IIID conversation: Between ritual and reality

The series of IIID Conversations is an online forum for (information) designers to meet and exchange experiences. This time Karel van der Waarde will interview the Australian author David Sless about the book "A New Semiotics - An Introductory Gude for Students" (co-authored by Ruth Shrensky).

"Today I feel like a lone meteorologist in a community of rainmakers: excellent at digital rituals, but weak on rainmaking." - David Sless

Back in 1985, funded by major institutions, Communication Research Institute pioneered an Information design research program, helping over three hundred public and commercial organisations to improve their communication with citizens, clients, and consumers., leading to improvements in productivity, public relations, and ROI, while reducing complaints.

But now with radical changes in organisations the methods and knowledge has been lost, replaced by digital token gestures, ritual displays passing for information.

For the future we need both rainmakers and meteorologists; token gestures have their use, but we also need the best information design available for public communication by institutions and organisations.

Our collaborative Publishing Program is designed to help.

For the past 50 years, David Sless, the director of Director of Communication Research Institute (CRI), often in collaboration with government, industry, and his colleagues at the CRI, has pioneered methods for designing public documents—such as forms, notices, bills, labels, instructions, and websites—that improve communication between organizations and the public. A leader in information design, Sless has achieved notable successes, including a redesign of telecommunications bills that resulted in record customer satisfaction and establishing global benchmarks for product instruction design in medicine labels. He co-developed Australia’s Industry Code of Practice for non-prescription medicine labeling, creating some of the world’s most user-friendly labels.

Alongside this work, Sless, with Dr. Ruth Shrensky, has contributed to semiotics and communication theory, proposing a simplified approach to human communication that marks a significant paradigm shift, influencing the future education of the field.