This is the best-known quote from Otto Neurath, designer, activist, economist and social scientist.  Neurath directed graphic designer Gerd Arntz and others in the 1930s and 1940s in the development of a universal pictorial language called Isotype.  Neurath’s vision for Isotype was a language made entirely of pictures that could bridge social divides and disseminate statistical and scientific information to the widest audience possible.  Today you can browse a great deal of the Isotype images online at gerdarntz.org or visit the collection at the Municipal Museum at the Hague, Netherlands.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with my books on Arntz and Neurath lately, particularly a catalog from an exhibition called ‘Lovely Language’ that was in Amsterdam in 2008.  The catalog explains that one of the reasons you don’t see Isotype or some other pictorial language as a successful international language is the different cultural associations that a sign takes on depending where it is.  The exhibition catalog offers a great example of this figure-ground relationship:

‘Take the sign that we in the west consider universal, the pictogram for man.  This simple outline of a (male) human being turns out to be not so universal when imported in India.  There, the Sikh community interprets the figure not as a neutral sign for ‘man’, but as the depiction of a naked man.  Male Sikhs wear a turban and a loin cloth – that is as naked as they get outside the strict confines of their bathrooms.  So the detailing of the pictogram changes, in order to make it “neutral” once again in the new cultural context.’

Not too long ago I heard Rachel Hinman of Nokia speak on the same ‘figure-ground’ subject, but in the context of mobile interface development for a rural Indian audience.  While we all find our iPhones so remarkably intuitive that we don’t even need an instruction manual in the US, we have years of cultural context and conditioning that informed all of the design decisions that went into that product.  In a different context, the conditioning would be different, and a successful product would likely look quite different.

I’m writing about all of this here because I think the grand, idealistic, unifying schemes of Neurath can be informative in the design process for the Digital Public Library of America.  It is widely accepted that the 4000+ images Arntz created for Neurath’s Isotype are beautiful and still individually useful, but in today’s networked, global information economy there are simply too many nuanced cultural considerations for an entirely pictographic language to communicate well.  The goal of this DPLA is to make the digital collections of America’s libraries, museums and other cultural institutions accessible and useful to people of all different backgrounds across this country.  The diversity and enormity of the target user group is astounding… because they are the same target that Neurath was aiming to communicate with: EVERYONE.

That said, I think that linked data and the semantic web present us with a whole new set of opportunities as we build large scale web-based platforms, and I think assuming that a project on the scale of Neurath’s Isotype couldn’t succeed now is wrong.  The proliferation of predictive interfaces and filtered information displays based on available data about who you are, where you are, and what your preferences are is a banal reality.  Remember when you were surprised that the advertisements in your gmail were targeted at you based on the contents of your emails?  Tip of the iceberg.  Take the earlier example from the ‘Lovely Language’ catalog and put it on the web.  The western pictogram for a man has a skewed meaning in the Sikh community of India, but there is no problem displaying one image for the user who accesses a web page in the US and another image for a user who accesses the same page in India.  On the web, we can correct and ‘neutralize’ Isotype for different cultural scenarios automatically.

My previous post described a scenario in which a librarian was able to manipulate and redisplay objects and commentary objects from a vast DPLA database based on the needs of their local users.  One of the goals I had in mind was making this curatorial process as easy as possible so that the barrier-of-entry would be low for a librarian who might not be technically inclined.  The “Don’t Make Me Think” approach is key in making this DPLA dashboard something that will be used.  What I’m describing here is a means of offering a default display format for a particular end user group based on a series of criteria that would be identified in the DPLA design process.  These defaults could be overridden, but the convenience of automating some parts of the UI based on rules would be desirable.  The dashboard should be powerful under the hood, and highly configurable for an advanced user, but ideally it would default to a sensible display if the librarian chose not to tweak a lot of things.

Thoughts anyone?  While the idea of automated display defaults based on location or the type of institution showing the DPLA objects may seem minor I do think it is important to consider.