I’m not sure what you’re saying. Psychology is very much a part of information design (which is, as I found later, a big umbrella under which many things are falling) – the couch potato hypothetically has information about how to get healthy available, but it hasn’t been made into usable form for him (or her) yet. If you were the couch potato or the couch potato’s doctor, you could use information design principles to display health stats (what stats? where? how?), prompt the person in question to exercise (when? how?), provide them with motivators (your friends are doing this too! look, you’ve burned 6000 calories since Tuesday!) – the important thing being not that we’ve “made data pretty,” but that we’ve sifted through the immense amount of available data and made the right data useful.

The presentation and communication aspects as you’ve defined it sound much more like what advertisers have been trying to do for years. I don’t know how to define information design, but that’s because I think it’s a field, not a specific problem to be solved. It’s like trying to define sociology, mathematics, or physics. Any field has many connections that blur into other fields. Any field has applicability to a wide range of problems, its own way of thinking, and a set of (usually thought) tools that are typically applied to a variety of things. So the overlaps and fuzziness in definition you describe aren’t necessarily indications that information design isn’t actually a field in its own right – I actually take them as an indication that it might be.

Perhaps a more concise way of describing (not defining) information design is that it deals with and creates things for data overload? I’m still struggling with what information design is, myself.

Similarly, the presentation and communication of information can be divided into two main levels. First is how to get people’s attention (and who’s attention to get, and through what channels). This is the main problem you have to solve with problems like organizational inertia and network effects and other group dynamics. And then there’s how to best present the information once you’ve gotten someone’s attention. And that’s a completely separate domain, and doesn’t have too much overlap. And insofar as those two things are part of a larger process, then sure, let’s make tools that take care of all of it. But it’ll be tools that solve more than one problem.

I actually think about this stuff quite a bit day-to-day. I’m one of four programmers in a software startup. We also have two people that go and install our software (it’s multi-user software that sells for 5-7 digits), and handle support calls. I’ve been on since the beginning, and I’ve been able to see how organization problems start, and resolved many of them, and am still resolving others and optimizing things even more. I still have a sense that I’m not doing quite as much as I could be, though. (Indeed, part of it is that the work itself tends to the boring side, and so I don’t get a lot done on the actual hands-on work compared to what I could.)

There are some big challenges ahead. For one thing there is little consensus for detection of information quality or failure (other than hindsight). And what is this term information? Most of the ways in which the word is used are quite uninformative and somewhat academic, where business is nothing if not pragmatic. I’ve tried to outline a framework for taking on these challenges, an information designer’s toolkit, so to speak.

As for the programming thing there are bug systems and source code management systems, which when used correctly are quite effective. I think Trac (http://www.edgewall.com/trac/) does the best job of presenting all of this data in a nice neat manner.