Looking for Facts
Maybe some of you remember five years ago when the call to action for designers was the avalanche of information to come. The future would see information exponentially increasing. We would all be buried under masses of data and no way to interpret it. Designers could solve this and organize chaos into order.
The doomsday predictions were partially correct. We are buried under a mountain of information that relentlessly enters our lives. Between mobile devices and social media, we can find information on any subject, although it may not be correct. Rather than creating a culture of schizophrenia and shell shocked consumers of information, we all seem to deal with the avalanche with the answer, "so what? Yeah, I ignore most everything."
I have several books on diagrams and information design. My favorite was published in the early 1970s. The diagrams are so carefully planned and meant to be understood. The goal was to take information and make it easy to understand and digest. Today, I often see the goal to take easy to understand information and design a solution to make it seem more complex. Although I could just be getting dumber.