Information Anxiety

Rating:
Summary: One for the reference shelf
Review: Found it difficult to put this down. Parts of the book are a bit slow and somewhat off topic, but most is spot on and Wurman offers some wonderful insight and obsevations that left me wondering why I had never thought of viewing things in a similar context.

For anyone designing web media/printed communications the advice and insight Wurman offers is well worth the price of admission. This is one I'll have the shelf with Tufte.

Rating:
Summary: A Quick-and-Dirty Mishmash of Platitudes
Review: I am taking the unusual step of rating this book "1 star" to express my extremely high level of dissatisfaction at its quality and usefullness. There is no question that Richard Saul Wurman is a highly gifted individual, and his ACCESS books are fabulous. But this poorly-edited, disorganized book fails to capture or convey any of the insights that went into that or other successful Wurman projects.

My guess is that this project was conceived as a quickie update to the original Information Anxiety to take advantage of Internet mania, and as such much of the work was delegated to others, but without sufficient review and editing. (There are too many editing mistakes to list here, but suffice it to say that probably few books have a misspelling in the Table Of Contents as this one does -- "Informatgion" instead of "Information".)

RSW tells us that it's important to always start off with what the question is. Problem is, he doesn't follow his own advice in that book. He careens uncontrollably from gushy predictions about the future, to cataclysmic warnings of information deluge, to superficial suggestions on software and web design, to facile pop management advice, The only thread connecting all these disjointed pieces is that he strictly limits himself to talking about how important something or other is, without ever giving specific advice about how to approach it.

I am personally interested in the field of localization and globalization. So naturally I was curious as to what insight RSW brought to this area. What I found was a single, lonely page on the topic, with a few lines of simplistic patter, and a strange, unexplained diagram of various fountain pens with country names associated with each.

I am also interested in the combination of text and graphics to present information and in fact bought this book thinking it might have some insights in that regards. So I was quite happy to see in the Table of Contents a section Design in the Digital Age, summarized as "In this Digital Age we need to focus on the connections among all design elements: medium, words, pictures, and sound." Alas, true to form, all the section in question does is repeat that we need to focus on this, with no clue as how we might actually do that, nor a single example in sight. To get an idea of the poor editing quality of this book, consider the following paragraph from this section:

"Where words meet pictures meet sound creates understanding. Are you a value-based organization? A service-based organization? A quality-based organization? Are you all three? We test communication by conveying a message and having the recipient understand it, be interested in it, and remember it. Any other measure is unimportant and invalid." Does anyone else wonder how the stuff about organizations fits in here? It's just random cut-and-paste content that accidentally found its way here, never to receive the benefit of the editor's pen. Signs of rampant cut-and-pasting abound throughout the book.

Although not really the fault of the author(s), the book is also seriously dated, having come out while there was still some degree of dot-com mania going on (although the peak was passed). So you can read this book on sort of an archaeological level, to recall all the bizarre things people were saying back in those heady days. Internet refrigerators, anyone?

I probably don't need to summarize; let me simply say you are best off spending your time and money on virtually any book on this topic besides this one.

Rating:
Summary: Every business owner should read this book
Review: Ten years ago RSW said that data was the source of "Information Anxiety"; he went on to explain ways for people to put data into meaningful displays. His premise is that the display of data helps you convey a message. Take a look at the millions of advertisements that still don't understand his simple suggestions.

I cringe when I see the updates or designs people do to magazines or newspapers that put more pictures, less data and even less "information." Doesn't anybody read books like IA2 to understand what the brain does and how it sorts data to come to choices? In the beginning Wired followed his rules and they blew away the competition, then they got smart and followed the formula of the oldline magazines, then nearly bankrupt they got sold. RSW set up the guidelines for magazines of the future.

This is a great book and if a business owner really wanted their advertising and their collateral material to produce results they would use the tools in the book to check and see if they have broken the rules of cutting through the noise.

Buy this book, follow the rules, win more business.

Rating:
Summary: The real problem is a malinformation explosion
Review: The basic theme of this book reinforces my long-held belief that the next killer app in computing will be some new way to visually display relationships between information. A new discipline is also going to spring up and those good at it will be in great demand. That new area of study will be a knowledge distiller, someone expert in taking the enormous amount of information about a topic and reducing it down to a base form. We see the initial steps in this trend with the extraordinary success of the ". . For Dummies" series of books. Their appeal is based on the basic formula of making things as simple as possible but no simpler.
As Wurman points out, while there is an information explosion, the real problem is a malinformation (my term) explosion. In other words, information that does not inform. This is not just a reference to that which is inaccurate, but information that is correct but so malformed or obscure to be misleading. He also argues that a critical rethinking needs to be done concerning how we learn. The premise is that the rewards for asking the right questions need to be improved rather than the continued emphasis on answering questions. We also need to rediscover much of our inner child.
At some point in our lives, we "mature" to the state where we will do almost anything to avoid embarrassment. This trait leads us to ignore inconsistencies and sit in silence when we don't understand. The childlike innocence that causes us to ask "obvious" questions goes away, replaced by fear of failure, which leads to an aversion to risk. Without the willingness to take a chance, many new things are not attempted, which limits the options for us all.
This is a book that you must think deeply about. The world is changing rapidly, and the most successful people will be those who know how to cull knowledge down to the true essentials. There are an enormous number of ideas in the book that can be used to assist this process. If you value the future and want to have a significant part in creating it, then you should read this book. Proper implementation of some of the ideas presented here will change the way we do things in the future.