Friday, June 4, 2010

A Better Jacksonville by (Information) Design: Message to AIGA JAX


In an article from EU Jacksonville, Joey Marchy, Co-Chair of AIGA Jacksonville, misses an opportunity with an argument made about the following dialogue.
[…]
“Graphic Design in the city will continue marching forward, elevate the city in ways we haven't experienced”

To which a reader responds,
[…]
“What, nicer ads being put up?”

Graphic Design or Visual Communications as some call it, can address problems in fields other than marketing, commerce or even city ambiance. What about Information Design? Take this image of London in 1954. It was drawn by physician, John Snow who had a theory about the death rates due to cholera as correlation to contaminated water from a communal pump on Broad Street. The black bars represent deaths from cholera and the dot in the middle is the Broad Street water pump. Clearly there was clustering around the suspected pump, but it was the outlying data points that revealed the answer. A woman who lived closer to different pump preferred to have water carried to her from the Broad Street pump contracted cholera. And the beer workers who lived and worked near the pump were saved because they drank almost exclusively beer and not the well water which it turns out was contaminated with sewage. Saved by great design (and possibly beer).[1]

While this story is a seminal moment in modern epidemiology it also goes to prove that graphic design is not frivolity. It saves lives and transforms our cities. As I mentioned in my previous blog post about brain drain, we need to find ways to connect people of all professions here in Jacksonville. Better design in this case can be information dense and interdisciplinary. I wonder how many Information Designers belong to AIGA Jacksonville.

Watch this lecture by Stephen Johnson explain this better than I do. Steven Johnson tours the Ghost Map | Video on TED.com

[1] Tufte, Edward R. “Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions.” Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press, 1997. 27-37

Edward Tufte is a genius of information design whose work has made a profound influence on the design of our visual world.

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