Second Premise: The design of public information symbols is always the result of a transformation process There is still some dispute around the historical concept of “transformation” and in what way it distinguishes itself from the modern concept of information design. For Christopher Burke, for example, “the transformer was a prototype of the modern information designer” (Burke, Kindel & Walker 2013: 14). Marie Neurath, in an interview featured in the 1990 documentary “Otto Neurath: der unbekümmerte Denker”, said: “It was my task to convert the knowledge that they [the scientists] brought us into pictorial form”. Anyway, it is clear that the process of transformation included the visualization of all kind of concepts and not only statistical ones. The difficulties that may be encountered during the process of converting concepts into pictorial form are well exemplified by Jeremy Foster, chair of the subcommittee for Public Information Symbols at the ISO Technical Committee 145 for Graphical Symbols. It's quite simple to denote certain things. This is a fire extinguisher; this is the emergency exit. It's when you get to the other more complicated things ‘do this’ and ‘don't do that’ that it can become more difficult and more complicated. And so, when you are trying to describe a series of things, rather than just one thing, then life becomes much more difficult. It's easy to use symbols for nouns, much different for verbs and adjectives and adverbs and things of that kind. (J. Foster in Peckham 2013: 04’42”05’16”)
Marie Neurath, commenting on the process of creating pictograms for the book Basic by Isotype, a primer for Basic English, said at first that "to introduce vocabulary with the help of pictures is often quite simple." Then she unfolds lots of examples of unexpected difficulties she was confronted with. At the end she concludes: "In short, there was a surprisingly large number of problems to solve, and the symbolmaking approach of Isotype was often a great help" (Neurath, M; Kinross 2009: 48).