Info design in The West Wing

I'm currently revisiting an old series of the West Wing, and found a nice reference to the power of information design - or at least map design.

It's this episode, Somebody's going to emergency, somebody's going to jail. The (geeky) Organisation of Cartographers for Social Equality turn up at the White House, much to the derision of all. But when they put forward their case for using the Gall-Peters projection of the world in schools, rather than the Mercator projection, the cynical White House staff are astonished - and not a little freaked out. There's a nice discussion of the issue on the wikipedia entry.

According to the wikipedia site (referencing the fan site), sales for the Gall-Peters projection went up from 3 per day to 120 per day following the episode.

Smoking in style

Our thanks to our friend Cara for these wonderful posters from Japan - how to smoke politely. I'm particularly fond of the 'cigarette as love affaire' one.
Lots and lots more posters here

Out of... patience

You may have seen this little gem on the bbc website - apparently more of us are screening emails by putting our out of office notification up.
The bbc story

This doesn't work too well for me with one of my friends. As soon as she gets an 'out of office' she sends a barrage of emails asking me where I am, whether I'm really on holiday, and whether I got any of her previous emails.

It does remind me of many conversations we've had about the status of email in terms of authority and formality. We always used to rank communications in the order
speech - email - fax - letter
with speech being the least formal, and letter being the most. But I suspect that the advent of instant messaging is pushing email even nearer to speech.

(There's a lovely bit of research for someone there about how people change their language between writing emails and writing instant messages - and why, when emails are just as 'instant'.)

A poster for our office?

Mark spotted this recently - potential artwork for our rather bare office walls?

If you like it too, you can buy it here.

Entering the blogosphere

Welcome to and/or/if's very own blog.

The four of us have been pinging emails between each other for more time than we care to remember. Some of which are unrepeatable, but a good number of which may be of interest to other people interested in all things info design-y. So we'll be trying to remember to post all kinds of interesting stuff and nonsense here.
Here's a little starter for ten: we've all been eagerly anticipating the launch of the iPhone over here (of course we'll all need one for important professional reasons). But folks in the States, who can already get their sticky fingers on them, are beginning to wish they'd switched off their itemisations:
iPhone bill: the movie
Another cross blog
And another

You've got to ask: who at AT&T failed to spot what was going on? Didn't someone in the enveloping site, watching box after box of 300-page bills thunk squarely onto the straining floor, at some point ask the question? We know of similar things happening over here with BlackBerry billing, but the crazy bills were spotted and solved quicksmart.

PS credit for our blog title goes to Mark by the way. He was very keen for it to be our company strapline, but we wussed out. But our blog seemed like a good place to embrace our inner Wombles.