Module 1
What if understanding a problem is more valuable than solving it?
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Darjan Hil & Nicole Lachenmeier
Superdot Studio, Basel
When Nicole and I began developing the Modular Information Design system, we did not start with a theory. We started with our daily client work, working on always new and complex topics: what is an efficient way of making complexity understandable? Not what does a perfect data visualization look like, but what are its smallest, most essential components?
We spent a lot of time breaking visualisations down — the way a chemist breaks matter into elements, or the way the Bauhaus workshops broke materials into their fundamental properties of structure, colour and form. We looked at our past ten years of work and hundreds of historic diagrams, stripped them back, and eventually identified 80 elements. Not 80 chart types. 80 building blocks. The essential vocabulary of visual information — applicable across data visualization, knowledge visualization, and information design alike.
The goal was to have a system to start an analytical, creative, systematic process of creating new solutions. Once you have the elements, you stop asking “which chart should I use?” and start asking “which combination reveals a different perspective?” The shift from recipe to experimentation changes everything. A good chef does not simply buy ingredients to realise a recipe step by step. Instead, they develop the dish based on the ingredients they have available. These are first tasted and analysed as individual components before being combined with each other. This is not about whether a combination is right or wrong, but rather about understanding the interplay of content, context and design.
A change in the sorting of the same content reveals a trend that was invisible before. A different grouping shows a relationship you had missed entirely. A different element, a changed colour, a new combination — and suddenly the data tells a story you did not know was there.
That is why variants are not a step towards the solution. They are the thinking itself. Each iteration does not improve the answer — it deepens the understanding of the question. Complex problems do not reveal themselves all at once. They open up gradually, through the patient making of many versions.
We wrote the book Visualizing Complexity: Modular Information Design Handbook because we wanted to share this way of working — what we call the Modular Thinking Mindset. Not to give people recipes, but to give them a system that makes complexity communicable — one module, one combination, one experiment at a time.
Reflections from Superdot:
Why is this relevant?
The problems addressed in this master — housing, climate, urban systems, public health, legal structures — are not problems that have a single correct answer waiting to be found. They are problems that need to be understood more deeply before they can be acted upon wisely.
Modular thinking offers a different relationship to complexity. Not mastery, but navigation. Not the answer, but a process for understanding what the question actually is. Elements become comparable only when they share a common language. You can only see the difference between two approaches when you have a system that makes them legible side by side. This is as true for data visualization as it is for knowledge visualization: the method shapes what becomes visible.
And something else happens in this process that is harder to explain but important: new combinations are genuinely surprising. There is a particular pleasure in discovering that two elements you had never placed together produce something neither could alone. This is not a trivial observation. In a world of overwhelming complexity, the ability to find delight in systematic experimentation — to treat a difficult problem as an invitation to explore rather than a burden to resolve — may be one of the most valuable capacities a designer can bring to the room. This is what we explore every day at Superdot Studio, our information design agency in Basel, through research, client projects, and the development of our MID framework.
Questions for the students:
- Think of a complex challenge you are currently working on. Have you tried making many versions of it — or are you still searching for the right one?
- What would it mean to break your problem down to its smallest elements? What are its basic building blocks?
- What is the difference between following a recipe and understanding your ingredients?
- Are you familiar with the work of Otto Neurath?