Berger, who collaborated on the book with designer Bruce Mau, suggests that design can be applied to any challenge and design principles are accessible to anyone. Here are few Q&A excerpts from the very interesting article.

CNN: How can design change the world?

Berger: When people talk about design changing the world, it tends to sound a little grand and ridiculous, because they think of design as, in one fell swoop, changing the world and solving our problems. What design actually can do, it can solve problems on a case-by-case basis around the world. As it does that, it changes the world, because it changes the reality for people wherever the situation is happening.

If design can change water delivery in a certain part of the world, then it changes that part of the world for those people. That’s the way design changes the world.

CNN: Information is just about everywhere, it seems. How does data visualization fit into the premise of your book?

Berger: Making things clear to people is such an important part of design. And data visualization is really an important part of that, as is any kind of visual design. Really, I think what design is trying to do is to show you something so that you understand it. If it’s trying to educate you on a problem, it needs to show you the problem in a way that is compelling and that makes it very clear to you.

CNN: The striking thing about data visualization is that it seems, almost, a new way of looking at the world around us.

Berger: It’s all about making sense of what would ordinarily be overwhelming to us. There’s so much going on around us. There’s so much information that you need to have certain things arranged and highlighted so that you know what to focus on.

The people who study this, who study visualization and the way the mind absorbs information, what they say is that the brain is always looking to figure out what’s important, what should I be focusing on. And it sometimes has trouble. Your eye kind of goes all over the place, and it doesn’t know where to look or where to stop and focus.

What designers do is that they try to get you to focus where you’re supposed to focus. Now, of course, they could also do that in a bad way.

“Part philosopher, part sociologist and entirely humanist, he studied tribes in Brazil and North America, concluding that virtually all societies shared powerful commonalities of behavior and thought, often expressing them in myths,” explained Thomas H. Maugh II for the LA Times.

“A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of ’structuralism,’ a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations,” Edward Rothstein wrote for the New York Times.  “His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France.  And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.”

In a review of Levi-Strauss’ books, Larry Rohter wrote, “To the layman, much of the debate between structuralists and existentialists, which raged from the 1950s into the 1980s, now seems incomprehensible, if not sterile and outdated. But no matter what one thinks of Mr. Lévi-Strauss and his theories, it is hard today to undertake the serious study of anthropology, ethnology, sociology, philosophy or linguistics without at least acknowledging him or trying to debunk him.”

The Fourth International Conference on Design Principles and Practices well be held at the University of Illinois, Chicago from February 13^th to 15^th, 2010. The cross-disciplinary conference will cover a range of design themes such as the “meaning and purpose of ‘design’, as well as speaking in grounded ways about the task of design and the use of designed artifacts and processes.”

Researchers, teachers and practitioners will discuss the nature and future of design while incorporating theoretical and the empirical topics, research and design applications,  and address market pragmatics and social idealism.

“Its role is to advance the outcomes of design research through a variety of mechanisms including knowledge transfers, external partnerships, publications, symposia, exhibitions and other forms of dissemination. DRI’s research encompasses work in a variety of fields ranging from textiles to industrially manufactured items and from communications design to craft-based artefacts,” the school explains.

For more information on it’s program and classes go to http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/research/centre/dri.

Equally interesting (to me) is the visualization of songs and how they are connected (see image).

From Musicovery

Musicovery.com is the first interactive and personalized webradio enabling its users to generate in  a few clicks a musical programme adapted to the various listening situations and their preferences.

A virtual remote control allows the auditor to navigate among a variety of moods and styles of music.

According to his mood or atmosphere sought, he may drive at any time his music listening experience guided by his intuition. The more he listened to the service, the more it gets personalized.

The service is accessible also on mobile and is expected to be compatible progressively universally with most devices (mobile phones, TV, PDA, players,…), and accessible everywhere.

The first session runs from Monday, December 28^th, 2009 until Friday, January 1^st, 2010. The second session takes place from Monday, January 18^th to Friday, January 22^nd, 2010.