Author: sheilapontis
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The Goldilocks Understanding
Last week, I came across a chapter written by Karl Weick in 1993 about sensemaking and found a few concepts quite useful to better understand information designers’ simplification process and why, often, outputs do not work as intended. It is not new that information designers’ goal is to make sense of and visually communicate a problem…
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Designing well-conceived human interactions
The creation of artefacts has been part of designers’ daily work for many moons. Most classes and courses focused on teaching the skills for doing this kind of work, and practitioners have mastered the use of related technology and software. Lately, design has broadened its horizons, playing an increasingly key role in helping make the world a better place.…
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How to make a grilled cheese sandwich
What do a grilled cheese sandwich and information design have in common? Both are activities that involve the practice of organising information (or ingredients!), simplifying complexity and, also very important, having fun! “How to make a grilled cheese sandwich” is a simple exercise to introduce (design and non-design) students to information design key principles that…
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Design Thinking in Action: The Period Shop
Last month while walking down Fifth Avenue in NYC, we saw a peculiar shop called ‘The Period Shop‘. As we got closer, we learnt that it was a three-day pop-up shop designed by U by Kotex, the brand of feminine hygiene products, in response to one of their consumer’s idea: Sarah M. This shop offered a combination of products from…
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Design Education 3.0: the unknown unknowns
The three short-films ‘Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding’ reflect the changes that higher education and, thus, educators have been going through in the last 30 years to better equip students to successfully deal with real-life problems. A couple of years ago in a talk at NYU, Prof. John Zimmerman also spoke about this shift in education presenting ways to reform and…
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3 Factors for Processing Visual Information
Why some visualisations are more effective than others? Why some visualisations are still not universally understood if I have tested them with a big sample? How can designers improve the effectiveness of visualisations? Each person interprets visual information in a different way. We know that understanding the intended users’ needs (maybe through observation or interviews) is key…
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Making sense of information (visual) practices II
Are information design, data visualisation, and visual analytics the same fields? Do they have similar or different goals? Who practices what? What are their processes? What is the best software to visualise data? These are very frequent questions which are often the central topic of blog posts, twitter threads, discussions, Q&A, and regular conversation related…
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A (more) complete picture of Design
In the last 15 years, design education has dramatically changed. Generally speaking, at the beginning of 2000s, design education was pretty much the job of art and design schools, and mostly had a learning-by-doing approach, involving hands-on studio-based assignments. It was rare to find a design course heavy on “lecture” format classes, unpacking the design process, or…
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Bridging Information Design Theory & Practice!
On Tuesday, Sense (my business partner and myself) organised the first Information Design Meet up event of 2016 at General Assembly New York City. Around 40 information designers, UX designers, visual thinkers, data visualisers and designers among other professionals participated in the event. We created interactive posters to trigger discussion on key aspects of information design, cards…
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A day full of information graphics
Last week, I flew all the way to The Netherlands to speak at Infographic Conference’16, which, like every year for the last nine editions, took place in Zeist, a town very near Amsterdam. Similar to Malofiej, this conference is mostly focused on information graphics, and between 250 to 300 professionals and students with various backgrounds–and ranging from senior data…
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New challenges of Design education
Designers who have been involved in the design community for more than 15 years should have noticed how much the role of design has changed, moving from being merely an artistic activity to being an activity that ‘makes everything possible’. Traditionally, designers’ most frequent jobs have involved making things look nice (or nicer), creating or improving brand identities, translating…
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Information Design: Who, What & Why Event!
Next month, the first Information Design NYC Meetup event of 2016 will take place. Information designers have been trying to define this field, determining its boundaries and describing the different forms that it can take. However, information design still remains unclear, meaning different things to different people. This first event will be an interactive talk/mixer focused on…
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