Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Lost stories: On the power of taking a historical perspective

I read today a great article on the Lost Stories in the Information Design History by  GK Van Patter, one of the co-founder of Humantific's (a Sense Making and Change Making Consultancy) website.

The article presents the work of an early visual thinker, yet mostly unknown: William Brinton (1880-1957) and his book Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts published in 1917, which includes the main principles and methods used up to now in infograpics and data visualization. Not only the work of Brinton is very interesting for those interested in visual thinking and infographics, but what I really appreciate was the historical perspective taken in this post.

Van Patter writes: "Some historical landmarks are well known to many, while others remain off most radar screens, especially to new generations. Particularly online, we notice a general lack of historical awareness and crediting in many current data visualization, design and innovation-related discussions." 

From this, he concludes:
"At Humantific, we have significant interest in the forgotten stories, lost stories, and off-the-beaten-path landmarks of sensemaking and changemaking history, as they have the potential to inform present day understanding significantly."

I was very excited to see this approach embraced by a consultancy as it is very close to the perspective we took to investigate the role of writing in our book, but a perspective which does not always seem relevant to all, in particular in a world where "not everyone wants to acknowledge that each generation tends to learn from, build on, or divert from the previous generation’s ideas and output."