What is information design?

Abstract

INTRODUCTI‘ON STC’s Special Interest Group on Information Design was founded in 1997. A scant 3 years later, it has over 2,700 members. That astonishing and rapid growth is testimony to the widespread interest in the topic and is deeply gratifying to those of us who have thought of ourselves as information designers for many years. What do those 2,700 SIG members mean by information design? As Beth Mazur says about plain language in her article in this issue, “Ask 10 people and you’ll get 10 different answers.” In part, the differences in those answers may reflect the backgrounds of the people answering the question. Information design, like many other aspects of technical communication, draws on many research disciplines and many fields of practice, including anthropology and ethnography, architecture, graphic design, human factors and cognitive psychology, instructional design and instructional technology, linguistics, organizational psychology, rhetoric, typography, and usability.