In a world plagued by an excess of information and the over-stimulation of the senses by visual imagery and numerical data, the role of processing information and effectively understanding it has become critical to our everyday operation and behavior. Our dependence on real-time information has propagated the development of a multiplicity of interfaces, mechanisms and technologies capable of filtering and transmitting just that: information.

The design process has become an essential filter of all types of information. Due to contemporary forms of communication and media, this process has now been charged with the task of gathering, filtering, comprehending, processing, interpreting, forming and representing information in a clear and coherent manner. The work produced in this laboratory seeks to introduce its participants to various modes of forming and representing information, qualifying, quantifying and visualizing it with the goal of familiarizing ourselves with contemporary representational techniques, creating new visualization tools and integrating them into the design process.

Ultimately we are questioning the design process and its relationship to research. Design is research, research is design. What is the potential for research, analysis and visualization to generate form? Can we reconsider our ‘sites’ as much more complex and dynamic matrices of information constantly in flux? How does the design process adapt and transform to this fluctuating interpretation of site and context? The implications are exciting and evocative, giving designers the opportunity to test extremes. By suspending disbelief and solely working with information, we suspend any predetermined formal ideas and misconceptions, allowing process to take the lead. Process is not objective, however. Suspending disbelief can be highly subjective, but the seeming neutrality of data relieves us momentarily from the pressure of formal resolution. It gives us the tools to map new possible worlds and describe different habitats, unexpected and not predetermined. The result is a process that questions the given, tests the extreme and relies on risk-taking.

The design process becomes more systematic, yet relies heavily on the quality and selection of information. The seeming neutrality of data does not render it objective. The data selection process and representation method are heavily reliant on intent, position and technique. The projects in these pages are examples that test the limits of representation by working on a variety of extremely different datasets. They also test the limits of our design processes by coaxing us to take a position and develop an intention about the information we are using. These projects have taught us the subjectivity of information and the impossibility of remaining neutral in any design context. From a map of airline cargo, an infrastructural analysis of the expansion of Beijing, a study into art procurement and world politics, to a new map of New York relative to its blogging community and a real-time three dimensional representation of medical information: each project tests the possibilities of relating different types of information, establishing new relationships and juxtapositions and testing our preconceived ideas. The formal yields are tentative possibilities, yet provocative alternatives.