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Lehrer’s book doesn’t go into as much depth with the behavioral economics, but he sprinkles some introductory neuroscience throughout that adds an interesting dimension to the material. He is also a journalist rather than a scientist, and some of his anecdotes read like excerpts from a dramatic piece of non-fiction. A pilot fights to land a stalled Boeing 737. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady makes a series of split-second decisions in the 2002 Super Bowl. A professional poker player faces off against a host of idiosyncratic rivals in Las Vegas. It all adds up to an entertaining and informative read, but I got a little lost trying to extract applicable takeaways straight from the text, and the ending felt a bit muddled and hand-wavy. It was still worth the time I spent reading it, though. I also give it bonus points for having images of ice cream cones on the front cover, leading countless hungry Americans into pursuing careers in neuroscience.

Tufte goes around the U.S. conducting seminars on information design, so presumably he directed these words at information designers, people whose primary goal is the effective communication of information. He went on to say that, in many cases, the audience knows more about the content than the designer does. For instance, designers tasked with communicating information about the federal budget to lawmakers and economists are really designing for people who (we hope) know a great deal more about the deeper meaning of all those numbers.

Respecting your audience, then, means making an effort to understand what your audience will find obvious, and what it won’t. It means using a level of explicitness that is appropriate based on that understanding, rather than assuming your audience a) can read your mind or b) has no specialized knowledge of the domain. It means using language that your audience finds familiar and mental models that it recognizes.

Don’t worry that your work will become less accessible to a general audience. There is no general audience, just as there is no such thing as a family with 2.5 children. Faced with the choice of being unhelpful to a lot of people or being helpful to a few, opt for the latter. If more than one specific audience must be addressed, figure out what each audience wants to get out of the information and create a design tailored to each.

Below are some examples of information design I found related to the federal budget. Just for fun(?), guess who their audiences are.

Death and Taxes

What does the federal budget freeze look like?

Data visualization with cookies

Budget

Federal IT Dashboard

In the article, Dr. Klass reflects on the difficulty of giving nutrition and lifestyle advice to her patients when she herself is not thin. She raises the question, is it best to get advice from people who…

• personally understand your struggles because they have a hard time following the same advice?
• no longer struggle because they’ve made their own advice work for them?
• never needed advice in the first place?

Think about it. How would the advice likely differ among these three people? Whose advice would you be most inclined to take to heart?

A quarter-long mini course I had been taking, Adaptive Service Design, has just ended. On the bright side, that means I’m only going to be taking four classes for the rest of the semester instead of five. The sad part is that it was a course with really interesting readings and classroom discussions that flowed freely, buoyed by a natural enthusiasm and curiosity that’s rare to find. This was the first time the course was taught, as well, so I feel lucky to have had the experience. For my final project, I created a service blueprint for an adaptive campus dining service, which I will discuss in greater detail in a later post.

Also this week, I finished reading an excellent book called Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink. It’s full of entertaining anecdotes about food psychology experiments conducted at Cornell, one of the most memorable being a comparison of how much soup people would eat out of a normal bowl versus a covertly self-refilling (aka bottomless) bowl. The finding: people use their eyes, not their stomachs, to gauge when they are full. I won’t give anything away, but there are some asides specifically about that study that made me laugh out loud.

I’m halfway through another book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. This book’s about choice architecture – the design of environments in which choices are made. It’s not as funny as Mindless Eating but still thought-provoking. Some of it reminds me of the material in my Information Design and Rhetoric course, the takeaway being that no design can be neutral. Beatrice Warde’s crystal goblet may be an aspiration, but it is also a mirage, ever unreachable. And since design always influences, the designer has a responsibility to influence with intent.

I mean…um… Spring break! WOooooOOooOoo!

Graduate Design Studio II featuring a semester-long team project to design a social service, sponsored by either Microsoft or Motorola (to be determined by a brief yet brutal death match on pay-per-view)

Research Methods in Human Centered Design covering a series of methods for explorative, generative, and evaluative research (my favorite to imagine: “velcro modeling”) to support the project work in Studio II

Graduate Design Seminar II reading and writing about interaction design (Will anyone top Henri Bergson for most baffling argument? Stay tuned…)

Adaptive Service Design exploring service design that leverages context-aware technology such as mobile phones, intelligent environments, and robotic products (super excited about this one!)

Information Design and Rhetoric exploring how rhetoric can provide systematic frameworks for designing information products in complex situations (more reading and writing guaranteed to blow my mind, plus two projects)

And just to prove it’s on, I’m going to stop this post now and go do some reading. Stay warm, people.

I eat food
that someone else grew.

I know the joy of music
because others shared it with me.

I know how to write
because someone else taught me how.

I have been fed, clothed, and sheltered
when I had nothing to give in return.

I have learned by the examples of others
what it means to be a good friend.

So many of life’s blessings
came without my having earned them.

So much of life’s meaning
comes from those who do not count the cost.

To all these people
who have made my life what it is:

Thank you.

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Six years into the Iraq War, we have no shortage of citizens suffering from traumatic experiences: war zone conflicts, the death of loved ones, job loss, and home foreclosure. Some people have been so affected that their everyday quality of life has declined dramatically, and perhaps for individuals, starting over with a clean emotional slate would seem a blessing. Imagine for a moment that it were possible to push a giant reset button on the collective American psyche, that with the aid of a little pill, we could wipe out all our past suffering and look into the future with vision uncolored by experience. Imagine that happened right before the 2008 election.

Tell me, exactly which lessons are best forgotten?