Information Design in the Digital Age

From the first Sumerian pictographs on clay tablets to today's technological developments the goal is basically the same - to transmit a message. The development of our current methods of communication truly make the earth seems like a smaller place.

The Digital Age, also called the Information Age and more recently the Wireless Age, defines the period of time in which the movement of information has become faster than physical movement. By some definitions, the Information Age actually began during the latter half of the 19th century with the invention of the telephone and telegraph.

The digital revolution transformed technology that previously used analog transmission, into a binary representation of ones and zeros. Digitizing a signal dramatically increases the ways it can be enhanced, copied, or altered.

In digital communications, for example, repeating hardware amplifies and repeats the digital signal with no loss of information to create larger networks.

In many fields, such as film, music, and publishing, the digitization revolutionized the manner in which the products were created, marketing and distributed. Intellectual property has become a hot issue, as any digitized creative work is much easier to copy and reuse. Storage of these assets also changed dramatically, from analog storage devices such as phonograph records, audio cassettes and film to a binary format which could be stored on increasingly smaller devices such as zip drives, CDs, DVDs, flash drives, iPods, and more. Probably the most dramatic effect of digitized assets is the ability to copy them easily to different storage formats, and to access or distribute them remotely.

The digital revolution goes far beyond the entertainment industry. Current digital communication and media systems are merging. These systems were once considered separate and distinct. As businesses convert all their data to a digital format the traditional business processes change dramatically. Digitized information is transforming the world of communication in a manner similar to the changes brought about by the printing press. More information for more people instantaneously and simultaneously.

Current technological advances such as mobile phones, high speed connections, Voice Over IP, and others, bring more changes in the way that people communicate.

However, although information is produced and transmitted more quickly than any time in recorded history, the shelf life of information becomes more fragile.

For more than 4500 years Sumerian clay tablets have remained intact. Books, newspapers, books, film reels, video tapes and cassettes corrode and disentigrate over time. Digitalization of information has changed our ability to share information dramatically, but it is not an answer for the information-fragility problem. Digital data is not usable without a device to access it. •