Enough is enough…

… it’s the reaction I often have when overwhelmed with information.  The upside of technology -- especially the internet -- is it’s ability to recall at will a virtual “horn of plenty” of information.  Whatever the subject, whatever the interest, the internet brings instant access to a virtual storehouse of information, from across the country and around the globe.  If it exists, it’s likely been stored in some digital file, and as such available for inquiring minds.  But most upsides have a downside or two, and information accessibility is no exception.  When you can access piles upon piles of data, that’s all you really have… piles and piles of data.  The downside of access is often understanding, or more specifically, the lack of it.

To demonstrate how illusive understanding can be in this sea of content, I Googled the word ‘simplicity’.  In .06 seconds it returned 69 million hits.  I thought if I condensed it more, to the keyword ‘simple’, that would help,… but in fact it returned over 1 billion references.  How is anyone supposed to make sense out of all of this information available to them, unless they have a lifetime to waste?  There is clearly an opportunity for more advanced search engines, getting better every day (if they could only read our minds to know what we’re really looking for…), as well as the interface design – how to make all this information useable, how to make all this information understandable.

This brings me to a recent interest of mine, information architecture, and how to best represent information visually.  I was prompted by reviewing some of the great work of Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher.  He’s developed a number of visualization tools that can make sense out of vast amounts of raw data -- my kind of guy.  One technique, called a treemap, uses mathematical algorithms to analyze large data sets in real time, and represent meaningful interpretations as visual images.  One example of this technique is a newsmap(www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm) which references the Google News aggregator to feed an ‘at a glance’ view of world media.  Color and scale are used to show how current (time) and pervasive (volume) published news stories are across subjects and/or geographies.  It allows you to quickly understand macro-level patterns of newsworthiness,… something you could never get, even if you read all the major papers each day.

You can get even more powerful insights when multiple data sets are related to each other visually.  For example, where stock prices are linked to blog traffic or news events,… or where on time shipment performance is tagged to product choices or weather patterns.  It’s the ability to gain a higher order of understanding from piles of data, that make information truly valuable.  Individuals could benefit from this, but team work literally requires it.  A team’s challenge is to develop what we call a ‘shared mind’ or shared understanding.  It happens by making everyone’s thoughts on a subject visible for all to see. And building on those thoughts with external references too.   Then the dance begins,… to compare ideas, to vote and prioritize, to combine themes in different ways, and, ultimately,  to create new knowledge.  As Richard Saul Wurman says in his book Understanding, “The goal of conversation is understanding between the participants.  Successful visual communication design can be defined as frozen conversation, much as wonderful architecture is referred to as frozen music”.

My fear is that the world’s ability to create new sources of information, is outstripping our ability to find the information we need, or have it presented in a way that we can quickly gain understanding and perspective.  In his book  Ambient Findability, Peter Morville (University of Michigan’s  School of Information) refers to this gap as information literacy, “a set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use effectively the needed information”.  The challenge is greater for a team, which includes individuals, both face-to-face and virtual, all with varying levels of information literacy.  I’m a firm believer of the old adage, a picture is worth a thousand words — and so I see visual communication as a big way out of this dilemma.  And the next step is work environments that appropriately display (in scale and context) these visual representations,… as well as tools/software (e.g., digital whiteboards) that allow new ideas to be created and connected to these,… for team understanding, and a shared mind.  How’s your literacy…?

Comments

[Mark Greiner]

Joe,… I feel your pain. Steelcase has not made it easy over the years for home office workers to buy their products,… but that is rapidly changing. Visit http://store.steelcase.com/ and see where we are headed. It just has seating today,… but shows you how easy we intend to make it for many other products as well.

[Joe Katzman]

I'll add a Steelcase-related point re: information and simplicity - one that underlines the point that clarity changes depending on which side of the fence you're on.

Let's say you're one of the growing number of home office workers. You want a good ergonomic workstation setup or cart to work at. Steelcase is known to you as one of the designers of innovative workspace places that "snap together" and are mobile. You don't need to bring the workgroup together, but the mobile aspect is nice and so is the idea of a better way of working.

Your challenge... go on the Steelcase site and find appropriate equipment, quickly, working to figure out what might be suitable and where to find it online. For maximum fun, try the same exercise at Haworth, Herman-Miller, and AFC.

[Joe Katzman]

You've read Bill Jensen's excellent book "Simplicity," which takes an in-depth look at this idea from a work performance point of view and offers some useful ideas and guidelines. This isn't just a problem for Google... it's a major productivity drain in most workplaces.

I have no affiliation with Bill Jensen, except that I recommend his work highly. See:http://www.simplerwork.com/

[Harsha Kalapala]

The newsmap of www.marumushi.com truly is amazing. Shows once again, how productive you can get with algorithms..

I use it as my homepage now..

[Patrick]

My fear about information is not the sheer volume, rather how it is managed or presented to us. One would think that nowadays information is more of a pull- oriented tool rather than a push-oriented one. But we must not lose sight of the fact that we live in a world in which the planet's leading search engine finds it perfectly acceptable to offer a highly censored version of their powerful tool to the largest communist government on Earth, thus enabling the continued deception of over a billion human beings. And a slew of folks are making tons of money from this.

Not really the kind of organization that I would want to get my news feeds from...