Jan

Experience = Wisdom

I want to understand how to understand, and how to help others understand.

In learning how to do this I found Richard Wurman’s article “The Business of Understanding” to be very useful and clear. It was also helpful to look at Nathan Shedroff’s article “Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory” to understand what Wurman had read and was informed by.

As I reviewed these articles, The method by which people understand the best was in bold, all capital letters for me. EXPERIENCE. People learn by understanding an experience that they’ve been through or an experience that they have heard about happening to someone or something else. How do we as information designers relate an experience? Through STORYTELLING. Richard Wurman writes, “One of the best ways of communicating knowledge is through stories, because good stories are richly textured with details, allowing the narrative to convey a stable ground on which to build the experience” (http://spuinfodesign.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/nathan-shedroff.pdf). Let’s be honest. People listen to, understand, and remember things that are INTERESTING. What I find that people are most interested in is REAL LIFE. Things that relate to them, things that effect them, and things that speak to them personally. By telling stories and relating experiences, people can relate the stories to experiences they have had or an experience that they wish they had. By doing this, we connect with our viewers on a personal level.

Why is it important to let our viewers connect to our work on a personal level? Wurman and Shedroff both explain that when we connect with people on a personal level by giving them experiences, it produces a kind of “meta-knowldege”(Shedroff. http://spuinfodesign.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/nathan-shedroff.pdf) called WISDOM. Shedroff explains that wisdom is the product of “contemplation, evaluation, retrospection, and interpretation—all of which are particularly personal processes.” From my perspective, knowledge represents everything that people have tried to teach me that has no impact on how I live my life; Wisdom represents those small pieces of knowledge that related to my life and how I should go about tomorrow.

In thinking about this and how to go about helping the quest to end poverty and hunger, I want to give people an experience that they remember as a turning point in their life. I want for my work, my design, my words, to not just give someone the knowledge about what they should do, but to give them the wisdom to go do it.

12 years ago Short URL Comments

information designers/information interaction design/nathan shedroff/personal level/retrospection/unified field theory

Jan

Poverty & Hunger

For the purpose of this class and our projects, I chose to research the Global Millennium Goal One of Poverty & Hunger. This issue is so broad because many of the worlds problems are born from simply not having resources or a means to change the way things are. It is also critically important to understand how we define poverty as David Woodward explains in his article “How Poor is Too Poor”. The United Nations defines poor as living off of “a dollar a day” (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/poverty.shtml), while David Woodward describes that living on a dollar a day in Britain would be the “equivalent to 35 people living on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on”(How Poor is Too Poor). Woodward also makes the point that a dollar a day is pretty arbitrary because the cost of living is different in different countries. We cannot say that the same amount of money can buy the same amount of food in every country. I would like to do some research on the cost of living in different countries and how the value of their currency changes how many U.S. dollars they could live off of for day.

For the United Nations, their goals were to:

1. Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day

2. Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people

3. Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger

(We Can End Poverty, http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/MDG_FS_1_EN.pdf)

In the same article, “We Can End Poverty” the U.N. states that the world is on track to meet goal number one. For goal number three, the article states that the amount of people suffering from hunger is decreasing but not at the rate that they had hoped. The U.N. does not say wether they are on target to meet the second goal but they do say that “the UN Development Programme (UNDP) is supporting the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Em- ployment Guarantee Scheme which provides a right to a minimum of 100 days of paid work a year for land- less laborers and marginal farmers, benefiting some 46 million households” (We Can End Poverty, http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/MDG_FS_1_EN.pdf). The article includes that almost half of the people that benifit from this are women, which would help to meet goal number two.

Personally, I am interested in how whole regions become so stricken by poverty and hunger for so long, like parts of Africa. Why do the people get trapped in this pattern of devastation which leads to so many other problems like a lack of education and then major health problems and early deaths. What will it take for a child, born into a poor family, to break loose from the pattern? Or a whole country to be free from being deemed as “the worlds poorest nation”?

12 years ago Short URL Comments