2020 Keynote – Cassini Nazir

Cassini Nazir
Hi there, Information Architecture Conference. My name is Cassini Nazir. I’m a designer of conversations, curricula, and interfaces. That’s Cassini, like the space probe that crashed into Jupiter in 2017, or the fashion designer. You and I are about to take an ambitious journey together. We’ll explore some simple lessons about information in order to understand what might be beyond information. We’ll learn about some human, animal, and mechanical senses, and how these very senses help us to make sense of the world which our brains integrate into information. If I’m successful, this talk will unsettle some uncertainties we have about the world. After all, the illusion of knowledge is often more dangerous than ignorance.

Cassini Nazir
Now you wouldn’t start exercising without warming up. Well, maybe you would, but you shouldn’t. Very much like physical exercise I’ll be putting our brains to work. So why don’t we give our brains a quick warm up? In a moment, I’m going to ask you to create a rebus. A rebus uses pictures to represent letters or sounds. It’s a sort of visual word puzzle. Now first, you should know there are two rules. One: only images or pantomimes. Toe plus knee equals Tony. And, oh, a yawn plus another knee equals that famous composer, Yanni. And two: no audible or written words.

Cassini Nazir
I chose this activity because throughout this talk, I’m going to ask you to look at familiar things from unfamiliar perspectives. What better way to do this than to start with the way people know you in the world. Take out a piece of paper and create a rebus uof your own name. I’ll set a countdown timer here. And in the meantime, there are a few examples to get your brain started.

Cassini Nazir
Now you took something very familiar and intimate, the thing by which you’re known in the world, your name, and looked at it slightly different by trying to make it experienceable. The rebus requires you to take one sense, sound for example, and employ another sense, sight, to help people understand it. Or you could take sight and make an action out of it by miming. The rebus also requires you to explicitly discard certain kinds of information, letters or sounds, in place of other kinds of information, visuals or images. We’re going to explore both of these things. Our human senses, and explicitly discarded information, or exformation, in this talk.

Cassini Nazir
But first, I’d like to set expectations. There are talks that end with 10 bullet points give you a visual framework or questions to think about. This isn’t that kind of talk. Instead, I’d like to borrow your imaginations, stretch it, take it on a ride, and send it on a journey. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, a mind stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension. Stretching the material of your mind isn’t an end in and of itself, but the stuff from which you’re going to refashion your world. After all, you’re creative enough to connect what you learn here into your own design practice.

Cassini Nazir
Paul Rand created a rebus designers know well. Rand’s rebus uses pictures to represent letters as yours does. But his is an iconic part of IBM’s visual history. Rand designed this poster for the presentation of the Golden Circle Award, an in house IBM occasion. Although Rand eventually prevailed, it was temporarily banned as it was felt that it would encourage IBM staff designers to take liberties with the IBM logo. Rand designed the rebus as a kind of game designed to engage the reader and incidentally, he said is also lots of fun. Long before Apple came up with it, Paul Rand asked us to think differently. In fact, Paul Rand designed this IBM poster in support of IBM’s decades long motto: Think. And thinking differently is exactly where we should begin.

Cassini Nazir
In the words of that great philosopher, Winnie the Pooh: Did you ever stop to think and forget to start again? We’re going to try to unpack how our brains understand the world by looking at how our brains understand information.

Cassini Nazir
Information Architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be more understandable. We do that by making information more findable and also more discoverable. Our jobs as designers is to render that which is complicated, meaningful, and that which is complex, manageable. And we’ve leveraged some powerful metaphors to help us understand all of this.

Cassini Nazir
In a very well known article, Marcia Bates provides an example of how users search for information. She says it’s like picking berries. Her berry picking metaphor presents a model of information retrieval through digital systems. It also shows how we search and find things and shows how we evolve that search. This model is useful not just because of the berry picking expedition, but because of the wider frame that she provided. This berry picking expeditions in the context of what Bates calls a universe of interest. Our universe of interest resides within a universe of knowledge. There also exists knowledge that we have yet to discover.

Cassini Nazir
This knowledge outside the individual is what Tor Nørretranders calls exformation. Nørretranders coined the term exformation in his 1998 book, The User Illusion. Exformation means explicitly discarded information. This is often the most common definition of the term exformation. In the book he gives a classic example of exformation. In 1862, Victor Hugo was writing to his publisher to ask how his most recent book Les Miserables was getting on. Hugo just wrote (…) in his message to which his publisher replied (…) to indicate it was doing well. This exchange would have meant nothing to you or I because the shared context was you unique to them. The amount of information in a single character here was very, very small. And yet because of exformation, the meaning is clearly conveyed. Much like the rebus you and I created, there is a high amount of information that was discarded.

Cassini Nazir
Let me give you another example of exformation. General Charles Napier commanding the army of the East India Company defeated Muslim rulers in the province of Sind, which is in present day Pakistan. Napier then proceeded against orders to conquer the entire province. He informed his superiors by sending a single word message, Pecavvi, which in Latin means “I have sinned”. However, the letter wasn’t a message of contrition. At that time all officials in England would have learned Latin at school. It was really a pun. I have the Province of Sind. Exformation here provided a pretty low level form of encryption. Much like the Rebus you just created there’s a large amount Have discarded information. Here, this definition of exformation is the knowledge needed to make sense of a message but which isn’t sent because it’s already known to both the sender and the recipient.

Cassini Nazir
In theory, if a state of common knowledge existed amongst all of us, then we can minimize the data that we would need to include in a message reaching an almost perfect state of exformation. You’re probably starting to see that exformation, the information that we have either individually or collectively disregarded is indeed all around us. And I think, much more abundant than information. But there’s yet another way to view exformation, a way that allows us to problematize the notion of information to view with fresh eyes our ways of noticing, sharing, and interpreting it. That’s precisely how Kenya Hara interprets exformation.

Kenya Hara
We always use the term information. The concept of information is to make things known. But the concept of exformation is the opposite. You makes things unknown. Unknown sounds a little bit strange. If we can [make] aware these people how little you know about that or how much you don’t know about than we can stimulate curiosity and interest.

Cassini Nazir
Maybe as a child, you like me, enjoyed watching the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons. My father would often ask me, why would I watch something if I knew how it was going to end with Roadrunner always outsmarting the Coyote? I guess the fun, my eight year old mind thought, wasn’t in the ending. It was in seeing how it all unfolded. Seeing what masterful scheme the Coyote came up with and what way the Roadrunner would foil him. This knowing and not knowing had a stronghold over my eight year old curiosity and interest. And in fact, of all the Looney Tunes characters, the Roadrunner I think was the most creative. He was a true designer. Not a very successful one, mind you, but a designer nonetheless. Unlike adults, children are naturally curious because so much of the world is unknown to them.

Cassini Nazir
Sometimes we forget that childishness and childlikeness are two very different things. Is it possible for us as designers to design something that renders a person more childlike, and help them to rediscover their curiosity about the world? This notion of exformation stimulating our curiosity is important. The one thing that constantly invigorates our mind is the unknown. We love to unravel a mystery. We’re drawn in, not by what we already know, but we’re eager to make the unknown world, known. Exformation’s possibilities for stimulating curiosity and interest may be more powerful than information.

Cassini Nazir
As you well know, there’s a lot of shouting going on in the world right now. We’re certain of what we are certain of and we have a high opinion of our own opinion. Kenya Hara notes that the people of the world like to say, “I know, I know.” I don’t know why they like to say it twice. But if in today’s world, you could possibly kindle someone’s curiosity. You can get them to move beyond information and the illusion of knowledge. Curiosity is one way that we can do that. It’s even possible to help people overcome their fears through curiosity.

Cassini Nazir
Now, you might say that exformation and information sound exactly like signal versus noise, with signal being information, and noise being exclamation. The difference is that noise creates confusion. Exformation generates interest. This is hard stuff we’re talking about. So let me give you yet another way to think about exformation. Exformation is like, well, Wayfinding. Actually, it’s more like Wayshowing. Kevin Lynch introduced the term Wayfinding in the 1960s. In the 90s, Paul Arthur and Romedi Passini extended the concept of the term by relating it to architecture and signage, which is how we use the term today. But Per Mollerup in 2005 reminded us that designers can only show the way. It’s the individual that finds it for themselves. So Mollerup coined the term Wayshowing. If you design these sorts of things you’re designing Wayshowing, not Wayfinding. Wayshowing relates to Wayfinding as cooking relates to eating, or writing to reading. I cook, you eat. I write, you read. I make a video, you fall asleep. I hope not. But what the designer does isn’t to solve the problem of finding the way. What we do is to facilitate people’s own problem solving. Mollerup of course acknowledges that if Wayfinding exists, there also exists the notion of Waylosing. Wayshowing has the ability to excite curiosity. Imagine a child’s excitement at the zoo, at the possibility of coming face to face with their favorite animal. People who pick up on certain bits of exformation create for themselves information out of it. Waylosing would be like noise. We detect these bits of information from Wayshowing through the radar of our human senses in order to help make sense of the world and understand it. But what if our understanding of understanding is deeply flawed?

Cassini Nazir
In a very strange reading called Suggestion About Mysticism in 1910, William James described a feeling of “much at once-ness” and “a tremendous muchness.” James noticed a sort of super abundance in the world around us. Our bodies and brains send a vast amount of information only a small portion of which represents conscious thought. Our brain makes a perceptual con on our behalf. “My experience is what I agreed to attend to,” James noticed. “Only those items which I notice that shaped my mind.”

Cassini Nazir
Our brains never directly experience the world. The brain requires the caravan routes of hormones, enzymes, and proteins which we catalog as touch or taste or smell, to form our experiences. The brain synthesizes the senses into experience. Our senses don’t just make sense of life. They tear apart reality and assemble it into meaningful patterns. The senses feed information to the brain like pieces of a jigsaw. Assemble enough pieces and…

Cassini Nazir
The human body sends a whopping 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing. Now, the processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated by the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and independently confirmed by Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky, at a maximum of 120 bits per second. We’re processing reality at the rate of the slowest modem. Now, let me help you visualize what this means. Suppose this entire viewing area of the video represents the amount of information our body sends to the brain. This represents the processing capacity of our conscious mind. Don’t see it? Here. Let me help you. How’s that? Better? A tremendous amount of compression is taking place if 11 million bits are being reduced to less than 50. This explicitly discarded information, as you know is called exformation. Between our brain and our human senses, a huge amount of exformation is being produced. Let’s take a closer look.

Cassini Nazir
Each of our senses produces a different amount of information. Our eyes produce the most amount of sensory information, about 10 million bits. You can see there’s a huge difference in the order of magnitude between our visual sense and all our other senses. This helps to explain why closing our eyes seems to open up the other senses. When we close our eyes, we suddenly have a larger throughput for the other senses. Close your eyes with me and take a moment to just take in your senses. Notice what you’re touching. Now, you might say I’m not touching anything by which you mean there’s nothing in my hands. But touches much more than what’s in our hands. Are your feet touching the ground? If you’re sitting down, is your chair touching you in a well, rather intimate spot? If you’re wearing clothes, are they also touching your skin? Notice that we explicitly discard so much of our sense of touch. Take a moment to notice what you’re hearing. Can you hear yourself breathe? Is someone mowing the lawn? Do you hear the fan in your room?

Cassini Nazir
Our senses provide a vast amount of information for us. So our brains, as you can see, make a perceptual cut for how we understand and take in that data. Now, you probably learned in school at a young age that we humans have five senses. We have not five senses, but at least nine. And what is and what isn’t a sense is actually rather hard to define. Scientists disagree on an additional 24 senses taking that total number to about 33 that we know of so far. It could very well be 34. Scientists just recently discovered that some humans have the ability to sense their correspondence with the Earth’s magnetic field. Dogs, for example, have this ability. They orient their bodies along the north south axis when they poop. Don’t you?

Cassini Nazir
But no sense does anything independently and listing all 33 this way may actually be counterproductive. Those five senses that you learned as a child are actually exteroceptive senses, how we perceive the world outside our full body. We also have interoceptive senses, how we perceive our internal states, and this includes pain or hunger or thirst. We often don’t even notice these interoceptive senses until they’re out of balance. All of our senses start with some outside influence. The signal produced by the external stimulus is transferred by the brain to the brain by nerve impulses. And in very specific regions in the brain the stimulus is interpreted so that we perceive something from our outside world. Our memories then kick in and we intepret the sensation in the context of our existence, of our past, and of our needs and wants.

Cassini Nazir
Thinking and sensing is a tautology. They’re one and same. You can’t think without sensing. You can’t sense without thinking. Now we usually design information as something of an additive process from the ground up. When we combine the notion of exformation with our human senses, design kind of becomes a subtractive process, like Michelangelo chiseling away at all the unnecessary and setting free the statue that’s inside the marble. If you’re designing information, you are also, without realizing it, designing exformation too. That’s why we focus so much on findabiliy and discoverability. You’re helping people narrow the window of information. But designing information can only take us so far. Your senses of hunger and smell as well as your memories of past food will inform what you choose to have for dinner tonight, more than the information architecture of a menu on which you base your meal choice.

Cassini Nazir
Our experiences appear seamless, when in fact they are quite seamful. The rebus I asked you to create earlier which, by the way I hope you actually created, allow us to travel across borders. Arthur Koestler described intersections of thought contexts as bisociation. We’re going to take this notion and apply it to our human senses. But first, let’s understand a little bit more about bisociation. The design of the Sears Tower in Chicago by Bruce Graham and Fazlur Kahn is often used as a classic example of bisociation. Graham and Kahn were mulling over design concepts for an office tower, and they were discussing the need for a novel approach for what was to be the tallest building in the world. Structurally, they agreed that a series of tubes with a shared wall was an extremely efficient way to support a very tall building. But that approach would also yield a rather bulky mass as compared with the simple steel frames in common use at the time. Graham paused and looked down at the table and his pack of cigarettes and he grabbed a small bundle of them in his fist. Then he proceeded to push and pull them to different heights. In this moment, he realized that if each tube were staggered vertically, both their slenderness and their structural integrity would be preserved. So linking the idea for a skyscraper with a pack of cigarettes, two seemingly unrelated things, prompted this novel concept for the Sears Tower.

Cassini Nazir
Bisociation is connecting two different thought contexts. We travel across the perimeter of each to possibly find verges between the two. Now that you’ve learned a little bit about bsociation, let’s connect them. What if we were to use exformation and bisociation and connect them to our human senses. Quick! Draw an atom. Got it? Did you draw something that looked like this? Or this? Or this? Now have you ever seen an atom with your own eyes? And yet here you are drawing one. What if it were possible to instead of visualize and an atom you could experience an atom?

Cassini Nazir
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s Nanoscape, give us an example of exformation connected to bisociation. When users move their hands over the table of the installation, strong magnetic forces, like repulsion and attraction and even slight shock can be felt. The invisibility of the sculpture is enhanced by the user’s own imaginations and expectations. The user’s mental image of the invisible sculpture becomes the main component. The work goes beyond the real, the fictional, the imaginary, and the virtual and reaches into a purely mental realm. This evokes curiousity, and from curiosity, information. These examples represent the difference between single loop learning and double loop learning. As our world changes, we too have to adapt. Real change happens at the level of understanding. And understanding only happens when we reassess how we suppose the world around us works. Our mental models, like our computers, need software updates to.

Cassini Nazir
Now I know. This talk on exformation has been actually very information dense. And I may have given you a few new words to add to your vocabulary. But let’s be honest, I’ve actually told you very few things you didn’t already know. My talk is really more of a reminder of things we may have forgotten. In this new century, the problems we face won’t be overcome simply by information. Creative thinking, imagination, and yes, even curiosity are important factors to helping us tease out these new possibilities. Exformation is a way that we can help transform information into embodied knowledge. I think we need to be more curious about how what we plop into the world ripples out and changes the lives of people it touches. If we’re truly designing transformative experiences, it’s done not just by information alone We have to make people curious and discover for themselves the transformation.

Cassini Nazir
If you’re interested in contributing to the knowledge of how we as designers can design curiosity, contact me. Let’s chat. In finding and designing information, we hope to also find truth. The Greek word for truth is alítheia. The word is actually made up of two parts. Now you may remember in Greek mythology that the Greeks had a river that you dipped yourself into before your passed into the underworld. The river “Lethe” means “forgetting.” When you put the word “a” in front of it, it means “not.” Alítheia to the Greeks means “not forgetting.” For them it didn’t mean facts or scientifically correct things. Truth to the Greeks were things held in common, a shared understanding. Rather than seeing things face to face, truth meant seeing the world shoulder to shoulder with those in the communities around us.

Cassini Nazir
How might you and I use exformation to create a larger shared understanding? Earlier, I gave you a quote from Winnie the Pooh. Now, you and I, we stopped a few moments to think. Don’t forget to start again. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai