Building Worlds for an Interactive Experience: Selecting, Organizing, and Showing Worlds of Information Through Comics

Abstract

Scott McCloud’s “Google Chrome” comic appeared in October 2008 as a piece of information design in the comics form. Days later, Peter Gasston, in a blog post entitled “Understanding Comics and User Experience,” convincingly connects Scott McCloud’s six steps of creating an effective comic (in Understanding Comics) to Jesse James Garrett’s (2002) five planes of a webpage structure, in The Elements of User Experience, claiming that the two are describing significant methods of information design. Both Garrett and McCloud, however, have another common trait in their theoretical approaches to designing information: they each seek to build worlds of information that engage an audience to integrate the story of that information into their lives. The construction of a world, defined as a particular view of the world, develops through the selection, organization and structure of the story in which that information develops to create contextual wisdom. The Google Chrome comic, enacts McCloud’s (1994) claim that we create worlds in our image in comics. As an information design perspective that shows the worlds we create when designing information, the comics form can be a significant addition to the field of information design. This information design perspective suggests that comics develop an interactive experience and builds a world through information visually that enhances an audience’s ability to build shared-knowledge between designer and audience.