Design’s role in developing ways to facilitate the autonomy of information systems when dealing with super-complex databases is growing in importance. The goal is to support diverse styles and types of knowledge. In the process, design’s functions have been extended from producing form to creating meaning.
The appropriate theoretical foundations have yet to be formulated to underpin these additional functions.
As information is not made up of matter or energy, it cannot be designed in a direct sense. It needs to be translated into something perceptible and tangible, as demonstrated in phrases such as “information architecture,” “information flow,” and “information landscape.”
Design when applied to information becomes effective as a catalyst for the production of artifacts (mainly objects concerned with media) that can improve the probability of the recipient processing information in the intended and appropriate ways.
Besides this, there is the research issue of whether information design is able to justify an independent epistemology that integrates diverse styles and types of knowledge, and uses experiments to investigate the functions of sensory knowledge.
Unlike scientists, designers tend to believe that the global effort to improve universal welfare is restrained not by a lack of data and the information it helps to shape, but more by a lack of ability and an unwillingness to create the appropriate information from the available data, and, hence, to justify relevant action. This is how the democratically chartered rights of informational self-determination become a politically effective factor, via practical data management and information access.
Design’s descriptive methods are sometimes considered inferior to scientific methods and, therefore, as the last step in the process of creating knowledge (Design Methods).
Yet these digital representations of actions and ideas, in the context of vastly complex databases, are first positioned as catalysts for actions and knowledge.
The actual machinery for information processing then takes center stage, and design’s potential contribution to envisaging the technologies necessary for future information processing becomes the primary focus of research. Today, information designers who create socio-technical systems according to this philosophy are part of an established approach, leading from Otto Neurath (visual systems), Wilhelm Ostwald (Die Brücke) and Herbert Bayer (Globoscope) to Charles Eames (films, exhibitions), Buckminster Fuller (the Dymaxion world map, synergetics), the Department of Information at the Ulm School of Design, and groups like Superstudio (Radical Design).
Digital media has paved the way for new and diverse possibilities for effective, design-related information systems, but the theoretical basis necessary for its development has still not been determined. In the process, information aesthetics in the 1960s tried to formulate a common description for scientific and artistic productivity, technical function, and aesthetic information that would unite all these conceptsa project that now seems even more necessary considering the ubiquity of today’s digital systems.
There are many information design projects being completed at the moment that can be summed up as “info-aesthetics” (Manovich 2006). It is vital to recognize this field of practice and research as cutting edge, but claiming that it is new indicates a lack of historical perspective about design and leads to a theoretical deficit.
The term “information” is fundamental in postindustrial societies, giving rise to phrases like “information society” or “the age of information.” But there is still no consistent theory of information able to integrate the necessary aspects of the psychology of perception and cognitive sciences with the scope of communication theory and technology and social and political perspectives.
Essentially, there are two identifiable positions in information theory: the scientific-technical position, in which information is mathematically determined as a degree of improbability, and a system-theoretical/Constructivist position that assumes that there is a disparity between a system and its environment and postulates that the viewer is a self-contained system where information is concerned (Constructivism). Both positions believe that information cannot be understood as matter or as energy, despite the reality that compressing atoms and energy into bits (that is the smallest possible units of information able to be stored in a computer as 0 or 1) is one of today’s most essential research issues, for example in quantum computers, biological information, or cellular machines.
Information does not exist as an absolute; it can only claim to be the “difference that makes a difference” from an observer’s perspective (Gregory Bates). Perceivable differences that materialize as matter or energy enter the full range of human senses as jumbled signals. Only a fraction of these can be processed consciously, whereas selecting where to direct attention is subject to anthropological patterns of perception as well as cultural, individual, and situational filters.
The perception system is structurally linked to its environment and develops expectations in relation to the nature of the future of that environment that are based on past experiences and consequent anticipations. Disparities in the environment that do not correspond to these experiences acquire additional value as information because they are events that need to be interpretedthe less probable the event, the higher the informational value.
Therefore information cannot exist in the environment per se; it has to be created by a structurally linked, self-contained information system. This version of the term “information” corresponds to positions of system theory guided by the philosophy of radical constructivism. Accordingly, understanding is perceived as a process of selection that constantly updates the difference between communication and information, because the same sensory stimulus, that is communication, can construct a range of credible information forms. The sentence “I go” could be understood as “I go on foot” (not by car) or as “I am going to the door” (while you remain seated) or “I go away” (and you stay here). The difference between communication and information is particularly evident in intercultural communication, where the same gesture can have different or even opposite meanings.
If design is to be understood as a producer of cognitively and emotionally effective interfaces (Interface Design) between system and environment, then an effective and functional definition of information is absolutely vital. Because in the selective process of understanding, even meaning, which is a definitive criterion for design, appears as a point of difference between the development of potentially plausible information and that of actual, realized information. Seen in this light, the difference between form and content is not an issue, and the designer (as in the one who creates form) strives to develop new interpretations that can communicate a selection of meanings.
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