Information Design Sensibility
Preparing information designers for the challenging future
The project entitled Information Design Program
seeks to create an innovative educational model to prepare future innovators.
The program will need to assist the learners in developing and nurturing
a new sensibility which can turbocharged creativity in their design careers.
It thus moves away from the traditional career preparation approach to
design and experiments with alternative means of personal development.
Then goal is to develop in the person a new information sensibility
to bring to the task of design. This new sensibility combines attitudes
from various other sensibilities, specifically...
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Intellectual sensibility - the possibilities of imagination... the question
of what can be
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Aesthetic sensibility - beauty and its cultural embodiments
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Social sensibility - similar to social intelligence, with added cognitive
ergonomics
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Technological sensibility - functionally responsive forms in an ever evolving
tech context
The new information sensibility does not define creativity, but it allows
it to be engaged and expressed in the design process. The new sensibility
is an attitude towards design, a framework within which to operate in a
design context. It is not a set of techniques, nor a background of knowledge
[even though these are important in its nurturing], but rather, it is a
mindset in approaching a design task.
Some of the specific techniques that information design sensibility
subsumes [without these capturing its essence] are...
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Assumption cracking - defining the box in order to crack out of it
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Dimension sliding - up and down conceptual dimensions to overcome oppositions
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Tools generalizing - abstracting from the particular design to handling
the full class
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Trans-sensing - seeking representations in alternate sense modalities
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Relativizing - situating the design in time-space-scale
Underlying these techniques and the intellectual aspect of information
sensibility are the various realms of being that situate us in the world
and that will largely define future evolution. A well developed information
design sensibility rests on a very open mind that is constantly tuning
into various challenge spaces and that constantly challenges itself and
its creations.
Much effort remains to elucidate further the nature of information design
sensibility, but it is quite clear that is is the stuff of innovation and
must become the basis for developing and nurturing future design.
Philip Duchastel via e-mail