London IA Mini 4: Max Gadney - "Information isn't beautiful"

On November 11th we held the latest in our series of London IA Mini conference evenings. The hosts were EMC Conchango and our kind sponsors were Zebra People. We had a top selection of speakers - Max Gadney, Richard Sedley, Jason Mesut and Oliver Reichenstein. Today I wanted to post some of my notes and a video clip of the talk from Max.

Max Gadney

His talk had been billed as a 'challenge' to "much of current practice in data visualisation and the wider IA discipline. Users need a bit more than just well organised data, and those practitioners just concerned with their CVs/portfolios are not helping matters".

Max cited the architectural concept of a building looking like the function it performs - the parti. Or, as the idea translates to infographics, "Where is my giant 3D image of a tank". He wants interfaces and information layouts which, when you squint at them, still convey to the reader what they are about, and he doesn't think a lot of data visualisation or 'Web 2.0' user interfaces do that.

This is, by nature, Max felt, difficult for designers and information architects. We are obsessed with details and minutiae. It is by carefully classifying the content and colour-coding it, and standardising it, and organising it, that we make the small elements of information into a coherent whole. As a result, we have a microscopic view, whereas in most cases the poor user simply wants to grasp the overall big picture.

Max also made a point that he felt a lot of information visualisation was the representation of data 'for the sake of it', rather than something that was useful. As designers, he argued, we are always making the vessels for someone else's content. When left to our own devices, we struggle to know what 'content' to put in the vessels we make. Downloading a chunk of data and playing with it gives us something to work with, even if the output is of little genuine use to the audience.

Max Gadney on why information isn't beautiful

In this clip, you can see Max explaining why he doesn't think that information is inherently beautiful.

Next...

In the next post in this series I'll have another video clip of Max Gadney, explaining how he sees the IA and the designer performing the role of 'the glass-bottomed boat' in an ocean of information.

This is one of a series of posts featuring notes and video clips from November 2009's 'London IA Mini 4' evening:

Max Gadney: "Information isn't beautiful" and "The glass-bottomed boat"


Read more articles about IA and UX events

Posted by Martin Belam, November 26, 2009    
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