Information Architecture: January 2005

Machine Shop Safety Information System

Now that we have completely deconstructed the game of baseball, it’s time for a new challenge.

Our project for the remainder of the quarter is to design an information system for the Savannah College of Art and Design machine shops. This topic is not only complex but also extremely important, and is close to my own heart. Let the intensity begin…

Project goals:
-Visualize scale and understand the importance of visual references and comparisons
-Use visual and semantic hierarchical elements to effectively to accommodate different levels of understanding
-Employ a balance of visual and statistical data to accurately inform the user
-Create an accurate, appropriate, and flexible visual system
(adapted from Jon Kolko’s project brief)

Project constraints:
-Comply with any relevant OSHA restrictions
-Include safety, operational, and material information as necessary
-Allow for the easy incorporation of additional system elements as machinery is added, taken away, or changed.
-The system is not limited to 2-dimensional signage.
-We have slightly less than 5 weeks to complete thorough research, iterative design, and refinement of this information system.

As our client introduced the project, I noted some topics that instantly came to mind:
-FEAR is a huge element of shop work / safety
-Explore using sex appeal to get the message across – people feel unattractive in safety glasses
-Drive the reality of an injury home to those that have not experienced one in the shop
-There are methods of use specific to Gulfstream that may not be wide-spread methodologies
-What is more important – what TO do, or what NOT to do?

Concept Map Design Semantics

Today Bob Fee, one of our most fabulous professors here at SCAD, invited me to attend his Design Semantics class. He planned to ask the class to decipher my Baseball Concept Map from a Design Semantics point of view. Although we didn’t have enough class time to do the interpretation, he came back after class to give me his expert opinion. Here are some of his comments:

The viewer’s eye is drawn to Home Plate because of the high amount of detail and color in the area. It appears to be the most important area of the map.
The use of arrows and outlines are idioms; that is, most people regardless of experience generally understand them. For instance, when one sees an arrow, instinctually the eye will follow it to the point, not in the opposite direction.
The use of bold arrows is Gestalt; it uses figure / ground relationships to provide information.
The colored outlines group items together.
The people/hats look like androids/machines; there is personification although they are not literal people.
“Ah! It’s a baseball hat!” He expressed enjoyment in the discovery process.
The smaller diagrams (like the pitcher) imply layers (or hierarchy), and have meaning.
There could be a more obvious demonstration of the overall concept; Pitcher throws ball, ball hits bat, runners run around bases to score runs.
There needs to be a more distinctive path for the eye to follow through the whole diagram.
The X over the ball in the Strike symbol is confusing.
The actions of the Batter could be broken into smaller, side diagrams like the pitcher is.
There is a great opportunity to use moving elements in the map, especially where action happens – running bases, pitching ball, swinging bat.

Thanks Bob!

Where's the Rubber?

I was having trouble finding practical information on the Pitcher’s ‘Rubber,’ so I called my Dad in Atlanta to interview him. Here’s what he had to say:

-The Pivot foot is on the same side of the body as the throwing hand.
-The rubber is a hard rubber rectangle on the pitcher’s mound, 4” by 12-15”long
-It’s a brace for the pitcher’s foot, pointing between first and third bases, and is located at about the center point of the pitcher’s mound
-Also, there are about 50% left-handed and 50% right-handed pitchers in the major leagues.
-A left-handed batter sees the ball better from a right-hand pitcher, so (strategy-wise) a pitcher prefers to throw the ball to a batter of the same hand.
-A right-handed batter is on the 3rd base side of home plate.
It is fairly common to be a switch hitter – they are very valuable to a team; some of the best players in the game were switch hitters.

I also conducted some additional internet research…
According to Wikipedia, there are three main categories of pitches: Fast Ball, thrown in a straight path to the batter and the most common; Breaking Ball, which includes Curve balls; and Change Up, a slower version of the Fast Ball.

Aliens Use Notecards

My childhood understanding of baseball is getting in the way of my understanding of the game as a whole. So…I had to do something drastic! I scrapped my previously learned knowledge for a while, and approached the problem as if I was a complete novice. We'll call it the, ‘what-if-I-were-an-alien-from-another
-planet-coming-to-the-earth-for-the-first-time’ approach.

So I sat down with the Official rules from MLB.com, some 3x5 note cards, and my new set of colored pens (Mmm...colors), and did the first thing that came to mind… I translated each rule, line-by-line, from incomprehensible verbal gibber-jabber to something that made more sense to me – a small diagram of each rule, broken into chunks; a verbal and visual sketch. I used circles to isolate main ideas, mostly nouns, and arrows to indicate actions or causality. Now, at a glance, I can understand each rule, as well as rearrange and group the rules for further analysis.

For example:

Rule 7.01:

A runner acquires the right to an unoccupied base when he touches it before he is out. He is then entitled to it until he is put out, or forced to vacate it for another runner legally entitled to that base. If a runner legally acquires title to a base, and the pitcher assumes his pitching position, the runner may not return to a previously occupied base.

Huh?

Right... So with as little 'thought' as possible, I broke up the sentences into chunks:

A runner ... acquires the right to ... an unoccupied base ... when he ... touches it ... before he is ... out. He ... is then entitled to ... it ... etc.

and then created a diagram using simple notations for clarity:

The first sentence of the rule is reflected in the first line of the diagram. This is the dominant, and most important part of the rule.

The second sentence is the second line of the diagram, where I used a split-arrow to reflect the two instances in which the runner looses the right to a base; one of the two instances must occur, but both may not occur.

The third sentence, while necessary in a complete list of rules, is intuitive and including it when explaining the game to a novice would do more to confuse (by having too much information) than it would to add clarity, so it was not included.

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For rules that have multiple stipulations, I diagrammed the main sentence of the rule to the left of the note card, and then each lettered stipulation to the right. Multiple letters are included on a card.

For example:

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I considered color-coding the elements of the diagrams to further enhance the clarity of the information, but ultimately decided that doing so would be too complex and time-consuming for a sketch. I plan to incorporate color and additional visual cues into a later step in the design process.

Color Me Anxious

The book Information Anxiety II, by Richard Saul Wurman, presents some really interesting ideas.

He hypothesizes that there is a progression of understanding from Data to Information to Knowledge to Wisdom. The book also discusses the 5 methods of information organization, known as LATCH:

L – Location
A – Alphabet
T – Time
C – Category
H – Hierarchy

Organization by color falls under the Category method, but I feel color provides such a deeper understanding of relationships that it should be a sixth category. I’m not referring to the inherent color of objects; color assigned (or maybe inherent to) information creates relationships full of meaning. For instance, a set of blue, blue-green, and green information ‘chunks’ are perceived as more closely related to one another than red, yellow, and blue ‘chunks.’

I'll Try Anything Once...

Today I got together with Lauren and Peter to create a Concept Matrix of all the terms in baseball. The goal is to analyze these terms in a methodical way, using the matrix structure to identify the most important and most common terms and ideas.

The process of creating the matrix was extremely tedious and time consuming, and the absence of visual information made utilizing the results difficult. Although I tend to find analytical methods useful, in this instance I feel the time and effort required far out ways the benefits, and I would not use this method again.

My impatience with information presented without effective visual accompaniment is rapidly increasing…

Hello, meet Web, Ph.D.

I find the nature of a blog very interesting, like speaking into a crowd, to no one in particular, and pausing to see if anyone takes notice.

I suppose that a blog is generally accepted as a place to share musings in a more spontaneous way than traditional websites. This format naturally triggers more imperfections and unintended outcomes than premeditated writing, such as typos and ill-expressed thoughts, like a face-to-face conversation does.

But then, a spoken idea diffuses into the air and is gone, only to remain in the memory of those that were there, while blogs can easily be committed to the searchable public records of the web forever?!? Makes you want to tuck your fingers in tight and log off...

That’s an interesting thought… Imagine a world where our every utterance is recorded, and accessible by anyone during and after our lifetimes. How unnatural. How creepy. How wonderful (if you have wonderful things to say.)

But maybe a blog is more like talking to a therapist, who busily scribbles down your every word to remind you of them later. There is a therapeutic quality to committing these thoughts to writing.

So...What's the Plan?

There are three deliverables for this project:

-A Narrative, using detailed, precise, sensory, and vivid language to immerse the reader in the experience of the game of baseball.
-A Concept Map, to visually and verbally demonstrate the overarching ideas of the game.
-A Process Flow diagram to illustrate the flow of information and sequence of actions. This is similar to computer code, where every step must be defined for the process to work.

We have to complete all of this within four weeks – yikes!?!

But! I have a plan… It’s a secret plan, though :)

Southpaw

We are assigned a project to learn, understand, and reproduce the rules of the game of baseball from the perspective of an Information Architect.

We began our investigation into baseball by meeting at the park to try the game for ourselves. There were a few of us with practice, but the whole experience was more like a hilarious flash back to middle school gym class.

I discovered during the game that, despite all efforts to the contrary, I bat left-handed and when I do so, the ball tends to fly in the direction of my bat and then collide with it. Apparently this is a good thing.

I also discovered that I have a surprising amount of childhood memories associated with the game of baseball, like watching my dad play on his office team when I was very young, watching the game on TV while my mother snored away (because it always put her to sleep), and going to professional games with friends as I became older.

My only other experience playing baseball vaguely resembled batting practice at my childhood home in Atlanta. It was more like a game of chase, where my dad would sprint after the fly balls that I ‘accidentally’ lobbed toward the downhill side of 45-degree grassy surface of our backyard. I never dared to put a real team in the direct path of one of those hits.

I haven’t thought of these times in years, and the recollections are powerful. I hope to incorporate this strong emotional connection that I, and I know many others, have to the game into the visual description that I will create for this project. Also, we are able to choose the target age group for our concept map (which uses visual elements to demonstrate the rules of game play), and I intend to explore ways to tailor the map to children.