Information Design – The Next Academic Frontier
Lecture by Dino Karabeg,
Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of Oslo
Information is the theme of the day, so much so that we call our historical era
Information Age. However, the changes that the Information Age has brought us so far
have largely been restricted to information technology. I believe that the Information
Age will truly begin only when we shift focus from information technology to
information itself. It is obvious that the new information technology makes it possible to
create new kinds of information. But what those new kinds of information are and what
purposes they will serve, that we have only begun to anticipate. As this lecture will
show, information has the capacity to profoundly change our lives and culture and to
benefit us far more than it has been the case before. But to fulfill that promise,
information needs to be consciously designed.
I have proposed the Polyscopic Modeling general-purpose information design
methodology as a model or a prototype of a new informing. This lecture will survey the
Polyscopic Modeling methodology by outlining its motivation, principles, criteria,
terminology, techniques and sample results.
By describing these initial steps in this new field I would also like to submit that
information design - the art and science of designing information - is at this moment what
computer science was fifty years ago and what nuclear physics was at the last turn of the
century: An emerging discipline, an academic frontier, an area where substantial
development with large impact is about to take place.
The lecturer
Dino Karabeg started his professional life as a research assistant at the Rudjer Boskovic
Institute in Zagreb. Following a doctorate in computer science (algorithm theory) at the
University of California at San Diego and several research and teaching appointments in
the USA and France he accepted an Associate Professorship at the Institute of
Informatics, University of Oslo in 1992. Since then he has been developing a
comprehensive system of ideas about basic issues in information and culture under the
common name information design by polyscopic modeling, which are now being written
up and published as research articles and books.