readingtype: Ways and means: two heavy titles that cover aspects of information design practice

Per Mollerup, Wayshowing. Baden: Lars Müller, 2005 | Bill Moggridge, Designing interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007

Information design is a discipline with many sides to it. Mollerup and Moggridge are seasoned practitioners in their fields, and both books are highly credible and successful in giving useful insights into the kinds of projects on which the authors have worked. You learn a lot about physical restrictions, client and user expectations, and the techniques and tricks that a seasoned practitioner can use in carrying out such design projects.

Mollerup provides a primer of what he calls ‘wayshowing’ – in other words the complement to ‘wayfinding’, which is the word more widely used. He’s coined his term to try to label accurately the activity that involves creating signed routes for people. Wayfinding, as he points out, implies that the people have to make the best of whatever they find en route; in effect it’s rather as if we referred to typography as ‘reading’. The book collects together very many examples, both right up to date and more established projects, and illustrates them well. It themes the case studies effectively and it’s both more provocative and more wide-ranging than might be expected, seeming to capture the nature of the wayfinding/showing field well.

I felt that I had seen quite a few of the examples already; perhaps I am better read – or perhaps I have walked through more of these signing systems – than I realise. I hadn’t recognised the signage in the Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham as the work of a major agency (Pentagram), but then I don’t remember noticing it at all when I was there in October 2006: has it really been implemented or was I seeing a mockup? I should mention (readers will excuse my hubris) that there are a lot of typos in the text; they seem to get more frequent towards the back of the book, which gives a feeling that somebody put the pedal to the metal late in the publishing schedule.

Moggridge looks at the interface between humans and machines. Both hardware and software come under scrutiny. He is diligent in showing the history of many core ideas in interfaces and in interface design. He provides anecdotes from some of the people (mostly in the United States) who were particularly innovatory in solving problems like the presentation of a user interface not based on text instructions, or how to move a pointer on screen, or how to deal with the need for a rapid visible reaction from a system overwhelmed by what a user has just told it to do.

Notable for its light coverage is the web; effectively Moggridge is labelling it as a synthesis of prior art, which is brave and probably largely correct. Although it is easy to grasp the idea that the original web was little more than an expansion of the hypertext idea that has its origins in the predictions of Vannevar Bush, there’s now so much of the web that it is difficult to accept it merely as an opportune and convenient re-use of interface conventions rather than something more important. And it is also to pass in silence over the remarkable way in which (through ignorance, through weakness, or through our own deliberate fault) the web breaks so many cherished graphical user interface conventions so comprehensively and with so little apparent ill effect on anybody’s bottom line. Perhaps this is a diplomatic silence.

I found that the case studies in fields that lie outside my experience were pretty seductive: I wanted to get involved in similar work. But as they get further from ‘2-D languages’ (those that go to make up graphical communication that does not change through time), these projects tend to get a bit silly; they take on the air of studiously-constructed practical jokes and conceptual art (for example, the nipple chair that gets excited in an electromagnetic field and the television-viewing organ-incubating pig seem a long way from conventional thoughts of interaction design). These make for diversions at the tail end of the book and Moggridge thinks we need them to help us explore the relationships that are possible between people and machines. To a pragmatic mind they look like creative exercises in nobbling research money and having fun with it, which is great for those who can do it. I was happier to reach the next section, which offers useful thoughts on working techniques.

These books are both, broadly speaking, portfolios; but in each case value is added through the fact that the authors offer much expertise. In effect the reader is taken on a journey through the writer’s professional life, viewing their work alongside the work of competitors, friends and colleagues. For Mollerup, the value of this is in the broad body of work that he has brought together. For Moggridge, the whole purpose of his book is to uncover insights through personal reflection and through the testimony of his interview subjects. Because many of these people are employees of the company he helped to found, the book is uncomfortably close to being a sales document – albeit of a most rarefied kind.

I do have some criticisms of the books as physical objects. Both are hefty, and both are a bit weirdly designed. I think this is the publishers’ responsibility. In the case of MIT, the design is the author’s and I am pretty sure that once the publishers had decided that it was better to let the author design the book and deal with the consequences than to impose their own choice of designer, they were happy. And I think I’m happy too; the flow of text and illustrative images works well. I do not like Officina Sans and Bembo typefaces together, but that’s just a personal reaction and there are no legibility problems anywhere. For Lars Müller, I speculate that their system (conscious or otherwise) took control; the choice of Helvetica (often bold) as the only type family cannot have been made by Mollerup; he’s much too sensitive to typography to impose this very harsh restriction. It’s not pleasant. The paper is high white and reflects light into your eyes, and the outlines of the letterforms are razor-sharp. Not suitable for contemplative reading. The format of the book is another contentious point; it’s heavy, but it is too tall and narrow to stay open unaided. I had to hold it in my hands to keep the reflected light from dazzling me, and so I got tired of reading sooner than I would have liked. But I can’t fault the layout for its compositional qualities.