What is information design?

Headnote

Defines two meanings of information design: the overall process and the presentation of information on page and on screen

Predicts the future importance of both meanings of information design, in terms of design for the Web and single-sourcing

INTRODUCTION

STC's Special Interest Group on Information Design was founded in 1997. A scant 3 years later, it has over 2,700 members. That astonishing and rapid growth is testimony to the widespread interest in the topic and is deeply gratifying to those of us who have thought of ourselves as information designers for many years.

What do those 2,700 SIG members mean by information design? As Beth Mazur says about plain language in her article in this issue, "Ask 10 people and you'll get 10 different answers."

In part, the differences in those answers may reflect the backgrounds of the people answering the question. Information design, like many other aspects of technical communication, draws on many research disciplines and many fields of practice, including anthropology and ethnography, architecture, graphic design, human factors and cognitive psychology, instructional design and instructional technology, linguistics, organizational psychology, rhetoric, typography, and usability.

THE TWO MEANINGS OF INFORMATION DESIGN

In part, the differences in definitions may reflect an ambiguity between using design in a very broad sense and, at the same time, in a narrower sense (see Redish 1999). 1 and-I suspect-many others within the Information Design SIG use information design, perhaps at different times, to mean

1. The overall process of developing a successful document

2. The way the information is presented on the page or screen (layout, typography, color, and so forth)

Using the same term for the whole and a part of that whole violates a guideline of good writing, but the fact is that the term information design means both. (A little later in this commentary, I briefly describe a historical reason for this dual usage, at least within the North American technical communication community.)

INFORMATION DESIGN AS THE OVERALL PROCESS

My definition of document design or information design has always been, first and foremost, the "whole." Information design is what we do to develop a document (or communication) that works for its users. Working for its users means that the people who must or want to use...