Information Design Approach Research Articles

An anti-infodemic virtual center for the Americas.

The Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) Anti-Infodemic Virtual Center for the Americas (AIVCA) is a project led by the Department of Evidence and Intelligence for Action in Health, PAHO and the Center for Health Informatics, PAHO/WHO Collaborating Center on Information Systems for Health, at the University of Illinois, with the participation of PAHO staff and consultants across the region. Its goal is to develop a set of tools-pairing AI with human judgment-to help ministries of health and related health institutions respond to infodemics. Public health officials will learn about emerging threats detected by the center and get recommendations on how to respond. The virtual center is structured with three parallel teams: detection, evidence, and response. The detection team will employ a mixture of advanced search queries, machine learning, and other AI techniques to sift through more than 800 million new public social media posts per day to identify emerging infodemic threats in both English and Spanish. The evidence team will use the EasySearch federated search engine backed by AI, PAHO's knowledge management team, and the Librarian Reserve Corps to identify the most relevant authoritative sources. The response team will use a design approach to communicate recommended response strategies based on behavioural science, storytelling, and information design approaches.

Recommenders’ originals: The welfare effects of the dual role of platforms as producers and recommender systems

We study a model of strategic interaction between a producer and a platform that employs a recommendation system, following an information design approach. Upon entry into the production market, the platform biases recommendations to credibly steer consumers towards its own goods. Despite the increased upstream competition, platform entry and self-preferencing can decrease consumer welfare and result in foreclosure of the independent producer. We then consider the natural policy remedy of separating recommendation and production or imposing unbiased recommendations and find it leads to welfare gains if the platform’s revenue potential is large enough, but to significant welfare losses when it is not. The ambiguity of such a policy’s welfare implications and the dependence on the industry’s returns highlights the importance of targeted restrictions on platform self-preferencing.

State-Promoted Investment for Industrial Reforms: An Information Design Approach

We analyze the optimal strategy for a government to promote large-scale investment projects under information frictions. Specifically, we propose a model where the government collects information on probability of each investment and discloses it to private investors a la Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011). We derive the government's optimal information policy, which is characterized as threshold values for the unknown probability of the projects released to the private investors, and study how the underlying features of the economy affect the optimal policies. We find that when multiple projects are available, the government promotes the project with a bigger spillover effect by fully revealing the true state of the economy only when its probability is substantially high. Moreover, the development of the financial/information market also affects the optimal rule.

‘Intuition as Method’ as an approach for information design

Information design is an interdisciplinary field of research and practice. According to International Institute for Information Design (IIID), information design is the defining, planning and shaping of the contents of a message and the environments, with the intention to satisfy the information needs of the intended recipients. Although IIID’s definition indicates a relationship between information, information designer, the environment, and the users, the definition lacks the roles of the users’ participation and the interaction amongst information, the environment, and the users in the process of designing information. It is possible to define three accounts in the design process. Information design approaches often impose a hierarchical relationship between these three accounts. Bergson’s ‘Intuition as Method’ and its rules can be adapted to bring these three accounts together on a horizontal formation and give the roles of these three separate accounts to the designer instead of applying a hierarchical structure in the design process.

Revival and Transition: Evolving Roles and Various Forms of Informative Graphics

Currently, informative graphics has attracted considerable attention for its efficient and effective methods of communication. The ways in which people receive information strongly influence their ability not only to comprehend the information but also to capitalize on the purported benefits of the information. Information-design approaches can facilitate the creation of many good-quality designs. By understanding both the history of information design and pertinent case studies, we can familiarize ourselves with information-design methods and applications. In this article, I discuss the evolution and various forms of informative graphics on the basis of historical, content-oriented, and phenomenological analyses. I investigate visual representations’ roles and identify the strengths and deficiencies of visual communication for information design. Historical evidence—such as Playfair’s graphic charts and his method, Winderlich’s clinical graphics, Nightingale’s statistical graphs, and Snow’s dot maps—show that appropriate visual formats can depict data and that these depictions can demonstrate effects over time. The graphical method can also aid in the measurement of small-time intervals between biological effects. Multiple variables enhance the exploratory power of graphics in relation to analysis and discovery. Narrative graphics associate the spatial dimension with time-series displays to depict space and time. Although many disciplines acknowledge “the importance of communication,” the general public in Taiwan has only recently begun to acknowledge the importance of informative graphics. We should reflect now and then on the evolution and various forms of informative graphics.

Persuading Multiple Audiences: An Information Design Approach to Banking Regulation

A policy-maker concerned with the potential default of a bank conducts an asset quality review and a liquidity stress test under the scrutiny of multiple types of market participants (audiences). Surprisingly, the optimal comprehensive assessment is opaque when the bank has high-quality assets, and transparent when the bank has poor-quality assets. Additionally, the policy-maker imposes debt buybacks and contingent recapitalizations. I find that without the latter, disclosure of information about the bank's fundamentals may backfire. When the policy-maker lacks the technology to test the bank's private information, she designs a liquidity-provision program whereby the government offers to buy assets from the bank in exchange for cash and a public disclosure of the bank's liquidity position. Interventions display a non-monotone pecking order: the private sector funds banks with either high or poor-quality assets, while institutions with assets of intermediate quality participate in the government's liquidity program. My results shed light on the optimal way to disclose information in environments with multiple audiences and multi-dimensional fundamentals.

Improving obesity prevention among university students through a tailored information design approach

University years are a critical period for weight gain primarily due to unhealthy changes in eating behavior in students. This is the first study to focus on the impact of tailored information design approaches on the awareness and retention of obesity related information, specifically by university students. A motion graphics was developed through a comprehensive user-centered research and design process that involved a scoping study (observation, questionnaire and focus group), usability testing (five stages of iteration), and a performance test. The results show low previous knowledge and a statistical significant impact on the understanding of information with a tailored user-centered motion graphics.

A Study on the Convergence Improvement Methods from the Information Design Approach to Tourist Signs - Focused on Tourist Signs in Gwangju Metropolitan City -

본 논문의 연구의 배경 및 필요성은 다음과 같다. 그동안의 우리나라 표지정보는 운전자 또는 보행자의 의지와 상관없이 도로표지관리국의 일반적인 관행에 따라 설치되었으며, 문제점으로 표지판의 표기오류와 설치불량, 가독성부족, 등이 정보소통의 문제와 걸림돌이 되고 있다. 또 최근엔 관광안내체계의 표준화 작업 또한 중앙정부와 지자체간의 협력 사업으로 관광 선진화에 노력하고 있으나 시각·정보적인 측면과 남녀노소, 내·외국인 등의 다양한 사람들이 동일한 정보를 인지할 수 있도록 해야 하며, 융·복합적인 관점에서 학제적 연구가 필요하지만 어느 한 기관의 일방적인 표준화 작업에 따른 또 다른 문제를 내포하고 있다. 가장 큰 문제점은 광주광역시의 경우 각 표지판의 해당관리감독 부서의 주체가 분명하지 않고, 전문성이 없으며 설치용역 업체가 알아서 설치하는 문제로 인해 똑같은 문제점이 계속 반복되고 있는 것이다. 따라서 그에 따른 문제를 해결하고자 본 논문은 광주광역시 관광안내 표지에 대한 연구대상과 범위를 설정하고 환경디자인, 정보디자인, 시각디자인의 학제적 복합적인 상황과 오프라인상의 운전자와 보행자 입장에서 좀 더 효과적인 가독성과 관리 및 설치방안을 제시하고자 하는데 연구의 목적이 있다. 구체적으로는 현재 광주광역시 관광안내표지의 문제와 서울특별시 표지판개선사업의 현황과 비교하고 국내·외 사례를 제시 후 문제해결방안을 제안하고자 한다. 본 논문의 연구방법 및 범위, 내용, 그 결과는 다음과 같다. 즉, 서론에서 연구 목적과 방법 및 범위, 본론으로 관광안내표지의 개념과 중요성, 그리고 문제점을 살펴보았다. 특히, 본론에서는 관광안내표지의 구성요소와 광주광역시 관광안내표지의 현황, 그리고 융·복합적인 정보디자인적 접근을 통해 개선방안을 제시하고자 했다. 또 관광안내표지의 국내·외 사례와 차이점을 제시하고자 하였으며 우리나라의 현황과 문제, 타 도시의 관리체계 등을 살펴보고, 마지막으로 결론과 제언으로 광주광역시의 관광안내표지의 개선방안을 도출하여 학제적으로 효과적인 설치를 제안하였다.

The design and evaluation of an interactive calculator for children

The aim of the research project reported here was to investigate the potential use of multimedia systems in teaching primary mathematics to pupils with learning difficulties. A multimedia interactive calculator (MIC), that combines learning materials with a calculator interface, has been designed as a result of classroom-based studies together with iterative prototype evaluation. The visual styling and operation of the MIC is the consequence of design decisions made in response to a user-need analysis carried out as part of this research. The MIC mediates between the concrete stage of learning number and the manipulations of symbolic arithmetical representations, particularly as they are used in the standard calculator, a transition which is difficult for many pupils to make. The work shows that multimedia systems can be helpful to children in making this transition. However, the authors agree that the careful use of an information design approach is needed to produce successful software. The MIC has been shown to be useful in teaching the concepts of number and the routines of addition and subtraction. Its interactive multiplication tables have helped pupils to discover number patterns and to improve their recall of number facts.