Author: sheilapontis

• Visual Methods: Social Science and Information Design

  Last June, I attended to a visual method workshop in Cardiff, organised by the University of Leeds. When I first knew about this workshop, I was really happy to find a workshop focussed on visual research techniques. Once in Cardiff, a friend asked me: “what do you expect from these two days?”, and, honestly, I…

  August 30, 2009

• Information Design & Diagrammatic Language course (Spain)

  From the 1st of March to the 21st of June 2010, I will be given a course about Information Design and Diagrammatic Language at the Escola Massana in Barcelona, Spain. The classes will be in Spanish, but most of the biliography and references are in English. Detail program and more information about the course on:…

  August 27, 2009

• Methods for a Design Method

  Creating a design method could be defined as a three-stage process that includes analysis, synthesis and evaluation (Jones, 1992; Yee, 2006). In other words, this process can be explained as ”˜breaking the problem into pieces’, ”˜putting the pieces together in a new way’ and ”˜testing to discover the consequences of putting the new arrangement into…

  August 22, 2009

• Visual methods

  A methodology can be defined as a systematic and orderly logical arrangement of doing something that particularly helps to organise and direct a research in a specific field of study. Specially, in relation with visual material there are no so many methods to use for interpreting and analysing, and even fewer references about how to…

  August 21, 2009

• Lazy designers

  Since I have started researching on design processes and design methods, I have received different kind of comments, questions and suggestions, such as: – Why do you want to study design processes? – Design process is a complex process to be studied, and most of these processes are pure intuition. – Do you want to…

  August 12, 2009

• Why diagrammatic maps?

  Lets start with the definition of some key terms. Map: the dictionary defines a map as a representation, usually on a flat surface, of the features of an area of the earth, showing it in its respective forms, sizes, and relationships according to some convention of representation. However, on a closer inspection of the history…

  August 9, 2009

• what is this blog about?

  My first challenge as a graphic design student was to redesign the underground map of Buenos Aires. I am not sure why, but since that exercise, I have become a big fan of underground maps’ designs. Why? Maybe, because it was my first work as a “graphic designer” or maybe, because I found amazing how…

  August 6, 2009