Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

Category: Design Discourse

  • SIGraDI 2012

    I will be giving a keynote presentation at SIGraDI 2012 conference in Fortaleza in the middle of November and I am looking forward to that.

    It has been quite a while I visited northern Brazil for a conference. I was presenting on the 1st Software Design Conference in Campina Grande, Paraiba, in 1996. The Internet was a pretty new thing at that time. A lot has changed in the past sixteen years. The Internet and the World Wide Web were still pretty new things in many places of the world. There ware barely 0.5 million internet users in Brazil at that time — and now there are well over 50 million. I was introducing »Interface Design« and applied that to the new activity of Web Design. Websites have been very simple things at that time that basically anyone could do professionally in almost no time by just following some basic common sense principles. There was no CSS, no dynamic manipulation of HTML with JavaScript and web layouts were done by abusing tables with invisible borders. Since that time everything has matured: the technology, the standards, the design know-how, the business and the educational agendas.

  • Hot Topics in Information Design

    I have accepted to work for the Information Design Journal as Special Interest Editor.

    I want to think in the open about this:

    What is a “hot topic” anyway?

    In my view there are four criteria for any topic to be “hot”:

    1. the news value
    2. actuality
    3. amount of discussion in the community
    4. touching “high-level aspects”

    The news value

    The news value is a very hard to identify aspect. Some topics may be news to some and outdated to others. There is no “topic map” that shows the age of topics – hardly even an identified list yet (while there is a list of research fields and areas of expertise). So the news value pretty much comes down to a statistical evaluation of demand and interest in certain topics.

    Actuality

    In contrast to news value the actuality can also be high for older topics that have regained some attention recently. It can also be interesting, because it is reflecting about new developments and “game changing” or disruptive topics.

    Amount & intensity of discussion

    To define “amount of discussion” one needs to look at two things: the quantity of participation (e.g. the postings in discussion forums and mailing lists) and the level of dissent above consensus. Both values are hard to track.

    Touching high-level aspects

    Any submission in the “hot topic” section should focus on the identification and reflection about the topic itself — and its location in the overall topology of topics. So the direction of a submission should be “looking from inside out” or trying to define a bird’s eye view onto the subject.

    Possible candidates

    I went through some monographs, magazines, conference sites and journals and tried to identify an initial list of hot topics. This list is nothing more than a starting point – a first step.

    • Multi-touch user interface design
    • Making sense of the mobile technology
    • Visualizing complex matters
    • Visualization as political propaganda
    • Open government
    • Aligning sound and visuals in UI
    • Improving public transport
    • Intercultural communication

    More steps will follow and this list will change.

    Do you think there is a “hot topic” not in this list? I am constantly collecting material — do not hesitate to e-Mail or twitter-message me.