Time flies when you’re having fun, or in this case working like a busy bee to get the projects done before the summer holiday season begins. Add shopping for a new job and for a new apartment and finalising a degree at the University to the list and see how the “remember to blog” post-it note is the first one to be scrapped.
So, to show that I haven’t completely forgotten TC2.0, I thought that I’d put together a little blog entry combining my core competence with my extracurricular interest, spiced with an international aspect.
In Wikipedia, information design is defined as “the art and science of preparing information so that it can be used by human beings with efficiency and effectiveness.” Naturally, any human being anywhere in the world must be given the possibility to use the information with the same efficiency and effectiveness. This means that the information design must be international.
Making the information design international means that your information plan or [insert-name-of-design-document] shows the requirements from everywhere in the world: legal texts for France, That text input for Thailand, disclaimers for Brazil, warranties for North America – whatever the requirements are in your business area.
Adding this required information can, of course, be handled with checklists from the various regions or countries that have something to add to your “plain” information design, but this approach leaves something to be desired. After receiving the requirements, you may not be able to understand them or may not know where to place them in your information plan. There will be lots of e-mails flying back and forth, which can be frustrating and prone to the “it’s in her inbox and she’s on holiday for five weeks” communication gaps.
But how about using something more 2.0? Create your information plan in a wiki.
Wikis, naturally, are built to support collaborative editing. Anyone can see the who, when and why of an edited piece of text. You, the original information designer, can create the original information plan wiki page and then let the real specialists in the regions/countries to add the information that they need to the correct place in your information plan.
Over time, the original information plan wiki page could grow into a web of wiki pages where the requirements are in their correct place and form wiki pages themselves with additional information on the requirement, its implementation in different projects, and so on.
I’m not saying that this approach would be free of problems. But it’s worth a try, as much as a spreadsheet or a document filled with requirements.
Filed under: information design, web 2.0
