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Crete, Knossos Palace, council room. Around 1800 BC.

Information design is an ethically motivated
approach to designing. It is ethical because it
recognizes the people addressed as different
from the groups that create the communications.
Awareness of the differences, however, is
indispensable but insufficient. It motivates the
approach, but to execute it in an effective manner
it becomes necessary to engage in user research.
User research includes many aspects and
involves many methods, tools and approaches
that help overcome our usual ignorance about
the real nature of other people, their motivations,
their sensitivities, their needs, their perceptions,
their possibilities and their limitations.

There are two basic modes of user research in
design: a) bibliographic, studying the perceptual,
cognitive, cultural, behavioural and psychologi-
cal issues involved in communication, as well as
the kind of problem confronted; and b) interper-
sonal, interviewing, observing, working together,
meeting and analysing people in action.

As designers that craft messages to be de-
ployed in the public space, we have to be aware
that our messages operate at two levels. One is
conscious, and is the reason why a project comes
to be: a need that has been perceived, identified
and defined, and that has to be satisfied. The
other is not conscious, and is connected to the
way in which the communication is planned and
crafted. Ways of communicating create models
that eventually become assumptions and habits.
Arespectful way of communicating creates a par-
adigm that leads to positive processes of social-
ization. The forms of things express the beliefs of
the makers and affect people's behaviour. Aclear

example is the comparison between the throne
of the king of Knossos, a product of a minimally
hierarchical commercial society (Figure 1), and
the throne of Napoleon (Figure 2), a strongly hi-
erarchical one. The difference between the seat
for the leader and the seats for the members of
council says a lot about the power differences
they represent, and also affect the behaviour of
the room users. [1][2]

The same happens with information design:
visual appearances elicit immediate emotional
reactions. One feels welcome or put-off. This
happens all the time with contracts, govern-
ment forms, or many other legal documents
whose content and presentation are cognitively
and visually overwhelming. The visualization
of information conditions our feelings and our
behaviours: a bad solution to an information
design problem (medicine leaflet, Figure 3) isnot
information design, because it does not support
reading and understanding, hence it does not
facilitate access to information, nor does it sup-
portmemorization and use. In addition, it makes
users feel incompetent or visually impaired.

A good solution to an information design
problem (UK railway timetable, figure 4) is in
formation design, because it supports quick ref-
erence, has a comprehensible code, and comes
in atype-size that responds to optometric values
for comfortable reading.

Human-centred, ethical and empathic design
takes form in matters of principle, but also ina
number of micro decisions that aim at facilitating
the users tasks, making information accessible,
attractive, relevant, readable, understandable,

Paris: Napoleon’s Throne. Early 19th Century.

complete, accurate, timely and usable [3] This
involves considerations of human perception [4]
[5] attention [6], cognition [7], reading [8], learn-
ing [9] [10] and behaviour, just to mention the
more important factors. These considerations
affect type selection [11] [12] [13], type size [14],
[15] [16] [17], layout, line length [18], visual hi-
erarchies, language [19], information chunking
[20], information sequence, language editing,
use of color [21] [22], use of images, relations
between images and text [23], document type,
document size, and medium. Design decisions
are developed in an iterative process that begins
with a participatory approach to studying the
problem and planning the design response, and
reaches maximum interaction during the devel-
opment and testing of prototypes.

The first issue to think about when undertaking
a project is its relevance. Does the project
matter? Does it matter to users, to the commu-
nity, to society? Relevance is a key issue in the
ethics of design.

Once that point is taken care of, my approach
to design focuses on impact, not on objects; on
performance, not on looks. Our task as design-
ers is not that of “form-givers,” a term popu-
larized as a direct translation from the German

“Gestalter,” which now translates as “designer.”
Objects, looks and forms are means that have to
be used to help achieve the objectives pursued.
One has to master them, but they are not the
focus of designing. The focus of designing is to
achieve the change one is pursuing, a change that