Visual Information For Everyday Use

Creating graphical communication for public use represents both a large industry and a fertile area for thoughtful and innovative research and development. In this collection some of the world's figures within the interdisciplinary field of public graphics have been brought together to share their wisdom and present a look at this exciting world. This text is divided into a number of sections representing the rich diversity of concerns embraced by visual information designers. The first section is devoted to these foundational issues before moving on to particular domains of interest within public graphics: user instructions; warnings; forms; tables and graphs; maps and plans; way-finding information; and graphic symbols. This book is designed as a companion for anyone concerned with visual information design, particularly in the context of everyday use. Contributions are included from ergonomists, psychologists, commercial designers and health and safety professionals. The audience reflects these contributions and is pitched at a level which allows it to provide both practical guidelines and a rigorous academic understanding of the field.

Creating graphical communication for public use represents both a large industry and a fertile area for thoughtful and innovative research and development. In this collection some of the world's figures within the interdisciplinary field of public graphics have been brought together to share their wisdom and present a look at this exciting world. This text is divided into a number of sections representing the rich diversity of concerns embraced by visual information designers. The first section is devoted to these foundational issues before moving on to particular domains of interest within public graphics: user instructions; warnings; forms; tables and graphs; maps and plans; way-finding information; and graphic symbols. This book is designed as a companion for anyone concerned with visual information design, particularly in the context of everyday use. Contributions are included from ergonomists, psychologists, commercial designers and health and safety professionals. The audience reflects these contributions and is pitched at a level which allows it to provide both practical guidelines and a rigorous academic understanding of the field.

The four-volume set LNCS 8517, 8518, 8519 and 8520 constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Design, User Experience, and Usability, DUXU 2014, held as part of the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2014, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece in June 2014, jointly with 13 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1476 papers and 220 posters presented at the HCII 2014 conferences were carefully reviewed and selected from 4766 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of Human-Computer Interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The total of 256 contributions included in the DUXU proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this four-volume set. The 69 papers included in this volume are organized in topical sections on design for health; design for reading and learning; design for mobility, transport and safety; design for rural, low literacy and developing communities; design for environment and sustainability; design for human-computer symbiosis.

Information design is an emerging area in technical communication, garnering increased attention in recent times as more information is presented through both old and new media. In this volume, editors Michael J. Albers and Beth Mazur bring together scholars and practitioners to explore the issues facing those in this exciting new field. Treating information as it applies to technical communication, with a special emphasis on computer-centric industries, this volume delves into the role of information design in assisting with concepts, such as usability, documenting procedures, and designing for users. Influential members in the technical communication field examine such issues as the application of information design in structuring technical material; innovative ways of integrating information design within development methodologies and social aspects of the workplace; and theoretical approaches that include a practical application of information design, emphasizing the intersection of information design theories and workplace reality. This collection approaches information design from the language-based technical communication side, emphasizing the role of content as it relates to complexity in information design. As such, it treats as paramount the rhetorical and contextual strategies required for the effective design and transmission of information. Content and Complexity: Information Design in Technical Communication explores both theoretical perspectives, as well as the practicalities of information design in areas relevant to technical communicators. This integration of theoretical and applied components make it a practical resource for students, educators, academic researchers, and practitioners in the technical communication and information design fields.

Visual information retrieval (VIR) is an active and vibrant research area, which attempts at providing means for organizing, indexing, annotating, and retrieving visual information (images and videos) from large, unstructured repositories. The goal of VIR is to retrieve matches ranked by their relevance to a given query, which is often expressed as an example image and/or a series of keywords. During its early years (1995-2000), the research efforts were dominated by content-based approaches contributed primarily by the image and video processing community. During the past decade, it was widely recognized that the challenges imposed by the lack of coincidence between an image's visual contents and its semantic interpretation, also known as semantic gap, required a clever use of textual metadata (in addition to information extracted from the image's pixel contents) to make image and video retrieval solutions efficient and effective. The need to bridge (or at least narrow) the semantic gap has been one of the driving forces behind current VIR research. Additionally, other related research problems and market opportunities have started to emerge, offering a broad range of exciting problems for computer scientists and engineers to work on. In this introductory book, we focus on a subset of VIR problems where the media consists of images, and the indexing and retrieval methods are based on the pixel contents of those images -- an approach known as content-based image retrieval (CBIR). We present an implementation-oriented overview of CBIR concepts, techniques, algorithms, and figures of merit. Most chapters are supported by examples written in Java, using Lucene (an open-source Java-based indexing and search implementation) and LIRE (Lucene Image REtrieval), an open-source Java-based library for CBIR.

Information Design provides citizens, business and government with a means of presenting and interacting with complex information. It embraces applications from wayfinding and map reading to forms design; from website and screen layout to instruction. Done well it can communicate across languages and cultures, convey complicated instructions, even change behaviours. Information Design offers an authoritative guide to this important multidisciplinary subject. The book weaves design theory and methods with case studies of professional practice from leading information designers across the world. The heavily illustrated text is rigorous yet readable and offers a single, must-have, reference to anyone interested in information design or any of its related disciplines such as interaction design and information architecture, information graphics, document design, universal design, service design, map-making and wayfinding.

Completely revised and updated, Evaluation of Human Work is a compendium of ergonomics methods and techniques that is both broad and deep. The editors have once again brought together a team of world-renowned experts and created a forum for them to introduce their most valued techniques and methods. Almost every chapter has been revised and several new chapters have been added. See what’s new in the Third Edition: Sociotechnical design of work systems Team design and evaluation Learning from failures through a joint cognitive systems perspective The Analysis of organizational processes Techniques in user-centered design Increased understanding of the nature of knowledge and knowledge management in contemporary systems Environment surveys Systems for near miss reporting and analysis The one thing that has remained unchanged from the first and second editions is that this text is produced NOT as a cookbook of ergonomics methods. The editor places ergonomics methodology in context, and each chapter carefully describes the background to method development in that area and the application of methods and tools. Exploring the topic of ergonomics/human factors from a ‘doing it’ perspective, the book serves as a guide to what ergonomics can offer industry, business, or human service professionals and a reference for practicing ergonomists.

A technical discussion that includes theory, research, and application, this book describes warning design standards and guidelines; aspects of law relevant to warnings such as government regulations, case/trial litigation, and the role of expert testimony in these cases; and international, health/medical, and marketing issues. Broken into thirteen major sections, the chapters cover theory, research, applications, and law, and many different perspectives on topics associated with warnings. The Selected Applications and Case Studies section highlights topics of interest and gives real world examples of problems and their solutions. No other book gives a more comprehensive treatment. This text will appeal to those whose study, work, or research concerns the design of hazard communications by linguistic, symbolic, and auditory means. The blending of research, theory, and applications also make the book attractive to safety engineers, health and medical professionals, occupational safety specialists, consumer product and industrial equipment designers, government regulators of consumer products and industrial safety, documentation writers, and plaintiff and defense attorneys involved in product- and premises-liability claims.