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.