[Visinfo] Reaction to Shedroff

[Zachary M. Davis]

Shedroff's article did not wow me in any sense, nor did I find it 
overly useful.  However, I think it is an important article 
nonetheless.  It seems to me that what Shedroff has set out to do, and 
more or less accomplished, is to essentially state the obvious.  He has 
taken on the (unenviable) job of sifting through the common sense of 
information and interaction design to draw out specific guidelines and 
principles.  It is for this reason that I didn't find the article 
particularly engaging--most of what Shedroff said struck me as 
obvious--but also the key to its usefulness.  The concepts that did 
grab my attention were amplified by the fact that I felt like Shedroff 
was telling me something I already knew, but had never really taken the 
time to think about.

One such example is his strict separation between information design 
and interaction design.  Because the projects I am working on for this 
class are both informational and interactive, I wasn't taking the time 
to look at them as two separate concepts, but as a single entity.  I 
think that taking a step back and looking at the two separately will 
help to improve my final outcomes.  Another example is the idea that 
designing for one medium does not imply that your only "competition" is 
within that medium--rather your competition will come from all media, 
but will be similar in scope and content.  Again, this is something 
that is "common sense", but I usually don't consider my new media 
projects as directly competing in any way with traditional media.

I had a few problems with the article, and most of them are admittedly 
nitpicky.  But for me, I simply couldn't believe that an article about 
effectively communicating information and context could be so confusing 
and ineffective.  The cube?  No idea where anything lies on those 
continuums.  The figure on Passive vs. Interactive?  There's only one 
piece of information on the whole left side of the diagram.  And in the 
final figure, I have no idea why an upside down briefcase (or is it one 
of those floaty things lifeguards carry?) is touching the keyboard.  I 
feel like he included diagrams just for the sake of having them, which, 
as Shedroff should be able to tell himself, is not an effective method 
for storytelling.

-- 
Zachary Davis
zmd at umail.ucsb.edu