January 2012 Archives

In researching background material for Information Design, I came across this interesting interview in Wired: Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong by Garth Sundem (2012). He interviews Robert A. Bjork, Distinguished Professor in Cognitive Psychology, UCLA. (And he got his BA from U of M, so that's nice.)

Some interesting snippets from the article:

• "People tend to try to learn in blocks," Bjork said. "Mastering one thing before moving on to the next."
• Instead of doing that Bjork recommends interleaving. (To learn tennis, mix in a range of skills like serving, backhands, volleys, overhead smashes, and footwork.)
• Make sure the mini skills you interleave are related in some higher-order way. If you're trying to learn tennis, you'd want to interleave serves, backhands, volleys, smashes, and footwork - not serves, synchronized swimming, European capitals, and programming in Java.
• The spacing effect: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you'll have learned after this second study session.
• Bjork also recommends taking notes just after class, rather than during. You have to work for it. The more you work, the more you learn.

Ann shared this link from A List Apart: An important time for design

I loved this quote in the article:

The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time. It's offering you a blank check and asking you to come up with something fascinating and useful that it can embrace en masse, to the benefit of everyone.

~ Ben Pieratt, Svpply

Later, the article has this snippet, which I think sums up things pretty well:

It's time for the design community to follow in developers' footsteps and fundamentally realign its focus. We need to think about products over posters and people over page views. We need this to happen at every level: in design schools, in design writing, and in the things we celebrate online and in person. We have a new purpose: elevate design and help change the world.

Here's another article I found while looking up more information about wayfinding. It's an interesting part of ID, how to transform information into a form that can be easily understood by everyone - but where you often only get a glance while driving by at 100kph.

The road sign as design classic

I found an interesting video on Slate, about the information signs at Penn Station. For the nation's busiest train hub, they don't make it very easy to find your way around. A great piece on information design applied to wayfinding:

Lost in Penn Station

Hi there! I often like to capture my thoughts and interesting ideas in a blog. I find the act of choosing the right blog item, the most appropriate topic, and how to frame it actually helps me to build a deeper understanding of the concept. I suppose it's sort of a reflection, just a bit more public.

This blog will collect my notes and interesting links related to a class I'm taking through the University of Minnesota: WRIT 5112.

If you've just discovered my blog, welcome! But I'll warn that if you're not in 5112, or studying information design (ID) then this blog may not be very interesting to you. But feel free to look around.