Some of CIDR’s work will be presented today at Aalto University’s annual day seminar, Visualising Knowledge. Alison Black will start the day with a talk, Representing technical information for everyday communication, which will be based on CIDR’s recent work in information design to improve healthcare processes and to communicate meteorological forecasts.
Congratulations to the editors of the newly published book Design for Health, Emmanuel Tsekleves and Rachel Cooper of Lancaster University’s design-led research centre ImaginationLancaster. The book forms part of Routledge’s series Design for Social Responsibility (edited by Rachel Cooper). It includes chapters by CIDR authors Sue Walker (reviewing the current and historical contribution of typography & information design to health communication) and Alison Black (an information design case study of work with renal specialists at Royal Berkshire Hospital to design documentation to support treatment of acute kidney injury).
Our first set of materials, communicating climate and soil moisture forecasts, is ready for field testing in Northern Ghana. This is a first design outcome of one of our collaborative projects with meteorologists, funded by NERC, who are drawing together data on climate and land surface in order to provide improved seasonal forecasts for soil moisture. The project, ERADACS (Enhancing Resilience to Agricultural Drought in Africa through improved Communication of Seasonal Forecasts), has set out not only to improve forecast skill but to ensure forecasts are communicated in the most usable way to people making decisions about what crops to plant and when to plant them. The project is in partnership with the Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and NGO, Evidence for Development. University of Reading brings expertise in modelling climate and weather, satellite derived observations of rainfall from the TAMSAT group, a tradition of agricultural extension research and, from the perspective of information design, a heritage of investigating the most accessible ways of communicating new information.
As field work gets underway we are conscious of the work in the 1950s of the Isotype Institute. Marie Neurath worked with local communities in West Africa, developing visual educational materials, initially about the constitutional impact of independence and subsequently to support public education campaigns regarding health and farming.
Today the Dementia Guide for Carers and Care Providers, the product of a collaboration with Health Education England Thames Valley, goes national at the Dementia 2020 conference, Royal Society of Medicine, London.
The guide can be downloaded from Amazon for Kindle, and is available from iTunes and iBooks store.
For some years now we have been working with healthcare professionals on research projects relating to dementia care, from which one output was the Handbook for Dementia Carers developed with Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust, to meet the information needs of carers in the Berkshire West region. Launched in 2014, it was subsequently adapted for use in the Essex region by Essex Healthwatch. More recently, we worked with Health Education England Thames Valley, to create app and ebook versions to extend the handbook content to professional as well as family carers.
The publicity materials for the conference exhibition stand (shown above) were prepared by Part 3 students in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, Francesca Britton and Alice Watkins.
Dear how to, week 17
Dear how to, week 7
Dear how to, week 19
We’re thrilled to announce that CIDR doctoral researcher, Josefina Bravo is part of the Dear How To team who won the Jury Prize and a Gold Award in Didactics at this year’s IIID awards. Dear How To is a team of three graduates of our MA Information Design programme: Josefina, Sol Kawage and Tomoko Furukawa.
Joan Zalacain, another of our MA information design graduates, and Rami Kilani (Zalacain Wayfinding & Overhaul Jordan) received the Gold Award in Future Concepts for their work on the Qibla Mecca Smart Wayfinding System
Congratulations to all winners!
CIDR is delighted to announce the publication of Information design research and practice, a Gower book published by Routledge. The editors, Alison Black, Paul Luna, Ole Lund and Sue Walker have had the pleasure of working with leading academics and practitioners internationally, and they welcome Erik Spiekermann’s comments in the book’s Foreword:
This book provides 750 (expertly designed) pages to show just how complex and multifaceted the history, the methodology, and the practice of information design are. I am very happy that our discipline has finally come of age and that we now have our own bible to prove it.
Information design research and practice is highly-illustrated in full-colour and contains 49 chapters in four sections: historical perspectives; theoretical approaches; cognitive principles and practical applications.
The Sign Design Society and Information Design Association are organising an evening ‘Talkfest’ in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication on 7 December. Starting at 5 p.m., a tour the Department’s collections will be followed by a series of 10 minute talks, and opportunities for socialising too.
More details can be found at the Sign Design Society’s website.
Jeanne-Louise Moys, third from left, with Penny Mordaunt MP to her right
CIDR member, Jeanne-Louise Moys, met with MP, Penny Mordaunt, Minister for Disabled People, who visited University of Reading yesterday to learn more about the University’s Breaking Down Barriers project. Breaking Down Barriers aims to embed inclusive design in the University’s teaching and learning. Jeanne-Louise brings a focus on access to information to the wide ranging research expertise of the team.
‘The science is hard, the communication is also hard, actually; the policy making is also extremely hard.’ This is how Sir Mark Wallport, summed up the challenge of communicating and decision-making, given the complexity of the science behind weather and climate. He was addressing the PURE (Probability, uncertainty and risk in the environment) Network at a showcase event at the Natural History Museum, on 13 September.
We have been working on one strand of the PURE Network’s activity, RACER (Robust assessment and communication of environmental risk) and produced the quick guide, shown above, to remind people communicating data, particularly probabilistic and uncertain data, of some basic aspects of information design. Survey research carried out with weather and climate scientists while preparing the guide found that, although most respondents were aware of the recommendations in the guide, they said they often failed to follow them. They felt the guide would be useful both as a memory jogger for themselves and for trainee scientists.
The full guide can be downloaded from the PURE Network website.
Alison Black and Sue Walker are chairing a session on Effective information design at the Design Research Society’s 50th anniversary conference in Brighton. The session, on Thursday 30 June, includes papers on topics ranging from data visualisation to the design of apps to support healthcare. Those who are unable to attend the conference can access the papers in the conference proceedings. We’re looking forward to the wide range of papers and events throughout the conference.
Postscript We were delighted by the attendance at the event and our audience’s engaged questions. Sue Walker has also reported on it here.
