Information Design: The Understanding Discipline

There is not consensus on exactly what information design is. Definitions of the discipline from stakeholders who associate themselves with the field are consistent only in that they are typically high level, not very concrete and do not offer much in the way of direct practical application.

Knemeyer, Dirk. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Information Design

Information Ecologies

I want to try to explain how I came to think about technology and people ecologically through my interactions with reference librarians. And I want to mention some of the touchstones that led to the concept of information ecologies. In looking at the library, what struck me as an outsider and anthropologist studying the work practices of reference librarians, was first, the very congenial mix of human and technical resources. Second, I was very impressed with the way libraries are run through a very clear application of values. So, for example, values such as service to clients, cost effectiveness, the timely delivery of information, open access to information. And finally, I was really struck by the attention that reference librarians pay to the specifics of clients' situations and needs.

Nardi, Bonnie A. Library of Congress (1998). Articles>Information Design>Cultural Theory

Information Engineering for the 21st Century  

Bowie urges technical communicators to spend less time creating documentation and more time designing products that people can use intuitively.

Bowie, John S. Intercom (2003). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Usability

Information Engineering: A New Approach to Technical Communication  

Information Engineering (IE) is a revolutionary new methodology for designing and delivering information to users of technical products. To provide services that truly add value to their organizations and to their users, technical communicators must transcend the mundane tasks of creating manuals, online help systems, and training. Information Engineering replaces these activities with more proactive methods that measure, minimize, and optimize the delivery of information.

Bowie, John S. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Information Design

Information Landscapes of Ordinary Spaces in Ordinary Time  

Communication designers undergo passages of the familiar, that is, the daily engagement with a milieu of spaces: rooms, corridors, intersections, tunnels, bridges, byways, etc. These are ordinary spaces in ordinary time. Such spaces are at the core of everyday life, for they are a constant presence. This fact makes such spaces conducive to oversight, passing over as opposed to passing through. However, their familiarity does not negate their importance.

Burgos, Nate. University of Alberta (2003). Articles>Information Design

The Information Management Model  

Our grasp of single-sourcing has come a long way in the past few years. This is thanks in part to technology that makes it easier to reuse content and in part to our pundits that introduce new ideas into our community. However the practice of single-sourcing is not new. For decades other industries, such as manufacturing and software engineering, have been producing components designed to be reused in products across their companies and their industries. What we lack that has made single-sourcing successful in other domains is a common standard for the components. To reach any real measure of success, we must seek to standardize how we manage information. The Information Management Model is an idea that aims to take a step in that direction.

Hanna, Rob. STC Proceedings (2005). Articles>Knowledge Management>Information Design

Information Modeling: A Practical Approach  

Information models are a critical component of single sourcing, enterprise content management, and dynamic content management. The information model is your blueprint for the effective writing, structuring, and delivery of reusable content. This session explains how to design information models, including information product models and element models. It also explains the role of metadata and how to effectively design it.

Rockley, Ann. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Information Design>Content Management>Project Management

Information Models and XML  

The defining feature of XML is the ability to specify your own tags. Learn about what to look for in an XML information model and what a technical communicator can contribute to an XML documentation team.

Baril, France. Intercom (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML

Information Planning for Successful Online Documentation  

Creating an information plan should be the first phase of any publication development life cycle, whether hard copy or online. The plan is a tool for reporting the results of your research about your audience, their tasks, the market, and the product. The plan presents the basic organization and content of the publications you intend to build, effectively directing the documentation team to produce a publication with very specific goals in mind.

Stevens, Dawn M. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Information Design>Management>Documentation

Information Process Reengineering  

Information process reengineering means making fundamental changes to how you create, maintain, deliver, and distribute information so that you meet business objectives. It is not simply incorporating new tools or technologies into a current information development and distribution environment. The changes made as a result of reengineering are much broader and more significant; they are revolutionary. The phases you move through as you reengineer are not revolutionary. In fact, to many the phases are quite familiar: design, pilot, refine, roll out. It’s not how you approach reengineering but rather what you end up with when you’re done that revolutionizes your business.

Currie, Cynthia C. and Thomas J. Vallone. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Information Design>Workflow

An Information Retrieval Using Conceptual Index Term For Technical Paper on Digital Library

This paper presents a method for semantic Information Retrieval(IR) which is implemented on Digital Library. It is well known that Digital Library should have the IR system that user may automatically access every kind of media from anywhere. However, no improvement is made for the retrieval errors based on individual differences of user's request. This is one of the significant problem for the searching efficiency of IR. Our approach does not use the request itself but the concepts. This makes it possible to retrieve semantic information not merely to compare with the word strings of the request.

Horii, Chinatsu, Masakazu Imai and Kunihiro Chihara. ISRDP in Digital Libraries (1997). Articles>Information Design>Semantic>Search

The Information Revolution

Nobody is offering courses in how to prepare hypermedia, nor are there a large number of jobs available for hypermedia authors. As we begin to come up against the limits imposed by the volume of existing knowledge, we will eventually be forced to place more importance on managing our information explosion.

Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (1988). Articles>Information Design>Hypertext

Information Specialists at the Intersection of Information Architecture and Usability

Discusses the intersection of information architecture (IA) and usability.

Head, Alison J. Florida State University (2001). Articles>Information Design>Usability

Information, Architecture, and Usability

What is the relationship between information architecture design and usability engineering? This is a loaded question, and I wade into dangerous waters by addressing it, but the answer has significant implications for a variety of audiences.

Morville, Peter. Semantic Studios (1999). Articles>Information Design>Usability

The Inmates are Running the Asylum

The classic rules of business management are rooted in the manufacturing traditions of the industrial age. Unfortunately, they have yet to address the new realities of the information age, in which products are no longer made from atoms but are mostly software, made only from the arrangements of bits.

Cooper, Alan. Cooper Interaction Design (2004). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design

Innovation in Classification

This article addresses two aspects of classification: innovation and faceted classification. Includes links to additional online resources involving classification.

Merholz, Peter. PeterMe (2001). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

An Integrated Approach for a Model Based Document Production and Management

The primary aim of the research presented in this paper is to provide pragmatic solutions to the problems of integrity and consistency of document based information, describing a building throughout its life cycle. The research demonstrates the computer-aided generation of project documents via a construction project data model. The first research activity involved the development of a Construction Project Reference Model (CPRM) and a Document Reference Model, from which various Applied Document Type Models can be derived. The work concentrated on the French Full Specification Document: the CCTP (Cahier des Clauses Techniques Particulières), which is generated during the detail design stage. A generic Association Model was developed and used to index the CPRM’s concepts to the CCTP’s documentary elements supporting their description. Finally, the mechanisms enabling the generation of the project CCTP from the proposed structured reference CCTP are described.

Rezgui, Yacine and Philippe Debras. ITcon (1996). Articles>Document Design>Information Design

Integrating Content Management with Portals: Meeting Enterprise Information Needs  

Effective communication is a top priority for most businesses. To help create, manage, and access information that is used to conduct e-business, technologies such as content management (CM) and enterprise information portals (EIP) are dominating IT and CIO discussions. We will review how these rapidly evolving technologies come together to provide benefits for enterprise implementers. Given the historical deployment of these technologies, many associate the application of content management solutions to externally facing sites, serving transactional e-business needs; and the application of portals to internally facing sites for general employee access to a wide range of information sources and applications. However, both technologies can provide support for the complete information lifecycle, from information creation to management to delivery.

CAP Ventures. Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Content Strategy

Integrating Information Architecture into Your Information Development Processes  

The most critical and time-consuming aspect of your decision to adopt information architecture as a backbone of your information development process might not be the adoption of new guidelines or tools, but moving the mindset and culture of the organization so that it can operate effectively in the new paradigm. Using examples from real experiences, the authors of this paper describe the organizational 'culture shock' that can occur when a team or organization moves to an information-architected model for content delivery--the likely pitfalls and some ways to overcome them.

Kowalski, Lee Anne, Andrea Ames, Michelle Corbin and David McCaleb. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Information Design>Workflow

Integrating Partner Information Using XML and XSL  

BMC Software Inc., a company that writes utility tools for database administrators, wanted to reuse the error messages from partner database companies. Having learned that two of these database companies already used single-source files for their error messages, BMC Software integrated the information about the error messages from the database companies. We accomplished our goal by negotiating with our partner companies for the source files of the error message information. This session discusses how we took those source files and modified them to create simple XML files, then transformed them into HTML using XSL transforms within a product.

Gentle, Anne. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

Interactive and Animated Pictures: Mere Visual Stimulation or Better Clarity?  

Digitalisation has revolutionised the creation and editing of graphics, and ushered in new forms of technical communication on the visual plane. In online documentation, interactive illustrations and animations play an important role, but creating them is definitely time consuming and expensive. But is all the effort really worthwhile? Are animated and interactive images automatically also self-explanatory? Or what are their didactic benefits?

Ballstaedt, Steffen-Peter. tekom (2006). Articles>Information Design

International Information Architecture

There are all sorts of idiosyncratic reasons why information architects should reach across borders.

Morville, Peter. Semantic Studios (2004). Articles>Information Design>International

Interview with L.J. Haravu  

An interview with the senior manager of Library and Document Services for the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics.

Kudesia, Saurabh. International Journal for Technical Communication (2007). Articles>Interviews>Information Design

Interview with Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville

An O'Reilly interview with Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld about their book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, their work, and the field of information architecture.

Hill, Scott. O'Reilly and Associates (2000). Articles>Information Design>Interviewing