my open window.
It is the passage to summer—the first day of spring madness
in New York. But, this riotous noise is music compared to the continuing
cacophony of mass media that assaults me from different directions—the
chaos of “information,” “news,” and “marketing
messages” boiling out of radios, televisions, newspapers,
magazines, films, billboards, telephones, paging devices, and the
Internet.
There was a time when information was precious, when news was important.
We collected and stored the facts in our heads. But something began
to happen around the middle of the last century. Information got
ahead of us. It started to grow at a rate we were unprepared to
handle. Throughout the sixties and seventies information abundance
made collecting and recalling more selective and more difficult.
During the eighties, real angst set in. We suffered from “Information
Anxiety,” as Richard Wurman explained in his classic book
by the same name. In the nineties, information became the currency
of business—the preferred medium of exchange, and the information
managers became information officers. Today, we have rounded the
Metcalfe curve, and this currency has become a commodity, another
mass-produced, unspecialized, overdeveloped product. And we are
nearly drowning in it.
An Ancient Currency
Information has always been our currency. Since the beginning of
cellular life when one cell exchanged data with another and then
others, until by some stroke of ingenuity, the neuron emerged enabling
two cells to communicate over distance. “With that single
enabling innovation, the variety of life boomed. With neurons, life
no longer had to remain bounded in a blob. It was possible to arrange
cells into almost any shape, size, and function. Butterflies, orchids,
and kangaroos all became possible. Life quickly exploded in a million
different unexpected ways…”1
Humans emerged and developed languages. They told their stories
to one another and the stickiness of the information became the
foundation of social glue. They bartered cloth for clay pots and
for shoes for their horses, but the real currency was knowledge—how
to weave the fabric, or craft the pots, or shoe the horse. From
the earliest Sumerian pictographers scratching events on clay tablets
to the revolution of Gutenberg’s printing press, and the innovations
in publishing that followed, information was the light on every
path to power. With the inventions of Morse’s telegraph, Bell’s
telephone, Marconi’s radio, and thousands of lesser-known
“data distributors,” information became the oil in all
the engines of commerce.
Many of the business “change programs” during the past
century, which were mentioned earlier, were not uniformly beneficial,
but the total effect has certainly given us more stuff. Yes, there
is still an enormous gap between the haves and the have-nots, but
today, there are more products and services—increasingly information-based—available
at higher quality, in less time, and at less cost than at any time
in history. The problem is not scarcity of supply; it is scarcity
of demand. Who wants all of this stuff? No one.
But, this is the wrong question. The question should be: Who wants
some of this stuff? And the answer is: everyone. People want what
they want. They want what will fulfill their desires,
what will satisfy their particular needs. Rich or poor,
they want the things that will make their lives easier, richer,
more meaningful and more fun. And the Web, following the rules of
openness and “plenitude,” is increasingly making this
possible.
Information as currency is not new. Without it, we would have no
history. What has changed—continuously—is the way we
exchange it. And with each major change a new information revolution
begins. Each bringing with it another set of concerns about the
implications of such a change. “What hath God wrought?”
was the first message Samuel Morse sent from Washington to Baltimore
with his telegraph in 1844.
The creation of information space brought about by the Internet
and the Web is only the latest in an ongoing procession of innovations
that allow humankind to continue exploring new paths, and creating
new engines for growth—creative, economic, and humanitarian.
The practice of Web design is fundamentally about understanding
this latest change, what it means to be informed, the enormity of
the spaces in which information resides, the multitude of channels
through which it flows, and the methods and tools for accessing,
evaluating, storing, sharing, navigating, and governing what is
available.
One Cannot, Not Communicate
Virtually all activity, even lack of activity, can be considered
communication. Yet clarity in communications is one of our most
difficult problems. What does it mean to be informed? Most people
who study this question agree that to be informed requires more
than just data. The data must be meaningful or useful to the recipient.
Before undergoing any physical operation in a hospital today, you
must give your “informed” consent. This means you must
understand (often nearly an impossible task) the information being
presented. Numerous court cases have established that simply putting
information before a patient is not sufficient to assure that the
person understands the gravity of the situation. Questions must
be answered, discussions held, to determine the level of understanding.
“Informed” compliance with local, state, and government
laws requires that we understand the laws. No one seems to know
if we really do, since governments are not sued as often as doctors
and hospitals. But somehow we manage to muddle our way through,
grasping the essence of the things most relevant to our lives, and
ignoring or keeping a weary eye on the balance.
Today, we are an “informed” citizenry that makes “informed”
decisions about a host of incredibly complex issues. Many things
influence the degree to which we are truly informed, but
two areas deserve special attention from Web designers.
First, our primary language is “fuzzy” by its nature.
Words, no matter how precise we try to make them refuse consistent
definition. The standards for interpretation, for meaning on which
we can agree, are not precise. At the code level of individual characters,
we can all agree at least in our primary tongue, that an A
is an A, a B is a B, and so on. But,
as soon as we gather several of these characters together to form
a word our agreement crumbles. The word “peace” has
been in the global spotlight for decades, yet we can not agree on
its meaning. Place any word into a line-up with other words to form
a sentence, even a simple sentence, and the problem of interpretation
escalates. This is obvious in the following two sentences. “This
is part of the peace process.” “We are on the road to
peace.” Is the peace in these sentences an activity or a location—a
series of events or a place we will recognize when we get there?
The fuzziness of language is also reflected in its ambiguity. For
example, the ambiguity found in the following real newspaper headlines
taken from Steven Pinkers’ The Language Instinct: How
the Mind Creates Language.2
- Child’s Stool Great for Use in Garden
- Stiff Opposition Expected to Casketless Funeral Plan
- Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
- Queen Mary Having Bottom Scraped
This difficulty—the lack of precision and the ambiguity in
our language that causes all this trouble—is also what makes
language so wonderful. It allows us to continually add words, delete
words, shift the meaning of words, and in this process of reinventing
our language, extend our creative options—our capacity for
knowing in unknown ways.
Second, by relying too heavily on our primary language—words—we
may miss the deeper meaning often conveyed by the context in which
the words are wrapped. The ability to communicate complex ideas
is said to be the most distinguishing characteristic of the human
species. But, it is not restricted to reading, writing, and arithmetic.
And, we are not alone in our ability to communicate without words.
Nature is filled with amazing examples of complex non-verbal communication;
from the red spot on a herring gull’s bill that needs only
to be pecked for a baby gull to receive food; to the extravagant
dance of the honey bee that conveys the precise location and approximate
yield of a new-found field of pollen; to the mysterious exchange
of navigational information among Monarch butterflies that passes
through four generations before leading the great-grand children
hundreds of miles back to a home they have never seen.
Like the rest of nature, we are informed, even on the Web in its
primitive state, by all of our senses. Content cannot exist without
a context. The speed with which a site downloads; the amount of
“god-awful” clutter, or lack of clutter; the impact
of color and sound; the amount, character, and direction of motion,
all make an impression—convey information—before we
can read the first three words. The context of any message is equally
as important, often more important, than the content.
On the Web, like everywhere else, communication is not just a ping-pong
volley of data exchanges, it is a dance; with kicks and jumps and
twist and turns, and it can be as rhythmic, raucous, or ridiculous
as the dancing partners desire. Meaning will be determined by the
minds involved
No More Best Practices
Businesses love to manage. Traditionally that is how tasks were
accomplished. Business managed the process and measured the outcome.
This worked well for businesses in the early part of the last century,
but with the explosion of information availability, new “management”
processes—driven by technology requirements—often do
more harm than good. They are still linear, controlling, fixed in
a word-built world, oriented to practice not purpose, and too focused
on system requirements instead of peoples’ needs. There must
be thousands of best practices, processes, and software tools for
managing information. There are thousands more for managing knowledge.
Recently, knowledge management has become “knowledge engineering.”
There is now even software for managing or “engineering”
ideas. Most of these things do not yet work. And it is easy to see
why.
The following paragraph is taken unedited from the homepage of KMNetwork:
“What Is Knowledge Management? From a business-technology
perspective, Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues
of organizational adoption, survival, and competence in face of
increasingly discontinuous environmental change…Essentially,
it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination
of data and information processing capacity of information technologies,
and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings.”3
This sounds worse than the car horns and sirens outside my window.
Compare the above paragraph with the following one from Richard
Lederer on the value of short words:
“Short words are bright like sparks that glow in the night,
prompt like the dawn that greets the day, sharp like the blade
of a knife, hot like salt tears that scald the cheek, quick like
moths that flit from flame to flame, and terse like the dart and
sting of a bee.”4
You may think this has nothing to do with knowledge management.
In fact, it is all about information clarity. Knowledge management,
if it is to mean anything, must be about information value, and
the first step toward value is clarity. Every writer and designer
should follow Lederer’s rule: “Use small, old words
where you can.” Here is another sound rule: Use visual metaphors
from life, where possible. At the risk of overstating the position,
here’s a third rule: Stop using the same techno-talk and best
practices that everyone else is using.
In the practice of Web design, there are no best practices. Every
site is different and every user brings his idiosyncrasies to the
experience. That’s one of the beauties of the Web. Yes, there
are some rules that may be followed. Of course, you can learn from
the successes and failures of others. Certainly, there are guidelines
that must be considered and growing standards to which we must adhere.
There are numerous procedures and methodologies and technologies
that can help save time, money, and headaches. There are also “long-shots,”
weird ideas, and infinite possibilities based on purpose. They should
all be considered rather than following an automatic prescription
of best practices.
Many businesses love best practices. They follow the path of reason.
They are orderly, rational, and logical. They have been tested and
proved. They can be used to make sure everyone is “on-board,”
“in sync,” and “on track.” They are great
“justifiers” for decisions. However, they cannot be
used—at least not effectively—to explore new terrain
or to find new ideas. Ideas are nearly always found beyond the borders
of reason, on the fringe, when one is informed but out-of-sync or
off-track. And most good ideas are hard to justify. They require
taking risks.
A comprehensive, logical, step-by-step process for Web development
is recommended. But, in reality, the process is not so clear-cut.
It is rarely completely logical, and often depends on simultaneously
searching for the solution and defining the problem. Design, by
its nature, is filled with conflict; it struggles with opposites
and thrives on tension. Particularly today, when companies, institutions,
even countries advocate shorter development time, a continuous flow
of new ideas, increased quality, reduced costs, broader distribution,
and higher returns. And technology is providing a host of new tools
for both design and implementation.
Today, input and ideas may come at any point in the process, functional
details for a variety of tools must be considered as part of the
initial input, and they may change at any point. And, contributing
writers, designers, illustrators, programmers, lawyers, and accountants
may be located anywhere in the world. As we have seen, information,
our primary currency, has become a commodity. Language, our social
glue, risks losing its stickiness from excessive complexity. And
the current practice of Web design is often without purpose. In
order to succeed, to prosper, to fulfill the promise of the Web,
the information and language related to the practice of Web design
must be simple. It must balance the natural and sometimes explosive
change of a living system with the same systems need for continuity.
Above all, the practice of Web design must contribute to making
peoples’ lives easier, richer, more meaningful, and more fun.
This article is an excerpt from the book The Real Business
of Web Design by John Waters (New York: Allworth Press, 2004,
256 pages, $19.95). For more information, please visit http://www.allworth.com/Catalog/GD312.htm.
You can order online for a 20% discount or place an order by phone
by calling 1-800-491-2808.
Notes:
- Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy (New York:
Penguin Books, 1998)
- Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: HarperCollins
Books, 1994)
- Kmnetwork.com, this Web site is touted as the World’s
most reputed Knowledge Management resource. It is also one of
the ugliest.
- Richard Lederer, The Miracle of Language (New York:
Pocket Books, 1991)
A pioneer in the use of computers for design,
and veteran Web designer, John Waters serves as Design Director
of Waters International, Inc.,
the interaction agency that's redefining design. His work has received
countless business, industry, and design awards and has been featured
in numerous design and communications magazines in the US and abroad.
This article appeared in the June
2004 eBulletin.
Feedback on DMI Viewpoints and article proposals
are always welcome! Please email jtobin@dmi.org.
All articles reflect the opinion of the author and not the Design
Management Institute.
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