Information Deficit

I just wanted to share an insight from a great book from multi-disciplinary designer, Kenya Hara. In his book Designing Design, he talks about how our brain is wired to handle dense amounts of information.

Sometimes we talk about the world we live in causing information overload and the stress it causes our minds. His take is that this is actually caused by the limited quality of information we are constantly bombarded with. Rather than information overload, our brains want to shut down because of information deficit – being constantly bombarded with fragments of incomplete information.

He talks about how our bodies or gigantic sensory organisms and that we are designed to take in all sorts of information at once.

A human being is a bundle of very delicate receptor organs and at the same time an image-generating organ equipped with a vigorous memory-playback system.

But something interesting has happened to us in the modern era. We spend hours a day taking in information primarily through static sensory experiences focused on one or maybe two senses.

His hope is that creators might look at experiences that account for more of the senses to better optimize the dense kind of information the brain is able to receive.

Here is a passage from the book that talks about the perceptive capabilities of our feet that we often forget about because we cover them up so often:

There is a reason why the bottoms of human feet are sensitive. The bottoms of the feet are the only body parts that always come into contact with the ground. They are used to detect delicate, detailed information at all times. Today, the bottoms of feet are covered by socks and shoes, so these sensors are now wrapped in covers.…

I'm reminded of the time I went to Bali on business with the interior designer Takashi Sugimoto. There are plenty of fancy resort hotels there, so I kind of figured we'd be staying at one of them. I was a little disappointed to hear from Sugimoto that he'd reserved rooms at an old lodging complex. "Those new resorts aren't very interesting," he said, by way of explanation. The site of the more mature lodge covered a vast area, dotted with cottages and paved with old stones in every direction. Guests walk barefoot there, and I was rather surprised to find myself enjoying the feeling. When I thought about why that was, I realized that the stone pavement was worn away by decades of barefoot travelers, polishing the stones as they tread. My feet rejoiced at the feel of the stones. It was a wonderful feeling of familiarity–like cuddling my old cat–that came to me through the soles of my feet. When I think about it, I sense an extreme delicacy in the feeling I got from stones worn away by the walking of fellow human beings. It's hard to explain, but it's probably a composite of minute discrepancies from stone to stone. Intuitively, I felt that the stones help a great amount of information.

I realized something then; although today's society is said to be in a state of information overload, in fact it may not be an excess. It's just an overflow of odd and fragmented information in the media. The amount of information in each fragment is quite small. In this slew of half-baked information, isn't the brain oppressed? The stress on the brain isn't because of quantity, but because of limited quality.

Against the backdrop of the evolution of media and its powerful gathering of news material and data, all of the world's happenings are trimmed like a lawn by a mower, with fragments of information flying about from place to place through the media as grass flies through the air. These broken pieces of information adhere to our tofu-like brain like spices sprinkled so thick that they obscure the entire surface. For a moment, this makes us think we're quite knowledgeable, but information tacked on the surface of the brain doesn't amount to much when you add it all together. Conversely, the amount of information we receive through sensual [of the senses], pleasant experiences via the soles of our feet is enormous. The human brain likes anything that entails a great amount of information. Its extensive capacity waits eagerly to perceive the world by completely exhausting its great receptive powers. That potential power, though, remains today in a state of extreme constriction and is a source of the information stress we’re all under.