IAC23
Non-information. Dark UI patterns. Misinformation. Unclear terms of use. Misuse of personal data. Our sources of information have shifted from editor-supervised to algorithm-derived, and expanded. Published in 1989 and 2001, Information Anxiety and Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman spoke of the deluge of “bits” and proposed solutions including the importance of a questioning and curious human perspective and the need for human control of the bits. Controlling the bits can be interpreted to mean people shaping their use of information tools, serving as editors of their experiences and taking control of algorithms through settings. Configuring tools requires understanding complex product and ecosystem models. The curiosity required to bend the bits to our world view is on constant call and the transparency needed to exert control is increasingly obscure.
Catherine D’Ignazio and Laura F. Klein wrote about the “god trick” in their book Data Feminism in 2020. The god trick is the appearance of neutrality. It comes up when I am teaching interactive information design and when someone realizes items of content they interact with and considered information are of questionable or unknown origin, and not information at all. It extends to messages and alerts that are not from who they appear to be, or that coerce. Students come to realize that they are numb to the quantity and quality of these noninformational and worse “bits” that they are exposed to. They realize that they spend their leisure time absently managing these bits – deleting spam while watching a movie after work, and that these micro interactions can leave a quiet numbing residue.
I argue that the god trick is an information architecture problem, and that we need to expand our influence to address it.
Tania is a human-centered design leader, researcher, educator and author. She teaches information and interaction design at Northeastern University. Her professional experience includes leading design in the product development group at the Harvard University Institute for Quantitative Social Science, co-founding the Boston UX firm Nimble Partners and working with clients including kayak.com, Napster, MIT and Oracle and defining service offerings and leading professional service designers at web personalization software pioneer ATG. Tania has a MDes in human-centered communication design from the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology and a BFA from Boston University.