Ahead of its time by almost three decades, the term has only recently emerged regularly in common vocabulary, yet its significance couldn’t be more profound. Miller uncovered a simple truth that connects every human that has ever walked the planet, or likely ever will — we are designed to consume information.

Whichever way you observe our capacity to process and store information (a true understanding of which is ongoing), we all own and operate a very advanced system. From the staggering storage potential of a single gram of DNA to the estimated processing speed of the brain, our innate ability to consume, interpret and act on information is unique on our planet and the space it occupies so far as we currently know.

It could be said that we are information. Our form is the current outcome of billions of exchanges of information with our common and respective natural, physical and psychological environments through time. This ‘information age’ could simply be an activity spike within a broader information exchange system operating over life’s lifetime.

While we may identify more closely with being social and cultural creatures of habit, the fundamentals of our nature entwined with information remain.

And it’s important to recognise both forms of information we use innately well that have, to the detriment of both creative and scientific endeavours, been faced off against each other — the quantitative and qualitative kinds.

Quantitative information deals in quantifiable properties (objective data), where qualitative information refers to subjective properties or qualities. The unfortunate parting of these two related concepts has manifested in the right brain, left brain myth. A myth that has reigned supreme in popular culture for far longer than it should have.

There is no evidence that proves categorising a person as either being more right or left brain thought oriented correlates to behaviours of predominantly logic or creative natures.

Moreover, the tendency to label a person with either behavioural myth has the potential to limit his or her capacity to the detriment of breakthrough ideas. Ideas which have time and time again risen from unexpected mix’s of influences bound by curiosity.

An interest and appreciation for both forms of information is the future of our world and everything that’s in it.

From complexity, code and data to culture and art. From emergent phenomena in nature to emergent cultural movements. The dealings in abstraction and precision and respect for their virtues arms experience designers with the capacity to shift perspectives and form useful versions of reality.

Conversely, the uncompromising avalanche progress brands are challenged with — the kind punctuated by technology — carries with it mounds of information. Perhaps the kind that is shaping a new iteration of cognitive prowess underscored by the need to consume, interpret and act on information.