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…?