I returned last night from four busy days at the Design History Society’s Design Activism and Social Change conference in Barcelona. Convenor Guy Julier has a more thorough conference blog here. The conference provided a space to debate emergent themes in design activism: politics and design, ecology and design, the role of agency, reflection vs. action, the importance of the language we use, peak oil and the capacity of design to address social and environmental problems within capitalism and current forms of democracy. The event started well with Henk Oosterling’s keynote describing a movement to a philosophy of relations. Attempts to repress ontological connectedness are destructive and a role of design is now to internalise what is currently externalised in order to better reflect the essential conditions of connectedness.
Tag Archives for information design
Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom
I just posted a reply to David McCandless on his blog ‘Information is Beautiful’ on the subject of the difference between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. David made a graphic based on this heirarchy of information, and also helpfully pointed out that these ideas have been around for a while. Here is his graphic:
I responded with some thoughts and an excerpt from Robert Logan, a Canadian physicist who has just written a book called ‘What is information?’ I have not actually read it yet but intend to soon (it is not yet available). Here is an excerpt from this book that breaks down these four categories: Continue reading
EcoLabs 