I stumbled across the work of Jonathan Jarvis (@JonathanJarvis) the other day, thanks to my housemate and colleague, @zaqintosh. The idea of creating a "design language", as Jarvis calls it, certainly isn't new. Visualization geniuses like @Stamen (and here), Hans Rosling, Dan Roam and many others have long argued that a visual language is absolutely necessary when it comes to understanding complex information systems. Even when I was at Origo, and we instituted a company-wide policy to take mind-map style notes and meeting sketches, a few of us took to creating our own "visual vocabularies" (as we called them) to help systematize our visual note taking, making them easily understood by anyone.
Goodbye chicken scratch, hello iconography and flow diagrams.I think the most compelling piece of Jarvis' story isn't that we need to create a malleable visual taxonomy - systematizing is a natural step in any language, and visualization is no different. No, the best part of his argument is that a new class of professionals, "New Mediators" as he calls them, will come to supplant - or blend - the previously separate roles of Journalist, Analyst and Designer. I'm curious to see how this plays out - now I'm off to brush up on my After Effects skills, since it looks like I'll be needing them. (image courtesy of Jonathan Jarvis at www.newmediators.com)