Operative communication: project Cybersyn and the intersection of information design, interface design, and interaction design

This article examines the connecting lines between the Chilean Project Cybersyn’s interface design, the German Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm and its cybernetically inspired approaches towards information design, and later developments in interaction design and the emerging field of Human–Computer Interaction in the USA. In particular, it first examines how early works of designers Tomàs Maldonado and Gui Bonsiepe on operative communication, that is, language-independent (and thus internationalizable) pictogram systems and visual grammars for computational systems, were intertwined with attempts to ground industrial design in a scientific methodology, to address an era of computing machines, and to develop the concept of the interface as a heuristic for a renovated design thinking. It thereby also reconstructs further historical vanishing lines—e.g. the pictorial grammar of Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPE—of the development of the ‘ulm model’ of design. Second, the article explores how an apprehension of first-order cybernetics in West Germany—e.g. represented by hfg ulm staff like Max Bense or Abraham Moles, merged with Cybersyn’s second-order cybernetics ideas, as represented by Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. And third, it asks about a further conceptual turn regarding an understanding of design which resulted in a focus on communicative interaction, e.g. in the later works of Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd on HCI, or in Beer’s Team Syntegrity approach. As an effect, the text will explore a specific and international network of cybernetic thinking between Latin America, Europe, and North America which emerged around Project Cybersyn, and which was occupied with questions of HCI, a democratization of design, and intelligence amplification.

Reframing Web Accessibility in Post-Secondary Education: Examining the Role of the Educator in the Curation and Creation of Accessible Digital Course Content

Web accessibility is emerging as a key issue and opportunity for educators in post-secondary institutions (Brown, 2018; Gronseth, 2018). Many factors affect web accessibility, yet little literature examines web accessibility factors relative to literacy, pedagogy, course culture, course content curation and information design for learning— areas that rest firmly within an educator’s domain. What facets are specifically relevant to post-secondary educators? The conference presentation, this proceeding, and a subsequent article for the OTESSA journal that addresses the broader construct of digital accessibility, invite critical engagement with web accessibility practices, accessible course content, and the digital accessibility of technology-mediated learning environments. Together and individually, they offer educators various points of entry that are relevant to praxis and seek to ignite discussions and interventions that build educators’ agency and self-efficacy to co-create accessible courses with students with (and without) disabilities.

Engineering Social Learning: Information Design of Time-Locked Sales Campaigns for Online Platforms

Many online platforms offer time-locked sales campaigns, whereby products are sold at fixed prices for prespecified lengths of time. Platforms often display some information about previous customers’ purchase decisions during campaigns. Using a dynamic Bayesian persuasion framework, we study how a revenue-maximizing platform should optimize its information policy for such a setting. We reformulate the platform’s problem equivalently by reducing the dimensionality of its message space and proprietary history. Specifically, three messages suffice: a neutral recommendation that induces a customer to make her purchase decision according to her private signal about the product and a positive (respectively (resp.), negative) recommendation that induces her to purchase (resp., not purchase) by ignoring her signal. The platform’s proprietary history can be represented by the net purchase position, a single-dimensional summary statistic that computes the cumulative difference between purchases and nonpurchases made by customers having received the neutral recommendation. Subsequently, we establish structural properties of the optimal policy and uncover the platform’s fundamental trade-off: long-term information (and revenue) generation versus short-term revenue extraction. Further, we propose and optimize over a class of heuristic policies. The optimal heuristic policy provides only neutral recommendations up to a cutoff customer and provides only positive or negative recommendations afterward, with the recommendation being positive if and only if the net purchase position after the cutoff customer exceeds a threshold. This policy is easy to implement and numerically shown to perform well. Finally, we demonstrate the generality of our methodology and the robustness of our findings by relaxing some informational assumptions. This paper was accepted by Gabriel Weintraub, revenue management and market analytics.

Pushing Notifications as Dynamic Information Design

We study the dynamic information design problem of a firm seeking to influence consumer checking behavior by designing push notifications.

Public Health Infographic Design for the public – the evidence base

In order to make effective infographics, one needs to understand the science behind public health infographic design. This presentation introduces guidelines for public health infographic design based on gathered academic evidence of effectiveness as well as information design principles. We tackle the topic from a variety of angles exploring issues of attention, comprehension, recall and behavioral change and focuses on infographics designed for a lay audience. Despite the exhaustive research conducted on say, graph comprehension, there remains a gap in how we account for the effectiveness of public health infographic design more broadly. The presentation also covers a brief examination of ‘hidden' historical precedents for the design of engaging health infographics, beyond the oft-cited visual work of John Snow or Florence Nightingale. We argue that notions of data spectacle and the need to grab attention remain vital today. The presentation concludes by reflecting on the future of infographics for displaying public health data, particularly with reference to the use of COVID-19 graphics in 2020/21.