Information by design: the design of content

Jenny Darzentas

University of the Aegean

Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering

Information by design…

• Implied :”Not by chance” and “don’t start from scratch’’

• Deliberate composing and labeling of content to achieve greater accessibility

• Accessibility applied to content so as to achieve the continuum – accessible- usable- meaningful

The problem space• New ways of working and living in the Information Age:

– Moving towards everything online and all connected (accessing and using information and making meaning from it )

– Interacting with information and “content” (as opposed to asking people to filter and mediate the content for us)

– Pulling down information and content, having them being pushed at us.

– Difficult to stay out (“students expected to inform themselves”) e-participation

– Nature of material: moving from static text and graphics to rich media (videos etc.)

– Moving from passive consumers to active producers

More specifically…

• Making sure that content can be accessed -meaning apprehended –

• Using a variety of devices (cross media issues from display and play – usability)

• And what if the e content is ….. gobbledygook?

• I want to talk about “access to meaningful content”

On Gobbledygook…

• Maury Maverick, Sr. hated bureaucratic jargon. Overseeing factory production during World War II, he sent out a famous memo (March 1944)  "Memoranda should be as short as clearness will allow... Stay off the gobbledygook language. It only fouls people up. For the Lord’s sake, be short and say what you’re talking about."

• Later, Maverick would explain that a turkey's gobble must have been part of his inspiration.

Gobbledygook as exclusion

• a nurse commenting on a baffling memo. She said:

• “receiving information in this form makes us feel hoodwinked, inferior, definitely frustrated and angry, and it causes a divide between us and the writer.”

A solution: Plain Language Movement

Al Gore presented 2 “No gobbledygook” awards in 1998, saying:– “..Plain language helps create understanding,

and understanding helps create trust. And trust - especially trust in the promise of self-government - is essential to solving the common problems we face."

Accessible text – plain language

President Clinton signed an Executive Memorandum in June 1998 directing agencies to:

1. write any new document that tells the public how to get a benefit or comply with a requirement in plain language by October 1, 1998;

2. write all new government regulations in plain language by January 1, 1999;

3. revise all existing letters and notices into plain language by 2002.

The goal was to make government :– “more responsive, accessible, and understandable

in its communications with the public. . . . Plain language saves the Government and the private sector time, effort, and money"

Plain language • It has concentrated on removing the

“legalese”, • Recommends using active voice, directing

document at reader “You” and layout (typography and graphic design principles)

• Has its limits…– User testing…?– Readability formulas (English language)– What about informal content, content that is

abstract, or technical (“dumbing down”) e.g. medical information

– Heavily text based… what about multimedia?

Playing around with special effects…

• Web designer Tim Guay wrote as early as 1995 about the inherent pitfalls of applying multimedia content to websites:

• If multimedia is used with no thought as to the reasons why it is being used, or it has poor lay-out or content it can result in a pointless aesthetic fiasco that needlessly hogs bandwidth.

Time to go content centric (again)• This is not new idea… the WAI saw three roles,

– Content, (WCAG) – authoring tools – user agents (tools)

• And the WCAG 1.0’s 14 guidelines included technology free recommendations such as– “ensure that documents are clear and simple”

• WCAG 2– “understandable” (“readable”, along with

“predictable”, and “input assistance”)

Why now?• Information age dominated by content and content

related industries

• Posited by French philosopher, Lyotard 1979 “le savoir” would be the commodity of the post industrial epoch

• Bill Gates: “content is king” prediction (1996) coming to fruition

• In commercial settings the explosion of Content Management Systems (CMS)

• The increase in proportion of personal content (and user generated content) on the internet Odlyzko, 2000

Who else? Information Designers • Information designers: who are they?

– Those with a focus on technical communication (historically from HCI)

– Those with a background in graphics and so interested in the interplay between words and pictures (visual design of information)

– Those interested in web based information (its production, transmission, consumption and archiving) = Information Architects

• ..many others who work in and research on “communicating content”

• Design competitions for (Communication products)

Designing content

• Looking at what has been done in other areas and drawing in experience and methods/ methodologies in the service of content,

• e.g. in simplistic pragmatic way

• Content composition

• Content labeling

‘Composing’ content

• Not so much ‘authoring’, or ‘creating’, but composing in the sense of ….assembling

• Composing content by firstly understanding language use:– Language-in-use: discerning intention and

meaning• Studies of discourse, • Rhetorical Structure Theory

Rhetorical Structure Theory

• A functional theory of text organisation

• Offers an explanation of the coherence of text

• For every bit of coherent text, there is some function, some plausible reason for its existence

• An example of nucleus and its relations

RST worked example

1) Farmington police had to help control traffic recently2) when hundreds of people lined up to be among the first

applying for jobs at the yet -to-open Marriott Hotel.3) The hotel's help-wanted announcement - for 300 openings -

was a rare opportunity for many unemployed.4) The people waiting in line carried a message, a refutation, of

claims that the jobless could be employed if only they showed enough moxie.

5) Every rule has exceptions,6) but the tragic and too-common tableaux of hundreds or

even thousands of people snake-lining up for any task with a paycheck illustrates a lack of jobs,

7) not laziness.

Uses of RST

• RST is intended as a tool to analyse texts, rather than create them

• Gives us an overview of the “building blocks” used in communication” e.g. nucleus and satellites and relations between them

• Has been used for many other things, text generation, text summarisation…analysis of explanations, of narrative

RST and accessibility…• Its use as a tool for guiding the creation of text equivalents.• Text equivalents are hard to do. Do you describe the picture

and the information it displays, or do you describe the function the picture plays (picture of Azolimnos Bay, Syros /photo of picturesque Azolimnos Bay, showing a sandy beach with two man made promontories with bathing ladders.

• This problem is becoming increasingly harder with new genres of layout from linear to boxed inserts and sidebars…some of which contain images/graphics

• By analysing images that occur in written discourse and see whether they are illustrative or integral. (integral not meaningful without them)

• Understand what function they are performing, and make sure that textual equivalent fulfills that role

• Does the equivalent have to be textual (sound of sea and happy people ) (travel shows)…olfactory interfaces…?

Labelling content: Metadata• A metaphor for this might be: the label on

a can– What is in it, – How it should/can be used, – Who is it good for

• What is it?• Where is it?• Can I interact with it ?• Presentation, device and time ?

Metadata (Wikipedia)

• “Metadata is structured, encoded data that describe characteristics of information-bearing entities to aid in the identification, discovery, assessment, and management of the described entities”

(American Library Association, Task Force on Metadata Summary Report, June 1999)

More simply put

• What is it?

• Where is it?

to

• Quality of Service metadata (display synchronisation of audio and visual streams, etc. ,

Metadata for accessibility

• But metadata can be oriented towards people- – To their preferences– To the devices they use– To the context (time and place) they are using

data

– The goal being “adaptable content”

How do we mark up (our personal) content..

• Automatically, e.g. Microsoft word (author, date created)

• Manually and deliberately, naming our files and putting them in folders… taking pictures and putting labels on them

• Collectively: folksonomies

• Not at all – use retrieval tools to find keywords, to find dates, keep only one item or group of items on a hard disk

• (people’s organisational abilities vary: – tools to support this, e.g. narration to find missing

files, folders etc)

These are just two aspects…

• There are others (user centred)– Studies of users/consumers of content (HCI,

information design)) ….. Of reader and audience reception (fiction and theatre)

• New Literacies

The new literacies..

• Moving from the 3 Rs (reading writing and arithmetic to

• Information literacy/media literacy (understanding messages couched in various types of meda and mixtures of media)

• Education not just in digital (e.g. technology literacy) but in understanding how messages are crafted and how they persuade..

• Medical literacy

Looking at specific application areas• e.g. Online journalism• takes into account the complexity of choice

available, responsiveness to the user, facilitation of interpersonal communication and ease of adding information (Deuze, 2003).

• As a result journalists, as professional content creators, have moved from broadcast for passive reception to creating multimedia experiences that their target audiences can interact with, by offering content, links to other stories, the ability for the audience comment and as well to contribute their own accounts of events for broadcast.

• As we now know from our recent Web 2.0 exposure, such perspectives on interactivity are not unique to that domain.

Cultural studies: Popular content:what can we learn?

• The Eurovision Song Contest

• The Contest has been broadcast every year since its inauguration in 1956 and is one of the longest-running television programmes in the world.

• It is also one of the most-watched non-sporting events in the world

with audience figures having been quoted in recent years as anything between 100 million and 600 million internationally.

• Eurovision has also been broadcast outside Europe to such places as Australia, Canada, Mexico, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Jordan, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, Vietnam, and the United States, despite the fact that these countries do not compete.

• Since the year 2000, the Contest has also been broadcast over the Internet with more than 74,000 people in almost 140 countries having watched the 2006 edition online.

• Popular Communication The International Journal of Media and Culture

• Special Issue: Euro Visions: Culture, Identity and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest

• ‘Why is the Eurovision Song Contest Ridiculous? Exploring a Spectacle of Embarrassment, Irony and Identity’ by Stephen Coleman

• ‘“In the End, Germany will Always Resort to Hot Pants”: Watching Europe Singing, Constructing the Stereotype’ by Myria Georgiou

• ‘The After-Life of Eurovision 2003: Turkish and European Social Imaginaries and Ephemeral Communicative Space’ by Miyase Christensen and Christian Christensen

• ‘Wild Dances and Dying Wolves: Simulation, Essentialization, and National Identity at the Eurovision Song Contest’ by Catherine Baker

• ‘On the Couch with Europe: The Eurovision Song Contest, the European Broadcast Union and Belonging on the Old Continent’ by Cornel Sandvoss

Principal arguments• Accessibility of content: a continuum of accessible- usable-

meaningful• To achieve those attributes content needs to be deliberately crafted

(this is nothing new)• What is new are new ways of creating, transmitting receiving and

storing content Web 2.0 mode..from brochure ware to interaction, from text based to rich media

• And our world is content centric (it always was), but now there is more of it, and we are expected to inform ourselves, and participate

• Many people engaged in content creation both professional and non professional (user generated media)

• Time to learn from them and to use the theme of content design to draw in this work (some people also trying to make it a discipline -Information Design)

• Three main aspects of content design: what can be inferred about the context of use of content, what we know about cognitive abilities of humans to interact with content and constraints upon content by technical considerations

• Examples of drawing in useful work : content in terms of composition and labelling.