Having run the Copenhagen-based design consultancy DesignLab for many years, Per is about to take up an appointment as Professor of Information Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Per is the author of a number of books, including Wayshowing: a guide to environmental signage.

The big event of 2009 for the IDA will be the Information Design Conference IDC2009 on 2nd and 3rd April, on the riverside campus of the University of Greenwich. Submissions for papers and presentations have been rolling in and the programme will be determined in mid-January. Deadline for submissions is 31 December -- read more...

Taking stock domestically and internationally, across the web, TV and print, we will look at what is working and also some areas for improvement.

Max Gadney led the multi-award winning BBC News Website design team from 2000-2007. He now works in digital strategy for BBC Television and in his spare time writes and illustrates for WWII Magazine in the US. www.maxgadney.com

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This talk will look at ways to visualise the structure of text. The two speakers bring different approaches to a similar issue:

Stefanie Posavec, Penguin: "'Writing Without Words' was the project completed for my final year on the MA Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. The intention of this body of work was to explore various methods of visualising literature without using words. I wanted to find a way of communicating the complexity found in literature as well as highlight the similarities and differences in the writing styles of various authors.The structure of a novel, punctuation, parts of speech, and words per sentence were used to generate the final complex patterns.
Any piece of literature can be visualised using these approaches, but I chose to focus on the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, because of its importance to me growing up in Denver, Colorado - a key city within the novel."

Piotr Michura, a doctoral student at Reading University: "Text visualization is a term coined to describe the application of information visualization techniques to textual material. It is defined as an attempt to reveal structures of texts analyzed by computer applications and present them in a meaningful way. It allows the researcher to track patterns of data otherwise difficult to extract from the multitude of data produced by a computer. Using text mining tools the researcher can extract specific information, find unpredicted relationships or deviations from usual patterns, find gaps, and generally explore the data. The outcome is the creation, validation, or rejection of novel interpretations of literary texts. There is a constantly growing amount of textual material available for literary researchers in forms of digital archives, libraries, collections. Within the community of literary scholars dealing with these kind of resources there is a growing interest in applications able to support complex tasks, which go far beyond merely accessing, searching, and retrieving relevant documents from the collections."

Feeds, APIs, widgets, facebook apps, mobile and instant messaging mean that there are many ways for users to interact with a service without them having to visit the main website. When we first talked about building Dopplr, we wanted give users more choice about how they get their information into and out of the application. In this talk, we'll describe how the site at dopplr.com is just one manifestation of a many-headed internet service. We'll talk about how this affects the user interface design, information design and the data modeling, and how it strengthens the relationship between designer and developer.

Matt Jones is a designer. He was creative director for the award-winning BBC News Online and Sapient's London studio in the first boom, then returned the BBC in 2001 to design the BBC's web search and a geo-located social network. From 2003, he joined Nokia in design research, then as a Director of UX Design.He is one of the founders / lead designer of Dopplr.com, a service for frequent travellers. He has written on interaction design and planetary-scale self-replicating robot dogs for 8 years at http://www.blackbeltjones.com.

Matt Biddulph is the nomadic CTO of Dopplr, the social network for intelligent travellers. He started out in 1994 building search engines on CD-ROM, and now specialises in digital media, social software and putting data on the web. In past lives he was a creative technologist for hire, working with companies like Nature, Joost and the BBC to bring cutting-edge technologies into the mainstream.

Legible London is a groundbreaking scheme to provide better information throughout the capital for people who want to walk.

A study conducted three years ago drew attention to the ineffectiveness of the present multitude of pedestrian sign systems in central London, and the consequent over-reliance on the tube map to help people navigate above ground. Since last November, a prototype of a pan-London scheme has been introduced around Bond Street tube station, in nearby streets and on bus shelters and on exit from the tube station. They show the direction to walk, how long it's going to take, and notable landmarks along the way. At the same time, 43 pieces of street signs and clutter have been removed. Tim will explain the thinking behind the scheme, and how the prototype was received. (www.legiblelondon.info)

Health information creates a relationship between the health industry (NHS, medicines) and its users (not all of them patients). This implicit relationship is clearly embedded in documents and information that the health industry produces - complex language, authoritarian instructions and poor design make up a dangerous cocktail, and there's little doubt it could be harmful to our health.

Looking at examples of forms, instruction leaflets and other healthcare resources, this talk will examine how we can create a healthier relationship, and the potential role of information design in improving health.