By Dietmar R. Winkler

From the insights of Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and mathematician, a great sentiment for a distinct and useful mission for a true profession of graphic and communication design could be taken. He maintained, “Any device is useful that sheds light on the otherwise unknown.” If one applies his criteria to visual design projects, it becomes clear that the greater majority is of unnecessary, repetitive, and ephemeral uselessness. It is forgettable. It is used for shifting momentary attention from the everyday-ordinary and mundane by dressing it up in visual deceptions to appear new and seemingly exotic. Yet, the purpose of information design is quite different. It is about the systemic collection of verifiable facts and data, defining the acquired knowledge so that it can become a useful and reliable tool for human use in the operational evolution of understanding of society and culture. It is never trivial.

Designers have only within the past four to five decades rediscovered “information design,” when in truth efficient visual recording and storing of complex information has been a seamless and timeless necessity, required for building reliable reservoirs of dependable information for instructing each following generation, assuring survival and cultural continuity. This makes visual information design as old as any culture or social group. It was and is produced by curious people, direct and close to the phenomena, searching for clarity in understanding the emerging paradoxes when comparing episodes observed by the community of thinkers and scientists to distinguish between peculiarities and to bring order to small or sensational spectacles. Unfortunately, visual design returns late to the table, mainly because it has no deep intellectual ambitions. Suddenly aware that its discipline is loosing respect and relevance, it nevertheless is still unwilling to invest in profession-supporting intelligence. In today’s world of economic exchange, the product is knowledge, and designers can no longer be interested in just packaging knowledge products for those who are visually unskilled. This moment in the history of design is about searching the universe for data and for inventing quality processes for synthesizing information components into useful and reliable knowledge for dissemination to the citizenry.

For this world, clambering for more sophisticated contributions from all its members, the intellectual skills of design education and practice have become tepid. Digital technologies instead of expanding design’s origiFor this world, clambering for more sophisticated contributions from all its members, the intellectual skills of design education and practice have become tepid. Digital technologies instead of expanding design’s original visualization skills have stunted them further, and they continue their downward spiral in their atrophy. The conditions are hastened by the discontinuity of visual studio skills and practices, and even more through lacks in intellectual nourishment. Schools are the culprits that instill in design practitioners notions of expediency through technology, and notoriety through charisma, rarely responsibilities to social and cultural contexts in which information must perform and in which superficial knowledge is not only useless but also endangering. At this point, information design has become mostly typographic. It is rarely graphic. Budget expediencies substitute photographic forms. Unless one believes that pie and bar charts are great graphic inventions then typographic programming and styling have become the order of the day. 

Looking at the majority of practicing designers, there seems to be an extreme lack of involvement in Looking at the majority of practicing designers, there seems to be an extreme lack of involvement in generating information. Outstanding meant in the past to stand above all others’ shoulders. But most designers are not better educated or informed than the public on any subject matter. Like the public, they only respond to the latest fads or social, political, and technological rumors, delivered in media news bytes. They are as unprepared to critically interpret and separate fads from trends or framing cultural propositions. They rarely feel self-empowered to author their own challenge to emerging conditions. Their realities are shaped by the same media that instructs every member of society, from workers to administrators. Knowing the same, not more, makes designers useless. They have become observers that do not see, communicators that hate to communicate or read and write. They hide behind the hype of contemporary technology. What makes them so indifferent to the emerging intellectual challenges and why do schools continue to foster superficiality and useless expediency, and why are they frittering away their chance to instruct society, expending energies on things that are inconsequential and not worthwhile?

As world history shows, each culture was able to give visual shape to important concepts without the help of so-called designers, framing the first inkling and dawning of understanding of newly emerging phenomena, including the unseen, mythological worlds and the placement of the human within their competitive hierarchies, and forming information resources on tools and strategies to grow food, heal the ailing, traverse ocean distances, and evolve tools of communication to foster social relationships.

The early twentieth-century Modernist promise for an increased status of designers has been fast eroding, and at the same time the public’s needs for more efficient and dependable information has drastically increased. While designers are trying to hold on to the speed-sluggish Gutenberg era, their vocation has been leapfrogged by the digital, high-speed information environment, in which many more participants from other disciplines function as information managers. The new era is not at all different from any other in human history, in that those things vital for survival will be highly regarded, while everything else is delegated to the titillating and ephemeral scrapheap of short-lived entertainment. Even if graphic and typographic styling can sharpen the intelligibility of information, in this newly emerging world, a squiggly, hand-drawn diagram may be of greater value than one that is aesthetically elaborated, if the treatment of essentials has not been enhanced or made more comprehensible through graphic design. The only difference may lie in the fact that the new technology has aided all researchers in casting finer and bigger nets. It has provided ways to follow complex developments and evolutions and, therefore, every day, information is outdating the findings from the day before. Having the ability to learn the same software applications, used by designers, researchers are also able to apply the same technologies to presenting information. One thing, however, will always stay in the realm of visual design—namely, the skills to observe and translate visual data into contextual visual information. But then again, if the information is very important, its value will not be diminished by a crude, non-design styled diagram, as long as the information is not compromised. 

A tough analysis reveals that smart managers and members of business schools and strategic think tanks continue to shape most of architecture, products to be marketed, and the corporate iconography as well—not designers. The owners and controllers of information delegate to designers the intellectually passive role of merely becoming stylistic graphic and typographic hands for their construction of information presentations. Designers are just not well enough educated to field and stimulate discipline-specific discussions. Unless they begin to critically know and understand the intellectual roots of the material for their projects, can follow various rationales, or weigh the value on equal intellectual planes of experts and information researchers, they will not be very useful in determining contents and context. They will stay in the category of beautification experts, of which there are too many.

Then, there is the dearth of talented visualisors. A four-year rudimentary design education can provide some of the skills but falls woefully short for professional scientific and information visualization. As beautification specialists, most designers are taught to be expedient in typographic and graphic styling. The field is stagnating by visualisors who have no stake in the development of the content of the information or who care about the most appropriate application to contexts. For the public, it is never about the aesthetics of type font or graphics. It is about intelligibility. It is never about graphic design, but always about communication. In the next stage of professional evolution, designers need to learn and understand that graphic design is subservient to communication and information research, synthesis and management. This must also be the directive to design educators. They must develop curricula antithetical to present modes, which properly relate to the needs of this time. Only then can the badly needed dramatic change occur—from passive graphic stylist to active communication negotiator. Each domain is caught up in coping with its own information explosion and resulting frustration. There is little time for sharing and interfacing with other disciplines. This moment in time presents the unique opportunity for designers to function as information synthesizers, intellectual content mediators between knowledge domains and disciplines as well as the public.

If design wants to revitalize its traditional mission, it must step up to support the citizens’ social needs for information in modern, democratic cultures, which automatically, evolving from autocratic and dictatorial systems with fewer truths into a more complex worlds of many but competing truths; it must be eager and want to grow beyond tradition. This completely opposite role from styling, formatting, decorating, and entertaining requires of designers new skills, like bringing concepts intellectually together, sharpening them, elaborating on philosophical or political ideas with the capability to select appropriate venues to reach designated audiences, especially those without design awareness, but with communication needs. This evolving design process is about negotiating between segments of the populace and the specific resources, held by individuals, by institutions and corporations, private, public, municipal and federal, profit and non-profit. Design will then participate in the accelerated culture instead of just seeing it pass by.

The basic foundations have been laid by many international information design experts, including Jacques Bertin, Edward Tufte, Richard Wurman and others, which in this paper are reduced to essentials, namely requiring designers to accept full responsibility for the integrity of information (not passive but active The basic foundations have been laid by many international information design experts, including Jacques Bertin, Edward Tufte, Richard Wurman, and others, which in this paper are reduced to essentials, namely requiring designers to accept full responsibility for the integrity of information (not passive but active knowledge of subject and context); expunge confusing and misleading presentation styles (eliminating mask, lipstick, and other beautification make-up, thereby stopping style from entering where fact stops); embracing the audience with respect and sympathy (as there are no general audiences but individual citizens in need of good information for their survival); reducing and eliminating data boredom by presenting the essentials only, purging the trivial, concentrating on revealing the not so obvious; and intimate collaboration with the project conceptualists, information researchers, and presentation technologists. 

A Case for Sustained, Direct and Hands-on Observation:
Information Research, Analysis, Synthesis, and Encoding

But before the eve of photography, the scientific observer and the visual recorder were one and the same. As soon as photography entered the laboratory, this seamless process was interrupted. Now, neither photographer nor graphic designer may neither have interest, affinity, or expertise in the subject matter they are presenting nor in understanding the context in which the information is used. Schools have short-changed the profession. It is easier to teach the aesthetics of styling than critical thinking. Today, the process of information seeking is made easier through digital means, but in the process continues to use the designer as a passive team-member in the data and information assembling and shaping process. A graduating design major most likely is no more informed by direct experience than any other member of society, which means they have no better information than the public. The contemporary designer seems to only go into action if there is a client request and an appropriate budget. Even then, the idea that expediency is more important than information fidelity is letting them be bystanders rather than active participants.

The invention by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) of photography, in the beginning decades of the 1800s, ushers in a distinct split between direct observation and visual recording and the “stand-in” recording by photographers. Between 1844 and 1846, William Fox Talbot (1800–1877) published The Pencil of Nature, a first book with and about documentary photography, which introduced the naïve belief, prevailing even today, that photography more accurately depicts reality, than the artist/designer as observer ever could. The photographic work of Edward Muggeridge (1830–1904), Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) fortify the vision of photography as a tool for the scientific exploration of reality. In addition, the discovery leading to the invention of the X-ray by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845–1923), a German physicist, further enshrined the use of photography as a scientific observation and recording process. Harold Edgerton (1903–1990) always considered his strobe photography as scientific, never as art. Roland Barthes, French theorist, challenged the concept that photography presents an undisturbed scientific truth, noting that the process of photography distorts reality just like any human observation, which is never neutral but guided by bias, worldview, religion, or purpose. 

In the same ways in which architect Christopher Alexander believes that the great architecture of buildings can only be accomplished by designers who stand in the middle of the social, cultural, and physical environment, surrounded by all organic information—about people, their behaviors—namely, the fully loaded aggregates of the information ecology, not just understanding, but feeling and anticipating the inherent hierarchical or organic flow, then design has to go back to direct observation, not just waiting to give shape to information, which has been assembled and authored by others. Universities should focus on specific knowledge areas and develop disciplinary concentrations for information design experts (i.e., medicine, law, hard and soft sciences, etc.). 

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Renaissance astronomer, influenced Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Italian physicist, mathematician, and astronomer, and also Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer. All three played major roles in the dawning of the Scientific Revolution, ushering in the period of European Enlightenment. All three were direct observers of the nightly firmaments, and recorded their findings in charts, diagrams, and three-dimensional mechanical working models; or, like Galileo, in beautifully rendered watercolors. Their sensitivity and skill to accurately visualize what they saw through their scopes rivaled contemporary photography. They were extraordinary information designers. 

Just to make clear the vastness of information reservoirs, encyclopedias present among the histories of disciplinary accomplishments over ancient and contemporary epochs in all cultures, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Christian, socialist, or capitalist, the astonishing work of myriad contributors to human knowledge, even if each filters the individual importance according to a cultural bias. That is why we find out from Chinese maps that the South American continent was known long before it was “discovered” by Europeans. The encyclopedic lists and numbers include about 1,700 major contributors to botany, 2,700 to zoology,   geometers who contributed to mathematics among 1,400 mathematicians; 800 were and are physicists, 750 astronomers, 500 archeologists, 100 physicians, 300 geographers and 200 cartographers, 600 sociologists, and 950 historians, among many other disciplines. 

The exact number does not really matter. What truly matters is that one culture learns from another and instructs the other, and one generation learns from the former and instructs another. It is also quite a task to do justice to all world cultures, which have labored to make sense of the universe and convey this survival knowledge to their peoples. For example, only in the middle of the seventeenth century in Europe, relatively late in comparison with Islamic alchemy, which matured into chemistry already in the first century, does Europe’s alchemy turn away from sorcery and magic to the foundations of what is Western chemistry, which began to support this vital discipline. Still, everything known is based on careful documentation, manifested in measures, frozen in processes encapsulated in drawings, charts, and graphs by the hundreds of early alchemists, now called chemists.

Each culture produced outstanding observers and thinkers. The visual recordings of Leonardo Da Vinci, a keen scientific observer and early visual and industrial designer, will always astound the historian. The medical studies by Claudius Galenus or Galen of Pergamum, a prominent Roman physician, dominated and influenced Western medical science for over a millennium, even though his research in human medical anatomy was flawed, borrowed from studies of monkeys and other animals. He erroneously believed that blood vessels originated in the liver, not the heart. It is not until Andreas Vesalius presents his seven-volume research in De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), profusely illustrated with woodcuts, in 1543, that many of the obvious errors were corrected. His studies stayed as preferred teaching tools for many centuries. Vesalius was a student both of art and medicine, studying and working in Paris, Padua, Bologna, and Basel, becoming the invited physician to the court of Emperor Charles V. 

In the hierarchy of most often published texts, The Elements of Geometry, by the Greek mathematician Euclid, who originally published it in Alexandria around 300 BC, stands close to few others at the top that have continued to influence generations of mathematicians. It has and is continuing to instruct students. But in 1847, the British mathematician Oliver Byrne presented a peculiar edition of The Elements. It concentrated on the first six volumes, covering elementary plane geometry and theory of proportions. It featured strong graphic visuals for instructions. The book is especially unusual in the instructive use of color. One can surmise that this colorful text, which presents each theorem in solid signal-color fields, may have informed the work of the Russian Suprematism movement, its founder Kasimir Malevich, and its members like El Lissitzky and Liubov Popova.

John James Audubon, nineteenth-century French-American ornithologist, left an invaluable legacy of his encounter with indigenous bird-life on the North-American continent. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, renown German humanist and man of letters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nevertheless observed the visual phenomena of color, developing independently understanding of the chromatic scale and color wheel. He influenced the color understanding of Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, and other students and faculty of the Bauhaus. 

The hand-produced diaries, recording the first overland expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1804–1806), undertaken for the United States to gain accurate information on the new resources acquired through the 1803 land purchase of the State of Louisiana from France, instructed the citizenry with rationales for opening the road to the West. The diaries of Henry David Thoreau, a nineteenth-century American author, poet, political and environmental philosopher, reveal his extraordinary skills as keen daily observer of his environment. His observational awareness is even more astonishing since he was not a “visual person,” neither designer nor artist. In comparison, while today’s artist/designers are trained to inform and instruct, they traverse their world out of awareness, in ersatz experiences, void of any critical recognition, and without greater sophistication than the public. Thoreau was able to point to the fact that a certain plant had, over seasons, morphed into a different shape, size, or color. Denis Diderot’s (1713–1784) Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry froze information on processes, materials, and methods in history, books that Shakespeare’s Prospero would have liked to have had when he was separated when shipwrecked from the rest of known civilization.

Alexander von Humboldt followed the examples set by Marco Polo (1254–1324), the Venetian merchant who introduced Europe to the rich and sophisticated cultures of Central Asia and China, Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512), Italian explorer, Vasco Da Gama (1460–1524), Portuguese explorer and Captain James Cook (1728–1779) English explorer, navigator and cartographer. On the basis of his painstakingly collected data in South America, he observed the interrelation of all physical sciences, biology, meteorology, and geology that have an inference on the growth of plants or their propagation. During their time, there was no designation that made them into scientists. They were just interested and committed individuals. They and others formed the understanding of the world by recording everything of importance, as seen through the eyes of their epochs of course. Captain James Cook, in 1769, made it possible through his contact for others to record some customs of the Maori, which make contemporary designers aware of other ways of creating social identities. In Maori tattoos, each pattern or ornament reads like a passport, making clear to any tribal member the status and rank within the tribal hierarchy, levels of skills in war and statesmanship, and social prestige and accomplishment, setting the initial stage for interpersonal conduct and etiquette. It is information design in its best form.

Even missionaries as well as the conquistadores of Maya and Inca cultures were early information gatherers and designers. They needed to bring back proof to their governmental sponsors about what was accomplished and about the size and quality of the riches they conquered and the natives they converted. Conquistadores like Hernán Cortés or Pizarro were indirectly forced to be diligent in covering anything of possible importance for their monarchs. We would not have known much about cultures and societies that contrasted with those in Europe and which since have died out. They brought back the Florentine Codex (circa 1540 to 1585), which was copied from original source materials, namely records of conversations and interviews with indigenous peoples of Tlatelolco, Texcoco, and Tenochtitlan, organized into a series of twelve volumes, and codices like it or the Codex Zouche-Nuttall or Codex Dresdensis, which help us even today to establish the parameters of these cultures. The Codex Dresdensis, a pre-Columbian Maya book of the eleventh or twelfth century of the Yucatecan Maya is believed to be the earliest known book written in the Americas. These documents are still aiding anthropologists in understanding Maya and other indigenous cultures.  

There are many examples in contemporary times. Vincent F. Luti, composer and professor of music at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, from a youthful age showed great interest in the exquisite designs of eighteenth-century gravestones by regional stone carvers of Newport, Rhode Island. Continuously, over sixty years, he took stone-rubbings and photographs, assembling an astonishingly detailed and exquisite collection of information from which the contents for his seminal text was developed. The information is so self-explaining and explicit that several design and art historians had to rewrite portions of their much more generalized presentations. His book has become a bible for archeologists because of its meticulous approach.

This means that if designers want to get back into information graphics, they must get their hands and minds dirty, observing, describing, authoring, drawing, painting, photographing, and providing text and image about the phenomena. For designers, living in a world of ephemera, in which technologies change and in which one style fad is chasing the next, the only thing lasting is the integrity of information design. Even when data become obsolete due to additions of better and more precise insights, the phenomenon of information design will always be a significant contributor to the knowledge of human evolution. Society will hold it in esteem. It is and will always be important.