Your information has to come from somewhere. Sometimes the information you recieve needs to be reprocessed or rewritten in order to create an effective message.

I participated in a workshop with her a year ago and one of her biggest points centered around a very early project of hers. If I remember correctly it was a guide for janitors on how to perform certain cleaning tasks. There was a big problem with people mixing cleaning chemicals.

She reluctantly showed us slides of the final piece, which were very clean and modern(ist) in appearance. By all standards of visual quality, it looked very nice, a very good example of information design.

Unfortunately, the janitors kept screwing up and mixing chemicals and the project was unsuccessful. She realized a few years later that it was unsuccessful, in part, because it was very dry and boring. The modernist visual style and the formality of the instructions were so disinteresting that none of the janitors read it.

In rethinking the project she concluded that if she were to have reworked the information to appeal to the specific audience of janitors they might have actually read it. She showed an example of a student project from somewhere that used a comic book format and said that it would have been more effective communication solution for the project than her original modernist solution. I'm not saying I agree with her but maybe her example will help you understand what she means when she differentiates between data and information.

__ 'The challenge for the graphic designer is turning data
into information__

A scanner can do that job.
Put man back into graphics for the sake of heaven !

Maybe it's tad too hardcore but I stick with what Mr. Jef Raskin
wrote : 'Information cannot be designed; what can be designed
are the modes of transfer and the representations of information.'

__ Observation, Interpretation, and Application.__

Brian, I like what you wrote very much. Writing 'deciphered'
you are 'hiding' the word 'code' which is about 'symbols'
& 'electricity' -- uhh, that's tough, that the challenge
& my my 2 cents, for what it's worth.

Best,
AS

In my understanding, data is just raw numbers. Information implies the intervention of the human hand/mind to focus and represent a specific set of data to make it meaningful. The "messages of meaning" is how we make the information relevant, accessible, and meaningful beyond the implied meaning. The janitor story that Jackson gave is a quintessential example.

I think she includes the 'data' step to remind us that we typically receive pre-digested/sorted/interpreted content before we add our own spin. It's that spin that separates us from accountants(?).

There are some interesting interpretations of a potentialy ambiguous quote. My own conclusion was that the data represents keywords given to us by the client to solve a design problem. We act as the mediators of information but the data is the essence of WHAT needs to be communicated.

No doubt I'm missing the mark entirely here ( I frequently do) but this quote makes me instantly think of the process I go through when designing graphs and charts for annual reports. I'm provided with pure data: lists of potentially meaningless numbers in Excel files. They mean nothing to me. I have to translate this into information (quality, quantity, for example) and then further translate that information into a graph or chart that communicates the main point as clearly & simply as possible (eg: if "x" is this low, we're stuffed. Or "y" is this much