Re: 1. Respond To Kosara Schneiderman Fry Here
Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 10:54 am
A key point I took away from Ben Schneiderman's "The Eyes Have It" is that data visualization's priorities are very similar to those of design in general. This is, perhaps, not a terribly stunning revelation, since data visualization, like the rest of design, is all about creating an effective and compelling visual presentation of information, but I was still struck by how many of his points seemed to have general applications-- while the seven tasks of data visualization (overview, zoom, filter, details-on-demand, relate, history, and extract) are all fairly specific to collections of data, his descriptions of the various data types of the data type taxonomies are interesting to think about in a broader design context.
In Robert Kosara's Visualization Criticism articles, I was fascinated by his discussion of what he calls "Informative Art", which seems to sit at the boundary between art and design, since in my own practice I often tend to compartmentalize my "art" and my "design" work. There's certainly a lot of cross-fertilization between skill sets-- I've occasionally incorporated illustration and drawing into my design, tools I learned for design like Adobe Illustrator found their way into my artistic works, and design skills like composition or typesetting found their way into things like my artist's books, but I'd never really considered something like the hybrid Mondrian-esque bus schedule discussed in both pieces. That the Mondrian schedule was an utter failure as a functional design is totally unsurprising: there is absolutely nothing about it to contextualize as anything rather than an uninspired knockoff of a Mondrian, let alone specifically as a bus schedule, and even if one is told it's a bus schedule, there's very little indication of how the graphic should be interpreted by a user looking for a bus. But it's a terribly intriguing experiment, all the same.
In Robert Kosara's Visualization Criticism articles, I was fascinated by his discussion of what he calls "Informative Art", which seems to sit at the boundary between art and design, since in my own practice I often tend to compartmentalize my "art" and my "design" work. There's certainly a lot of cross-fertilization between skill sets-- I've occasionally incorporated illustration and drawing into my design, tools I learned for design like Adobe Illustrator found their way into my artistic works, and design skills like composition or typesetting found their way into things like my artist's books, but I'd never really considered something like the hybrid Mondrian-esque bus schedule discussed in both pieces. That the Mondrian schedule was an utter failure as a functional design is totally unsurprising: there is absolutely nothing about it to contextualize as anything rather than an uninspired knockoff of a Mondrian, let alone specifically as a bus schedule, and even if one is told it's a bus schedule, there's very little indication of how the graphic should be interpreted by a user looking for a bus. But it's a terribly intriguing experiment, all the same.