Sociograms
This was a study conducted by D’Efilippo to examine social networks through five case studies. This makes you think about how different people around you navigate and view different social aspects of their lives. The charts are laid out in a very intriguing fashion, as she put the individual names of the people from her life and different statistics of their social life to compare and contrast. She talks about how most social diagrams ignore the fact that data reflects the plight of people individually, and also as a whole, also using the words “abstract” and “unemotional” to describe it.
The formal choices and color choices are different shapes that are laid out in a circular fashion, that create unique blobs of different color that correspond to the individual statistic on the chart. What makes it work is the varied color choices and the information both on the individual charts per person, and the combined chart that shows all the people at once, creating a varied colored shape, as seen above in the photo.
Richard Saul Wurman
The other information designer I chose was Richard Saul Wurman. I chose him because not only did he create the TED Conference, but also has written over 90 different books, and focuses on the idea of making complex information accessible and understandable.
The work of his I have chosen is Information Anxiety, a book that lays out the concepts of people becoming overwhelmed by the many stressors of day-to-day life. He talks about the fact that humans don’t suffer from an overload of information, but from poor design of that information that is given to us. The book then talks about making that complex and stressful information more legible and accessible.
While Wurman created and laid out the idea of information architecture, D’Efilippo uses this foundation for the modern era to help visualize that information on a broader spectrum, using things like the graphs we looked at in class.
