The information design summer school is a part-time course run by The Simplification Centre that provides hands on teaching of information design theory and practice. I joined a part of the 2021 cohort which was the first time they had run the course online as a result of the pandemic.
This was one of the best courses I have ever taken as a designer and I would highly recommend the experience to anyone interested in digging deeper into information design. The course is wonderfully curated by Rob Waller and combines a great mix of expert tuition, homework exercises and a live brief for students to collaborate on.
The live brief we were given, to put the information theory we had been taught into practice, was to design a leaflet for families who have loved ones suffering from Delerium. We were put in touch with two experts on the topic who explained the challenges of diagnosing and differentiating delerium from more commonly understood conditions like dementia.
Our team came up with an illustrative idea that also took inspiration from zines to create a practical resource that could be printed locally and function as both a foldable leaflet and a poster.
I was also able to conduct some user testing of our concept within the short time frame we had been given. I reached out to colleagues at work to find people who had experience of dementia. I put the leaflet into a simple Jamboard template and asked them to highlight which parts of the leaflet made them feel more of less confident about the information.
A Google Jamboard used for remote testing of the leaflet design.
Although I felt I knew quite a lot about information design going into the summer school, and I had the benefit of being practioner with respect to a lot of the design topics we discussed, I still feel like I learnt a lot. The tuition and handouts were great and the live project brief was the icing on the cake.