APPLYING INFORMATION DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND METHODS TO OPERATIONS IN THE INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT

The flood of information has saturated the battlespace, and it is imperative that commanders and their staffs are able to sift through the irrelevant information and pull out the actionable information required to make decisions. The objective of the proposed project was to apply Information Design (ID) principles and methods to communicate clear, effective, efficient, and relevant information to decision makers when planning operations in the information environment (OIE). The information received was prioritized according to the CARVER Methodology in order to smartly design information presented to Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group (MIG) commanders. Visual Analytics was the mechanism to present visually appealing information that was clear, engaging, and easily absorbed. The focus of the research centered on the spread of influence within communities of interest discovered through use of the Scraawl software suite. While a useful tool for discovering large amounts of social data quickly, the practical use of Scraawl to the Marine information practitioner would be limited due to classification issues. However, it was found that influence within the analyzed communities spreads rapidly and widely according to experience of the source, physical geography, meaningful and consistent engagements, and media utilized. This thesis showed how effective an open-source tool can be to reduce the cognitive load of the MIG commander, enhancing efficient decision-making.

Department dc:contributor.department

Information Sciences (IS)

Grantor dc:publisher

Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Manuel, Bruce A., Jr.

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Kendall, Walter A.
• Zhao, Ying

Statement dc:rights

• This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10945/67770

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:calhoun.nps.edu:10945/67770