Andrew (far right) and Sue (far left) with colleagues at Information Design Conference 2007
Andrew Boag and Sue Walker have been elected Co-Chairs of the Information Design Association (IDA).
Andrew Boag is founder and Director of the information design company BoagMcCann (formerly Boag Associates). He has practiced as an information designer for over 25 years – directing projects for private and public sector clients, both nationally and internationally.
Sue Walker is Professor of Typography at the University of Reading and a key member of the Centre for Information Design Research. For many years she practised as an information designer in the Reading-based consultancy, Text Matters, before embarking on a full-time academic career in the late 1990s.
The Co-Chairs will be supported by an enlarged Committee and a number of sub-groups, and it is hoped that this re-organisation will help to extend the reach of the IDA.
Sue Walker said: ‘I am delighted to be taking on the role of Co-Chair and to be working with Andrew Boag and other members of the Committee. Andrew and I represent the practitioner and academic perspectives on information design respectively, and we hope that this will make the IDA accessible to people from both communities’.
Information Design Conference 2012
Soldiers assemble in front of the Elephant of the Bastille
Breaks at last week’s Information Design Conference were enlivened by a grandstand view of the film set for Les Miserables. The conference itself needed no enlivening with papers spanning wide-ranging topics such as public communication of the impact of education on social mobility in Mexico, through the design of forms and reports for the 2011 Indian Census, right down to the detail of button placement on interactive forms. Themes included design for transport and wayfinding, design in health care, the challenges of data visualisation and historical perspectives on information design.
This last theme yielded some delightful perspectives on the work of information designers. Pia Pedersen, in a talk on the ground-breaking exhibition work of Marie Neurath in the 1940s, quoted a less than positive reaction ‘These charts just aren’t the sort scientists prepare’ and Sue Perks referred to the description of designers working on the New Exhibition Scheme for the Science Museum in the 1970s as ‘…pure tasteless communicators’. It seems that clear communication still faces some barriers in technical disciplines: in his description of studies to test the efficacy of different map orientations in navigation Thomas Porathe noted ‘Real mariners never turn the map upside down’.
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