Centre for Information Design Research

Alison Black and Matthew Lickiss accompanied colleagues Kelsey Mulder, Andrew Charlton-Perez and Rachel McCloy, from the University of Reading’s Meteorology and Psychology Departments to a workshop on Volcanic Ash Forecasting at the Royal Academy of Engineering. This was part of CIDR’s collaboration on a multidisciplinary research project, RACER, on the communication of the risk and and uncertainty of extreme weather events.

Those who remember the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010 might imagine that both government and the airline industry are keen to have better tools to measure and predict the presence of ash in order to safely manage the impact of future eruptions on air travel.

During the workshop we ran a small study (see illustration), looking at professionals’ responses to some of the different representations of volcanic ash distribution that are available currently. Some of the data from this study are to be presented at the European Geosciences Union 2016 General Assembly in April.

More details of the workshop’s findings can be found here.

In October last year CIDR hosted an EU funded workshop, Reading to do. As an introduction to the workshop, each participant brought along examples of printed and electronic documents they had used recently in order to carry out a task or make a decision. This video presents an edited version of participants’ presentations of their documents. The presentations highlight some of the pleasures and frustrations of using information that is provided to support people in everyday tasks.

The Face Forward conference on typography was held at the beautiful campus of the Institute of Technology in Dublin over two days last week. CIDR member Keith Tam presented his work on Chinese–English bilingual document design. Keith gave an overview of the issues at hand when designing bilingual documents for selective (as opposed to continuous, narrative) reading. He then went on to discuss his studies investigating how people use different spatial patterns of bilingual documents and introduced a study he is planning currently to examine how monolingual and bilingual readers search for information in bilingual documents.

(Keith’s followers on Facebook will know of his striking photos of the University of Reading campus. Now extended, above, to the Dublin Institute of Technology Grangegorman campus.)

Some of the resources developed by Jeanne-Louise Moys for systematically testing readers’ impressions of typographic layout

Jeanne-Louise Moys’s doctoral research features in Design Week’s recent post on ‘Searching for new perspectives in typography’. Design writer Rick Poyner highlights some of Jeanne-Louise’s early findings and their implications for typographic research and practice. When Jeanne-Louise started her research there was a substantial body of studies looking at how choice of typeface – and typeface ‘personality’ – affected people’s perceptions of documents. In her Phd (completed in 2012) Jeanne-Louise looked at a much wider range of typographic variables than just choice of typeface; for example, how much variation there was in type size or style within a page. She found such variables influenced people’s perceptions in quite systematic ways. Rick suggests that more research is needed to extend the application of Jeanne-Louise’s work to different typographic materials. That’s underway, with Jeanne-Louise’s further research already published in Visible Language and other projects by CIDR researchers well on their way to publication.