Paul Stiff

Information design before designers

Information design is an idea of the later twentieth century, but it is obvious that ‘information’ has for long been designed. Less obvious, and in fact hard to explain, are the responses of historical readers to their encounters with designed and printed information. This is partly because histories of reading usually assume a very particular object of interest: not just the book, but the book as barely-material carrier of a literary text. Certain restrictive 'normal' models of readers, of reading, and of reasons for reading, are entailed by this privileged position of the literary book. A further disablement is the limited purchase of the prevailing measure of historical literacy.

The project which this talk describes – Designing information for everyday life, 1815–1914 – is instead about designing for reading for action. Rather than the disembodied literary book, its objects of interest are material texts – the transient documents of everyday life – and the experiences of their readers within the first industrializing society.

The work explores how design might, or might not, have supported a newly and often haltingly literate readership. It investigates how information was presented to readers who had, for example, to make choices between alternatives, to select and calculate, to follow a route, or work out the duration of a journey. This meant figuring the import of publishers’ decisions about non-linear configurations, explanatory text (‘how to read this chart...’), graphic devices which may have made key text more salient, and so on.

The project faces challenges. Past readers cannot be questioned about what they read, why, what they found difficult, and which formats caused them problems. Nor can publishers, printers, and authors be asked about the design decisions which they made. So the project draws upon accounts of reading which seem to be relevant to designing, and also looks to present-day information design practice for insights into readers’ behaviour.

One challenge is to reconstruct historical experiences of reading for action. Might it be useful to borrow from workplace ergonomics the tool of task analysis? And what about the information design tools of personas – hypothetical archetypes of actual readers – and scenarios, through which personas are played to test the validity of a prototype design and of designers’ assumptions? Such methods may prove controversial as History, but they could help to illuminate the so-far elusive nature of people's past encounters with unfamiliar graphic configurations of printed information.

Paul Stiff worked in book publishing before joining the University of Reading, where he has taught typography, information design, and design for reading, for nearly thirty years. He spoke, not very cleverly, about some difficulties of tabular design at the first Information Design Conference at Cranfield in the early 1980s, and aims to make more sense this time.