Programme of IDC 2009 (Subject to amendment)

Underground and DLR

Greenwich is not on the London Underground system directly, but is served by the southern spur of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) system, which connects to the London Underground at Canary Wharf, Bank, Bow, Canning Town and Stratford.

The most convenient DLR station for the conference is Cutty Sark, named for the historic tea clipper ship on display nearby (but currently undergoing repair after a fire). The next DLR station south is Greenwich itself.

Alternatively, take the Underground (Jubilee Line) to Canada Water or North Greenwich, and take the 188 bus to the University of Greenwich.

Overground rail

Trains for Greenwich depart from either Charing Cross (via Waterloo East), or from Cannon Street in the City of London. All Greenwich trains also stop at London Bridge. (This is the world’s oldest suburban railway, opened 1838.)

Bus routes

The most useful bus route is 188 from Russell Square (south of Euston rail station), which also serves Waterloo Station, Elephant & Castle and Rotherhithe, plus Canada Water and North Greenwich Underground stations.

Arriving by air?

• From Heathrow Airport, take the London Underground to Green Park, change to the Jubilee Line, take that to Canary Wharf and change to the DLR for Greenwich.
• From Gatwick or Luton Airports, we recommend the Thameslink train service to London Bridge; continue by overground train to Greenwich.
• London Stansted Airport: we recommend the National Express bus service A9, which runs directly to Stratford bus/rail/DLR station (about 45 minutes; take the DLR from Stratford to Cutty Sark station for Greenwich.)
• London City Airport: take the airport bus to Canning Town and change to the DLR.

Coming by car?

Greenwich is not in the London Congestion Zone but some approaches will take you through it. From Central London, there is a riverside route via Waterloo, London Bridge, Tower Bridge, Bermondsey and Deptford; or a route via Elephant and Castle and New Cross.

From the North of England and East London, avoid the Congestion Zone by crossing via the Blackwall Tunnel, and drive west along the A206.

There is pay-and-display parking next to Greenwich University, just off Romney Road: marked P on our location map.

Or even by boat...

Travelling to Greenwich by boat along the Thames was the favoured mode of Tudor royalty, these days much faster thanks to the modern power catamarans of Thames Clippers. A commuter service runs between Greenwich and Charing Cross Pier on the Embankment, taking half an hour to make the journey, also calling at London Bridge Pier.

Word-processing and page make-up software typically provide the opportunity for their users to set up paragraph styles and character styles, or use sets of them that are already available in the software. Typically the styles could be for ‘body text’, ‘level 2 heading’, ‘bullet list’ etc., and they store rules for the typographic formatting, pagination behaviour, and other attributes of those document elements.

Using Styles in such software brings many benefits – among them, consistency of formatting, efficiency of graphic production, and the ability to modify the appearance of all examples of an element (all subheadings, for example) across a whole document. It is therefore somewhat mystifying that people generally don’t use them. Why?

For information designers, the issue is a challenge whenever we are asked to set up templates for client organisations, so their employees can use them to make publications and other information products. For those who work in software interface design, the question arises whether the Styles feature is inadequately represented in the interface of these programs; or whether there is a profound mismatch between the Styles feature and users’ mental model of how text is formatted. In the latter case, there is probably a link to whether users have a concept of the structure of texts.

There must be some reason to explain why so many people, from students to civil servants, are producing elaborately formatted documents in Microsoft Word where every paragraph uses the style Normal with local formatting overrides. The authors have started an ongoing programme of research to discover why.

The project involves a study of the different ways that Styles work and are represented in the interfaces of 8–10 different WP/DTP programmes, and interviews with students, educators and self-taught users. Especially for the third group, a relevant question is – how ‘educational’ is the interface itself?

This study has implications for education, whether at the ‘computer literacy’ level of ECDL certification – where Styles are not currently on the curriculum – or the more professional level of education in graphic design and technical communication.

Kemi Adeboye is a senior lecturer in computing at London South Bank University, specialising in HCI Education and User-Centred Design: she teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Kemi has also taught ECDL (‘European Computer Driving Licence’) courses at Goldsmiths College.

Conrad Taylor is a freelance media designer, producer and educator who was an early adopter of DTP software. For over 20 years he has created template documents for use by client organisations, primarily for technical publishing and journal production. In parallel he has taught use of Styles in PageMaker, FrameMaker and InDesign, and his articles on the subject have been published in Sweden, USA and Australia.]]> http://www.infodesign.org.uk/2009-conference/speakers/adeboye-taylor.php http://www.infodesign.org.uk/2009-conference/speakers/adeboye-taylor.php 03 Speakers Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:00:54 +0000 Conference fees are set at two levels. Those who have been accepted to make a presentation or poster display will be charged the ‘contributor rate’. Otherwise, the full conference rate is chargeable.

The conference fees cover all refreshments and lunch; for those who pay for both days, a conference dinner on the evening of 2nd April in the nearby Trafalgar Tavern is also included. Separate dinner tickets can be purchased at £25 each by those attending only the first day – or by anyone who wishes to invite guests.

Registration and electronic payment (PayPal, credit card or funds transfer) can be made online at our secure booking and payment page.

• Student discounts: Depending in part on how regular bookings go, we hope to offer a limited number of substantially discounted places to students.
• Group discounts: There will be an additional discount of 10% for bookings of three or more people from the same organisation.
• Cheque payments: Before 22 March, payment can also be made within the UK by cheque.

To find out more about these possibilities, email us.

This year's conference offered an exciting variety of case-studies from design practitioners and their customers, reports from researchers, and thought-provoking reflections on the principles behind what information designers and communicators do. Some of the early reactions from those attending indicate that it may have been the most successful Information Design Conferences for quite some while.

Topics included:

• Wayfinding and signing
• Interaction design
• Health information
• Instructions and explanations
• Designing online learning environments
• Design models, theories and techniques
• Information design history

As in IDC 2007, the conference setting was the Restoration grandeur of the University of Greenwich in London, in buildings designed by Sir Christopher Wren. We also organised a convivial conference dinner in the historic Trafalgar Tavern, overlooking the Thames.

In the coming weeks and months, this Web site will be transformed into a repository for the outputs from the conference. Good-quality audio recordings were made of the lectures, and we are collecting in the slide sets from speakers, and other assets suchy as papers and extended abstracts.

A website for ‘hard to reach’ users needs to help diverse user groups find what they want in a large information repository. There are many ways of approaching ‘site wayfinding’ – most commonly through the hierarchical organisation of user types, typical tasks/user goals, subject classification or even by type of interaction/content. This may be organised though an essentially rational approach driven by cognitive theory, iterative development and extensive testing.

On the other hand, there are inevitable constraints on rationality including uncertainty, time and resources, so in practice the web designer/architect has to trade off opinions, guesses, and the path of least technological resistance.

This presentation is a reflexive case study. It looks at how initial decisions on structure, navigation and metadata were taken for a particular site – knowhownonprofit.org – and their outcomes, both successful and less successful.

We will explain:

• the options we thought were available to the project in the context of not-yet-recruited future users and not-yet-written future content (much of it created in ill defined ways by these future users);
• the initial graphic and interaction solutions we devised to deal with content architecture and metadata classification;
• the testing we did and how that affected the initial structure, functionality and visual design of the site; and
• what we learned after the site was ‘soft launched’ quietly in October 2008 and before it was ‘officially’ marketed and launched in the spring of 2009.

Mark Barratt is an information designer and partner in Text Matters, a Reading UK information design consultancy. He has a background in journalism, typographic design, magazine management, electronic publishing & markup languages, video production and effective communication in large organisations. He teaches occasionally, and is Vice-President of Association Typographique Internationale. Mark is currently working on web-based projects around Third Sector management, appropriate development, and social & environmental benchmarking.

Clive Holtham is Professor of Information Management and Director of the Learning Laboratory at Cass Business School, City University, London.

Despite the fact that we live in the information age, telling people that you are information developer – that you write the user guides and online help systems distributed with software and technology products ’ still invites ridicule rather than respect. User guides are still a by-word for poor writing, unintelligible jargon, and irrelevant diagrams. In a recent survey of users carried out by a commercial organisation, respondents talked of ‘read rage’ as they became frustrated with the poor quality of user documentation. This attracted some media attention, but only to emphasise the fact that so many user guides are so bad.

More than a decade ago, leading practitioners in document design such as Karen Schriver and Ginny Redish were writing seriously about the need to engage with users as the only way to find out what users really wanted. To almost all practitioners this is an obvious strategy, but it is notoriously difficult to implement in most organisations. The tech writing blogosphere is teeming with anecdotal evidence of the difficulties writers face in practice, in all but a minority of enterprises, and it seems that the smaller an enterprise is the less likely it is to treat user documentation as an endeavour worthy of serious consideration. Information about products and services tends to flow in one direction only, and that is from the developers downwards and outwards to the users. Few companies feel the need to hire professional writers for user documentation and few of those that do appear to allocate adequate resources to allow their writers to do a good job. When document production appears so low down on the list of corporate priorities, thoughtful information design and planned document development must remain a distant dream.

In December 2008 David Farbey conducted his own private online survey and in this presentation he shares some of the more than 100 negative comments about user documentation that he received. He examines reasons why the general standard of user documentation stubbornly fails to improve and invites suggestions and contributions for a ‘better user documentation manifesto’.

David Farbey is a freelance technical communications and information design consultant and has worked in the field for the last 15 years in a wide range of sectors and industries. He is an Associate Lecturer in Technical Communications at Sheffield Hallam University, and has taught courses on professional writing at Coventry University. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators, a Senior Member of the Society for Technical Communication, and a Member of the British Computer Society.

I will be looking across print, web and television, surveying trends in information graphics that appear in the media, both in the UK and abroad. This survey will not be encyclopaedic by any means, but will identify the patterns that merit the most discussion – those that are working and those that need a lot more work.

My talk will address the following issues:

• How do we design for non-expert audiences whose needs are different from information design-literate academics/ professionals?
• How do we manage the needs of business and designers to push ‘innovative’ interfaces when the public are often confused by such things?
• How are newspapers responding to needs to innovate and integrate graphics better?
• How do we television designers provide visualisations with integrity when their medium is so concerned with entertainment?
• How are designers using the data created by websites and services to visualise this world of data?
• How do breaking news graphics differ from magazine features? And how different should they be?

Max Gadney is a Commissioning Executive in BBC Vision. Prior to that he was Head of Design and Audience Insight at the BBC News website. As well as many BAFTAs and Webby awards, they won a Peter Sullivan President's Award at the Society of News Design Annual Summit. Max authors and creates information graphics on military technology for WWII Magazine in the US. See also www.maxgadney.com]]> http://www.infodesign.org.uk/2009-conference/speakers/gadney.php http://www.infodesign.org.uk/2009-conference/speakers/gadney.php 03 Speakers Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:11:22 +0000 Information Design, interaction and interface design panel

Separate traditions working on essentially the same problem? What can these communities learn from each other?

Katherine Gillieson is a designer, writer and lecturer at the Department of Typography at the University of Reading. Her practice involves work in interface design, diagrammatic representation, and lettering in the built environment. She is active in interdisciplinary collaborations and as a developer and moderator of online communities, and has worked in interaction design for mobile, web, tv and convergence environments with Alcatel, Nortel Networks, Sony, GM, and 3 UK. Her most recent essays on the form of the book can be found in Fully Booked (Die Gestalten, 2008), and she has a series of extended entries appearing in the upcoming Phaidon volume Graphic Classics.

The debate about whether graphic design is an art or a science is ongoing. Those who contribute to the field seemingly locate themselves somewhere between a polarised subjective and objective position. For example, advertising swings towards art for inspiration, whereas information design often appears more secure in its relationship with science.

Within graphic design, such debate encourages diversity rather than unity, and a perception of boundaries rather than an understanding of core concerns. And yet it has been suggested that design, (part of which graphic design must be considered), bridges the traditional spheres of the humanities and the sciences, offering a third perspective.

In an attempt to clarify such confusion, this research further develops work in progress on a diagrammatic modelling exercise that attempts to depict the key spheres of influence in graphic design practice, education and research. Science and art are significant in this, as is design.

Referring to work in education and research, this paper presentation attempts to clarify some of the key influences and characteristics that make up the core of these opposed concerns. In doing so, the opportunity to consider how graphic design makes use of these opposed positions, using the analogy of a pendulum swing, illustrates how graphic design must be conscious of both positions, in order to inform and affect the actions and behaviour of audiences.

It is assumed that information design, by its very nature, must first aspire to inform, before it affects, behaviour. Whereas art might wish to affect before it informs behaviour. But, at the outset, graphic design does not necessarily presuppose the need to inform, or affect, behaviour.

When requirements demand such an approach, a critical understanding of the core values associated with subjective and objective design decision is essential. This research attempts to clarify these core values with the aid of diagrammatic modelling. This presentation exposes the model, to an audience with a specialist interest in information design. In doing so the researcher encourages feedback on the usefulness of such a model as an educational tool.

Robert Harland is a graphic designer and lecturer in the School of Art and Design at Loughborough University. He is presently enrolled on a PhD programme at The University of Nottingham School of Built Environment where his research focus is the relationship between Graphic Design and Urban Design. Before pursuing an academic career in 2001, he spent 15 years in private practice in London.

Information design is a profession that attracts inquisitive people that notice details. We see complex information and maze-like environments as a challenge not a chore. We automatically start to think about how a signing system or map could be made clearer when we are navigating airports, a ski slopes or cities. When we fill in forms or try to follow a user guide, we work out how it could be made much simpler. But most people are not like us.

We think about who will be using the information we are designing – and how they will use it. But do we really understand how different users see or understand the information we are designing or the environment we are signing? Do we ask enough ‘other people’ what they think?

I will use examples and observations from information design and wayfinding projects to share my experiences of different users, in particular people with special needs, and describe ways in which different people use information and environments. I will discuss the inconsistencies in inclusive design guidance, and the difficulties designers face when trying to meet inclusivity obligations with a single design solution.

Many of us have special needs when we make a journey. Someone using a pushchair needs a ramp, not stairs, as much as someone using a wheelchair or with a broken leg. Someone listening to loud music on an MP3 player will not hear audio information clearly and will be reliant on visual information, just like someone who is registered deaf or hard of hearing. Many people need glasses for reading but wouldn't be wearing them when standing at a bus stop, so they will not be able to read information unless it is in large enough type – just like someone who is permanently partially sighted.

Though many people cannot read easily, they can letter-match if the same word (in the same upper or lower case format), is used consistently on all signs and maps. By 2020 almost half the adult population will be aged over 50, myself included. The likelihood of us having a disability increases with age. We need to be clever now, so as we get older we will still be able to use the information we are designing today, and follow the signs that are currently being installed.

Colette Jeffrey has been an information designer since completing an MA in Information Graphic Design from De Montfort University in 1994. Working at the Information Design Unit, then Enterprise IG, she specialised in wayfinding and sign design. She researched and co-authored the official guidance on wayfinding for NHS hospitals, and has developed wayfinding strategies and information design solutions for 25 hospitals, Wembley Arena, Heathrow Airport, the Natural History Museum and a shopping centre in Dubai. She joined Applied Information Group in 2007 and is directing wayfinding projects in Brighton and Leeds, and is leading on inclusivity issues for Legible London.

In today’s increasingly complex and technology-dominated world, it is not enough to produce manuals for users of gadgets and instructions for patients; we also need documents that help citizens in making sense of the world and of the complex systems that run it. The growing proportion of the elderly and the faster pace of technological change both demand suitable literature for a truly inclusive and empowered citizenry.

Clear text is an essential component of effective information design However, clarity is hard to measure. Clarity of instructions may be measured by monitoring performance and clarity of explanatory text, by testing comprehension. But, on finding that comprehension scores are low, how does one go about improving them? What tactics can writers use to make their writing easier to understand? My background in research made me turn to scientists: How do they explain to the lay public something as abstract as the laws of heredity, as esoteric as fossils, or as minute as molecules? As I pored over the prose of those who are masters of the art, I began to realize that their repertoire comprises a dozen tactics to put across to lay readers difficult-to-understand concepts, mechanisms, and processes.

My analysis showed that these tactics are used by all writers in writing about any topic. The raw material for the study was anthologies such as Richard Dawkins’s Oxford Book of Modern Scientific Writing, the two annual series, namely Best American Science Writing and Best American Nature and Science Writing, winners of the Royal Society prize (formerly the Aventis prize) for the best-written science book for the general public, and winners of the Pulitzer prize for explanatory writing, supplemented with literature on the craft of writing. The paper that I should like to submit focuses on these tactics, including the following:

• Use examples and analogies.
• Use questions as headings and offer answers.
• Address the reader directly.
• Include ‘advance organizers’.
• Employ logical sequences (spatial, temporal, hierarchical, etc.) and make the sequence explicit.
• Reinforce ideas through repetition.

Each tactic is illustrated with appropriate examples. The tactics do indeed offer generalizable conclusions and ideas that writers can use. The reasons why the strategies are successful and how writers can use them to improve their own writing are also discussed.

Yateendra Joshi works with Cactus Communications in Mumbai where he puts his 20+ years of experience in copy-editing scientific texts to use, mainly for training and advising the firm’s large team of editors. Yateen is an Associate Fellow of the Communication Research Institute, a member of the editorial board of the Information Design Journal, a BELS-certified editor (Board of Editors in Life Sciences, USA), and the author of Communicating in Style. He lives in Pune and also works with the World Institute of Sustainable Energy as a Senior Fellow.

King William Walk, London SE10 9JW [Map]

About seven minutes’ walk from the conference, Devonshire House Hotel is a four-star hotel on the World Heritage Site itself – converted from the former nurses’ home of the Seamen’s Hospital. There are 94 rooms.

Rates: from £89 per night

You can book online

Novotel Greenwich

173–185 Greenwich High Road, London SE10 8JA [Map]

A new-built four-star hotel about 12 minutes’ walk from the conference, and right next to Greenwich rail and DLR stations.

Rates: from £153 per night

You can book online

Hotel Ibis, Greenwich

30 Stockwell Street, London SE10 8JN
Tel. [+44] (0)208 305 1177 — Fax [+44] (0)208 858 7139

A two-star hotel about eight minutes’ walk from the conference. WiFi network. Two rooms available for people with disabilities.

Rates: £95, or £102.99 with multimedia/Internet package
Rates are per room and include tax, but breakfast is £7.95 extra.

You can book online via Ibis reservations