Back in my ideacity days, I’d talked a bit about about “branded intuition“, otherwise known as infographics by Dino who’s equally obsessed with the topic.

Though I don’t know if this does the practice justice, I see infographics as the combination of:

#1) experiental, “pliable” interactive design. in other words (and speaking human), graphic/technology design that kicks ass. includes interactive experiences that are fun to play with, and seem to get you to what you want without looking too hard. allowing folks to intuitively and graphically navigate through an experience or search for information. there’s a number of examples out there, but Nintendo Wii and their Wii News channel are great examples.

#2) the use of back-end data(bases,) algorithims and “smart” applications that learn when users interact. using all that MIT voodoo and statistical math that makes my head hurt to predict what you might want or need. but instead of doing so in a way that serves up one answer – allows you to narrow down what we think you need to get the the right stuff (think in simple terms think of sithsense as a simple exampe)

From an account planner perspective, sword swallowing Hans Rosling was one of the first folks that opened my eyes to this via his impassioned speeches at TED. From a technology and marketing application perspective Icosystems (who I’ve met with in the past) showed me some eye opening applications that they’ve been developing out of Cambridge, Mass.

My gut is that infographics/branded intuition (or whatever name you want to label it) will feed a VERY interesting web future. Along with a 3-dimensional web, low bandwidth HD video streaming, and drag and drop/software based platforms that make current widgets look juvenile- we’re in for wild ride in the next 5 years.

Apparently others are catching on to the infographics movement as well. Check out this latest article about Icosystems from Mediapost. A quick excerpt of Icosystems and their hunch engine technology thats been embedded into a baby-naming website follows:

How do we go from name inspirations to new name ideas? Nymbler combines human expertise and artificial intelligence to sift through thousands of names and find the ones that fit your taste.
Our ingredients:

Laura Wattenberg is a name expert and the author of The Baby Name Wizard. Her specialty is analyzing name style-sorting out the dozens of influences that might distinguish Marvin from Mason or Daphne from Darlene. Through years of research she has compiled a huge portfolio of name information. Each name is categorized on everything from ethnicity to historical popularity to soap opera appearances.

Icosystem is a Cambridge, Massachusetts technology company. Their Hunch EngineTM solves the dilemma of searching “when you don’t really know what you are looking for, but you’ll know it when you find it.” The Hunch EngineTM is a smart system based on a genetic algorithm. Given information on options and taste, it identifies subtle patterns and makes personalized suggestions.

Together, these two experts set out to create an intelligent baby-naming tool. They trained the Hunch EngineTM on Laura’s storehouse of name data and analysis. They taught it to understand names, to pick up on the trends and style cues that you’d notice yourself-and maybe some you wouldn’t.

The result is Nymbler, a unique personal naming assistant. It’s an expert system that learns about your taste and helps guide you to new ideas. We hope you’ll enjoy exploring this name landscape as much as we do.