Information design is a functional art practiced by every culture in every time period. Paul Kahn will review examples from many domains – theology, art history, physical and social science, engineering and business – to illustrate how information design encompasses the selection and encoding of both qualitative and quantitative data to serve nine general functions.

Re-evaluating information design history in this broad sense can help us gain perspective on how qualitative and quantitative information are both part of the information design story. The talk will explore the multiplicity of information design strategies human cultures have devise over many centuries. Our biggest challenge today is not only learning how to write software programs to become masters of all the numeric data we possess. It is learning how to select and shape information to make meaning.

The Speaker

Paul Kahn teaches in the Information Design & Visualization and the Experience Design MFA programs at Northeastern University, Boston. His portfolio includes clients in the biomedical field, literary publishers, large cultural institutions and international corporations in the US and Europe. He served as Experience Design Director at Mad*Pow from 2012-2018, where he worked in the technology and healthcare sectors. Before this he spent a decade working in the design community of Paris, France, where Kahn+Associates was the first agency focused on information architecture. In the 1990s he led Dynamic Diagrams, an information design agency in Providence RI and taught at Rhode Island School of Design. Early in our digital transformation, he was part of the hypertext research team at Brown University’s Institute for Research on Information and Scholarship.

Paul Kahn was our guest for the Good Morning UX on Tue Jun, 2019 at 9:00 AM.