Information Is Beautiful

In your quest to find a descriptive term for the visual depiction of wisdom how about “Sentation” as a liberal conjecture of sentient information? I realize that the implication is not strictly visual, however when the sentient mind compiles information from a variety of senses, including the sense of ourselves. Is that not the quintessential process of wisdom.

A sentatient presentation is more than the data, colors and lines on a graph. It is customized to match intellect, interests and needs of the intended audience. Remember the communications paradigm of parent-parent, child-child, and parent-child? The US Marines saw the value of this concept in development of comic book style technical manuals that covered very complex equipment maintenance. They also understood the propensity for poor readers to just skip-over words that were unfamiliar to them. Those manuals were written at the third grade level.

If I were developing a sentatient website of the American Civil War, I would try to make it as realistic as possible. The Southern perspective would include all the sights and sounds of the deep south to make it come alive in harmony with the facts and figures of the time. Scenes of plantation life would come alive with all the beauty and sounds of a home worth fighting for. In the foreground, children softly singing and playing to the melody of ring around the rosy would be shattered by the reverberation from the speakers as the master cracked the whip on a team of mules plowing in the background. These same children would morph into the soldiers crying in agony to the blast of the cannon so loud that the speakers break the starch on your shirt.

Interesting think-piece. I would say the last step (blue box) involves… creativity, parallel thinking, intuition. And I disagree with Andy’s statement that data involves design….that would definitely be info. Ulf’s suggestion of aesthetics seems really interesting. Ever heard of Bradford Keeney’s book, The Aesthetics of Change? Quite nice. Congrats.
BTW, I consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to be obsolete. If it was ever ‘in’. Is ax very criticised theory…. no field work to support it and very arbitrary (actually is impossible to explain certain situations in nowadays work arenas with it). Wouldn’t compare it with your hierarchy of knowledge through data. I WOULD nonetheless consider some critics…. as the model makes wisdom an exclusive possibilities for whom possesses data, info and knowledge…. and I DO think there’s a certain possibility of straightforward enlightenment.
I insist EXCELLENT think-piece.

Yes, old idea. Newtonian actually. That bits of things are combined to create more complex things. True in the rough, but “real” world is Quantum or Stringy. Thus, a real diagram would show that it’s not hierarchical but network; wisdom will lead to ways to generate new types of data, knowledge will create new information structures, etc. Enlightenment is when you find where to pull so that the knots are dissolved.

Josef B.

I’ve just wrote a blog post on this, found it stimulated my brain enough to write one!

http://www.danpaulsmith.com/blog/2010-12-21/hierarchy-information-digestion

T.S. Eliot posed the question: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

But the best explanation I’ve come across to date is as follows: “Noise becomes data when it has a cognitive pattern. Data becomes information when assembled into a coherent whole, which can be related to other information. Information becomes knowledge when integrated with other information in a form useful for making decisions and determining actions. Knowledge becomes understanding when related to other knowledge in a manner useful in anticipating, judging and acting. Understanding becomes wisdom when informed by purpose, ethics, principles, memory and projection.” – George Santayana

The data -> information -> knowledge -> wisdom hierarchy comes from, I believe, the late great Mortimer J. Adler and his epic book “A Guidebook To Learning: For The Lifelong Pursuit Of Wisdom.” Brief review here: http://erikjheels.com/100.html. Awesome book.

I have done a PhD on this very topic. You may be interested, in brief, in the following:

The DIK hierarchy has interesting origins, according to Shara (2005) who undertook a study to discover when this metaphor was first used. He discovered it in Harlan Cleveland in 1982, and then in Milan Zeleny in 1987. But the hierarchy is first suggested in a poem by T. S. Eliot, published in 1934, called The chorus of the rock:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

So we have built a discipline or two, or even a culture, on a false set of correlations. Data cannot be the ‘building blocks’ of knowledge because they are the product of a knowledge system (as either ‘facts’ or ‘numbers’). In my opinion, it all starts with knowledge, and the creation thereof, part of which (only) can be shared (‘communicated’) through being represented in language of some sort -including art and mathematics. And the listener needs to be able to understand the meaning given to these sounds (shapes, scribbles) according to cultural context. That part of knowledge which can be shared – and which people wish to share with certain other people – can be called information. Data are a kind of information. Wisdom is an attribute totally unrelated to knowledge (and information and data), but is a philosophical concept based on actions that cause no home and that reveal understanding.

??? = Purpose / Purposeful…. I considered the top to mean something to others, not just the self or self actualization like Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs… great post.