Designing information for people
During this webinar, Dr. Karel van der Waarde will discuss how information can be designed to do more than meet formal requirements: it should help people find what they need, understand it, and make informed decisions.
He will draw on his extensive experience designing information about medicines for patients, nurses, physicians, and pharmacists. His talk will use medical information as a starting point for a broader question: Why do we accept documents, systems, and information that are difficult to use in everyday life?
Information about medicines sits at the intersection of regulation, law, institutional needs, commercial realities, and human behavior. Digital formats offer new possibilities: content can be updated more easily, information can be searched, and its presentation can be adapted to different users. But technology alone is not the answer.
The key question remains: Is the information relevant, easy to find, understandable, and genuinely useful to the person who needs to act on it?
Many public systems are still designed from the back end. A system—whether tax, healthcare, voting, or administrative—is created first. Information explaining how people are expected to use it is developed only afterward. Dr. van der Waarde proposes a different approach: What if we started with people?
Design can begin by observing how people actually behave, what they need, what they are capable of, and what they expect. Legal, organizational, and technological requirements can then be translated into systems that people can navigate and use effectively. This approach raises important questions about the role and responsibility of information designers—and about what happens when design, law, technology, and human behavior meet.