Monday, February 8, 2010

DP: Paper

How can information architecture create a semantic web platform for the graphic presentation and organization of information which enables different user types to view and compare the global information climate; facilitating a dialogue between arguments existing in disparate web spaces for the purpose of informing decision making?

That is the question that started my research and experiments. It is long and complicated and has caused me many problems, so I simplified it.

How can information architecture create a platform for the graphic presentation of information which enables a range of user types to visually compare data for the purpose of informing decision making?

I also tried this

How can a web platform present information in a graphic way purpose of informing decision making?

I thought this was better, but I was still having problems with wrapping my brain around it even though I wrote the damn thing. So I tried to figure out what I was really doing. I thought maybe saying it a different way would help. But finally I realized my question was: How can I visualize data? Now, not to make things too easy on myself the question that immediately preceded that was: How can different meta data inform the visualization, thus informing the decision making and formal quality?

So my project, at least as far as I understand it right now is about taking web content and and visualizing search results and discrepancies among data. I have also decided that in order to engage the audience I have to make the solutions more poetic and human. I think so that this aspect of the design does not come about arbitrarily that the poetic aspect of the application will come from the meta data that all information carry with it. Typical meta data comes includes date/time of upload, location, originator of post, tags, file size, etc. So from this data other things can be inferred about the setting in which the data were created. For example if I know the time and location of a post, I can infer the weather of the location at the time of upload. At this point I’m not sure how weather would add anything to the data, or illuminate it further, maybe it doesn’t have to. However, what I can do is use this to inform the layout, in a way allowing the metadata to decide the form of the content. I define parameters for how the metadata is used and the design follows systemically as a result.

In sum my design solution will be the structuring and meta-designing of data.

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