understandable, it became easier to monitor blood sugar levels and manage insulin, while also reducing the chance of making a mistake. But the chart was still just a part, albeit a central part, of living with diabetes.
Or take privacy policies as another example. How often, in the course of a month, do you agree to an app’s “Terms of Service”? Or what about your bank’s annual privacy notice, or the last employee agreement you signed? How often do you read all the terms and conditions? And if you have, did you understand the binding legal terms you agreed to? The phrase “I have read, understand, and agree to the terms ...” has been called the biggest lie on the Internet.1 We have all committed this lie and for good reason. Terms of service documents are dozens of pages long and written in legalese. They can only be understood with significant effort. In one study, researchers asked people to sign up for early access to a new social networking site. The site didn’t exist, but it had a convincing home page and a sign-up process based on the design of Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites. The privacy policy and terms of service were modified from actual LinkedIn documents.2 The privacy policy told users that, if asked, the site would share any user data requested with the government, including the NSA and other intelligence agencies. Some 97% of people accepted the policy. The terms of service document was more brazen. It required all users to “immediately assign their first-born” child to the company, including unborn children through the year 2050, and that accepting the terms meant said children automatically became company property—“No exceptions.” Of the 543 people who signed up, 93% agreed to the terms. Too long—should’ve read it.
FIGURE 1.3 Making sense of information is like assembling pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Think of these legal documents, or the knitting tutorials, or any other information, as a jigsaw puzzle (see Figure 1.3). All of the raw information we might need is there—pieces of the puzzle—waiting to be assembled into something coherent. With some effort, it is possible to understand the content of these documents in their original form. In some cases, it’s simply a matter of fitting the pieces together. In other cases, it means transforming the information into some new form that makes sense, adapting the information to yourself, your situation, your particular needs—precisely what Stephen did with the diabetes chart. The legalese of privacy policies makes this difficult, even mind-numbingly so, but it can be done. Such documents should be more understandable since they have legal implications. Yet we should also acknowledge their complexity and accept that understanding them will never be as simple as interpreting the red, yellow, and green of a traffic light.
We have grown so used to “problems of understanding” (as we’ll call them) that it can be hard to even see them as problems. Like fish unaware of the water in which they swim, we often go through life, accustomed to or unaware of these problems of understanding. We do not always realize the ways in which we can solve this puzzle and create understanding. We joke about incomprehensible privacy policies. We expect medical explanations to be confusing. We’re frustrated by confusing parking signs. But all these things, and more, can be understood and, more precisely, can be made understandable.
Information Is a Resource
We tend to think of information as an object, some thing, however ephemeral, that was created to inform: a newspaper story, a podcast episode, an airline ticket, a restaurant menu, a privacy policy, or a street sign telling us if, when, and where we can park. In this book, we will take a somewhat different view. We will treat information as a resource—more like wheat than bread. Wheat is a resource from which we can make bread, or the crust for a cherry pie, or paper mâché. By treating information as a resource, as raw material rather than a finished product, we give ourselves permission to transform it into a shape that aids understanding and makes us better thinkers.
“Information must be that which leads to understanding,” wrote the designer Richard Saul Wurman in the late 1980s, an era that was, even then, concerned about information overload.3 Information that failed to inform was merely data, he argued, but as data, it became a malleable material through which understanding could be created. “What constitutes information to one person may be data to another,” Wurman explained, and “if it doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t qualify for the appellation.”4
In this book, we will also take the perspective that information is understandable in relation to people and their needs. This means that information may be perfectly understandable to some people and, at the same time, perfect gobbledy-gook to others. But unlike Wurman and many others, we will avoid fretting over the distinction between information and data (as well as how information and data relate to knowledge and wisdom).5 For our purposes, there is simply information. And how understandable some information is depends on who is using it and what they need it for. The privacy policy is information to lawyers and judges since they are trained to read and write documents in that style. For the rest of us, it is also information; it’s just information in a form that befuddles us. Even so, information can be made understandable, or at least more understandable, and in the coming pages, we will explore the ways that this happens as we adapt, modify, and transform information to our needs.
To be sure, it’s infuriating when we need information to be clear and it isn’t. We should expect more from the information in our lives, especially when it comes from experts and professionals. But we should also remember that nobody can predict, or control, how information will be used. This does not absolve those who produce information as a shoddy, disorganized, and baffling mess. The diabetes chart should not endanger. The terms of service should not obfuscate. But we should neither abdicate, nor overlook, how understanding also depends on what we, as we seek to understand, bring to the table. When we have information, we always do something as we figure it out.
Consider this very book. As authors, we want to be understood. We wrote and rewrote the manuscript (ad nauseam, it often seemed) to hone our ideas and clarify our prose. Yet we also knew it would never be perfectly understandable and, more importantly, we knew that you, the reader, would do things to create your own understanding. You might mark interesting passages, perhaps with a pencil or a sticky note. You might write in the margins to say “don’t quite get it” or “Huh?!” or “great example!”6 You will, almost for sure, use a bookmark instead of remembering the current page in your head. We hope you’ll discuss the book with friends and colleagues, perhaps as part of a book club. And if you are a designer, or anyone whose work requires producing information in any form, we hope you will do all this, and more, as you wrestle with applying the concepts to your understanding projects. We wrote this book to give you information and understanding, but these pages cannot do that well if you just scan your eyes over the words. Understanding information demands more from you than consumption.
Understanding often means adjusting the balance between the information you have and the understanding you need. In some cases, this balance should be strongly tipped toward writers, graphic designers, podcasters, filmmakers, and anyone who creates information, even if it’s just a lunch menu or a yard sale poster. When you create information, you should always strive to make it understandable.
Yet this always comes with a cost, whether that cost is time and effort or learning new tools and developing better skills. It often means establishing a process for testing information with the intended audience, evaluating how well it is understood, and iterating until it reaches an acceptable level of understanding. This book, for example, was reviewed by many people (to whom we are wildly grateful) and from that we retooled much of the manuscript, followed by more reviews, editing, and revisions.
This balance also tips the other way. Understanding doesn’t happen like Neo in The Matrix; we don’t plug
