Infomation/Instructional Design

Information/Instructional Design:

Information design, also known as communication design, is a rapidly growing discipline that draws on typography, graphic design, applied linguistics, applied psychology, applied ergonomics, computing, and other fields. It emerged as a response to people's need to understand and use such things as forms, legal documents, signs, computer interfaces, technical information and operating/assembly instructions. Information designers responding to these needs have achieved major economic and social improvements in information use. Information Design is a field and approach to designing clear, understandable communications by giving care to structure, context, and presentation of data and information. As a field, its principles relate to all communications products and experiences, regardless of medium (print, broadcast, digital, online, etc.). Information Design is, primarily, concerned with clarity (instead of simplicity) and understanding.

Source

The city rail network map is a good example of information Design. as it takes a lot of infomation and turns it into an image that is clear and easily understood by commuters

Instructional Design

Interactive Design

Interactive Design:

Interaction Design is a field and approach to designing interactive experiences. These could be in any medium (such as live events or performances, products, services, etc.) and not only digital media. Interactive experiences, necessarily, require time as an organizing principle 9though not exclusively) and Interactive Design is concerned with a user, customer, audience, or participant's experience flow through time. Interactivity should not be confused with animation in which objects may move on a screen. Interactivity is concerned with being part of the action of a system or performance and not merely watching the action passively.

Dan Saffer offers a definition of interaction design. To quote:

Interaction design is the art of facilitating or instigating interactions between humans (or their agents), mediated by products. By interactions, I mostly mean communication, either one-on-one (a telephone call), one-to-many (blogs), or many-to-many (the stock market). The products an interaction designer creates can be digital or analog, physical or incorporeal or some combination thereof.

This Mcdonalds website allows the user to interact with the different menus and options through a cleverly designed site.

Web 2.0

Web too-point-oh:

The one-sided, read-only Web 1.0 is at its end: Web 2.0 is upon us. This new paradigm, where participants contribute as well as listen, write as well as read, and influence as well as be influenced, is changing web design in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. source

Web 2.0 is basically a second generation of the WWW that allows for greater interactivity and offers more up to date services and greater dynamics for participants. Sometimes called the "New Internet," Web 2.0 is not a specific technology; rather, it refers to two major paradigm shifts. The one most often acknowledged is "user-generated content," which relates more to individuals. The second, which is equally significant, but more related to business, is "thin client computing."

User-generated content, comprised of blogs, wikis and social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, let everyone have their say on anything and publish it to the world at large. As Web applications become more sophisticated, people can easily develop elaborate personal Web pages, create a blog, and upload their own opinions, audio and video. Users are augmenting the news by reporting current events sometimes faster and with details often overlooked or ignored by the professional news media.

In thin client computing, data and applications are stored on Web servers, and a user has access from any computer via a Web browser. Many believe that thin client computing will eventually supplant locally installed office and other applications and that turning the Web into a gigantic application server is the ultimate manifestation of Web 2.0.

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