Designing for Clarity: How Structure Shapes Meaning
Donovan Dynamics – Dimension One: Information
In any system—digital or physical—meaning doesn’t just emerge by accident. It’s structured. It’s encoded. It’s designed.
That’s what the Information dimension is all about. It’s the first of the twelve dimensions in the Donovan Dynamics framework, and it focuses on how systems hold, reveal, and shape meaning. When information is clear, everything feels intuitive. When it’s off—even slightly—everything feels harder than it should be.
We often talk about “bad UX” or “confusing messaging,” but underneath those complaints is usually one core issue: the information design is broken.
Information Is a Structure, Not a Fact
Most people equate information with content—words on a page, data in a dashboard, facts in a document. But information is more than that. It’s the structure that allows meaning to emerge.
• A headline is information.
• A menu hierarchy is information.
• A button label is information.
• Even the absence of something—an empty state, a ghost outline, a delay—tells us something.
Information is always working, whether we’re paying attention or not. So the question becomes: What are you encoding? And is that what you meant to say?
Case Study: Kernel Mind’s Eye
Mind’s Eye
At Kernel, I worked on the Mind’s Eye interface, a data visualization tool built for researchers studying brain activity. Our goal was to translate real-time hemodynamic data—blood flow across the cortical surface—into something visible, meaningful, and useful.
It wasn’t enough to make it look pretty. We had to make it truthful, interpretable, and clear. We used color, shape, and motion to show cognitive activation. We built time-based overlays to help researchers see trends. Every visual element became a question of information design.
And what we learned was simple: if the structure is clear, people feel empowered. If it’s noisy or misleading, they don’t trust it.
Designing for Clarity in Everyday Work
You don’t need to be building neuroscience tools to work with the Information dimension. You’re using it every time you decide:
• What gets shown, and in what order
• What gets grouped together, and why
• What gets left out
• How users understand hierarchy, flow, or priority
The better your structure, the less your users have to guess.
Questions to Ask in the Information Dimension
• Is the structure helping people make sense—or getting in the way?
• What assumptions are baked into the hierarchy or grouping?
• Are you giving people context, or just data?
• Is the absence of something causing confusion?
Closing Thought: Information Is a Design Material
In Donovan Dynamics, Information isn’t just a thing you transmit—it’s a material you shape. When you treat it that way, clarity becomes a design decision, not a lucky accident.
Because the best experiences don’t just look good. They make sense.