6 ms·

Is Information Visualization the Next Frontier for Design?

11 points by peter123 17y ago

pierrefar 17y ago
Yes, and not just design. I think data mining and presenting the insights you get from that is the next big thing. I can't say this enough: it's not just about the visualization but also the way you store data and how you analyze it to produce the info you want to visualize. It's the whole stack from raw data to pretty pixels on the screen.
- gsiener 17y ago
  I completely agree but know nothing about the space. What is the current thinking on the best way to tackle this? Who is poised to dominate this field?
  - pierrefar 17y ago
    Whoever owns the data are best poised to dominate (hi Twitter), but we'll see :)
- Silhouette 17y ago
  Well said. We live in a society where more data than ever is stored systematically and widely available, but we haven't yet developed the tools to cope with the resulting information overload. I suspect this is why we see popular trends like using Facebook and Twitter: even if people did have the time to take part in genuinely deep, creative, insightful interactions, there's so much to talk about that soundbite discussions rule. It doesn't help that the media is increasingly full of superficial "don't make me think" material. Sometimes, it's the endless echo chamber that is most of the blogosphere and online forums: today, I reckon about 90% of the posts I've seen are just links to other posts that are top 10 lists of other posts that might, if you're lucky, include one or two original bits of writing. Off-line media is just as bad, with banal reality TV shows and sensationalist newspaper headlines boosting audience numbers because so many people just don't want to make any effort any more. I think in the next couple of years, though, we will start to see a backlash against these trends. People will get bored of one-liner "discussions" with "friends" they haven't talked to more than twice in real life, and start to wonder what happened to, y'know, interesting conversations where they learned something or gained a new insight. This doesn't have to be highbrow or reserved to well educated middle classes: just "I liked this movie I saw the other day, because..." rather than "That movie rocked, because." would be a start. As this trend takes over, I think we'll see improved ways of separating the wheat from the chaff. Just as search engines try to identify the best material on topics covered on bazillions of web pages but mostly not very well, so I think we'll see tools develop that cut out the middle men and go straight to the source of original, interesting material; I suspect the first social networks that enable this effectively will be the next popular trend. Which brings us back to where we came in, which is to say that we need to have some original, interesting material to talk about for all of the above to work. That, one way or another, is going to involve either thinking more or sharing data that isn't trivially available to others, either because it's not accessible, or because it is but you still have to work out which parts are important enough to highlight. And how are we going to know that one bit of writing is presenting such content where many others aren't? Whatever the answer to that question, if a picture is worth a thousand words then we can be sure that good visualisations that pick out interesting data to discuss are going to play a big part in it. Of course, sometimes you can be too verbose. I didn't have time to write a short post here, so I wrote a long one instead, as Mark Twain might have said. Maybe I could have just written "Current trend = banal & uninteresting => doomed; new trend = original & creative => interesting => successful; effective visualisations help identify original & creative content". Then again, that's more than 140 characters.
- pie 17y ago
  It's been interesting watching visualization (and similarly, intuitive usage of data mining) struggle through what appears to be a very long and very awkward infancy stage. Academics and developers continue clinging to things like hyperbolic trees and treemaps as flagship tools for understanding large data sets. Most of these have never seemed particularly useful to me, from the first time I saw a presentation of "cutting edge" visualization techniques in 2001. Similarly, people have this seemingly endless fascination with tag clouds, which are often of dubious utility. This article mentions Wordle, a tag cloud generator that adds typographic design to the equation, and the audience is wowed anew. It's always amazing when excellent, conscientious design meets large datasets, and when the end result promotes understanding and insight. I'm blanking on current examples at the moment, but two chestnuts are from information-laden maps such as the New York City MTA map and Gapminder's world data visualization.

11 points by peter123 17y ago

Yes, and not just design. I think data mining and presenting the insights you get from that is the next big thing. I can't say this enough: it's not just about the visualization but also the way you store data and how you analyze it to produce the info you want to visualize. It's the whole stack from raw data to pretty pixels on the screen.

gsiener 17y ago
I completely agree but know nothing about the space. What is the current thinking on the best way to tackle this? Who is poised to dominate this field?
- pierrefar 17y ago
  Whoever owns the data are best poised to dominate (hi Twitter), but we'll see :)
Silhouette 17y ago
Well said. We live in a society where more data than ever is stored systematically and widely available, but we haven't yet developed the tools to cope with the resulting information overload. I suspect this is why we see popular trends like using Facebook and Twitter: even if people did have the time to take part in genuinely deep, creative, insightful interactions, there's so much to talk about that soundbite discussions rule. It doesn't help that the media is increasingly full of superficial "don't make me think" material. Sometimes, it's the endless echo chamber that is most of the blogosphere and online forums: today, I reckon about 90% of the posts I've seen are just links to other posts that are top 10 lists of other posts that might, if you're lucky, include one or two original bits of writing. Off-line media is just as bad, with banal reality TV shows and sensationalist newspaper headlines boosting audience numbers because so many people just don't want to make any effort any more. I think in the next couple of years, though, we will start to see a backlash against these trends. People will get bored of one-liner "discussions" with "friends" they haven't talked to more than twice in real life, and start to wonder what happened to, y'know, interesting conversations where they learned something or gained a new insight. This doesn't have to be highbrow or reserved to well educated middle classes: just "I liked this movie I saw the other day, because..." rather than "That movie rocked, because." would be a start. As this trend takes over, I think we'll see improved ways of separating the wheat from the chaff. Just as search engines try to identify the best material on topics covered on bazillions of web pages but mostly not very well, so I think we'll see tools develop that cut out the middle men and go straight to the source of original, interesting material; I suspect the first social networks that enable this effectively will be the next popular trend. Which brings us back to where we came in, which is to say that we need to have some original, interesting material to talk about for all of the above to work. That, one way or another, is going to involve either thinking more or sharing data that isn't trivially available to others, either because it's not accessible, or because it is but you still have to work out which parts are important enough to highlight. And how are we going to know that one bit of writing is presenting such content where many others aren't? Whatever the answer to that question, if a picture is worth a thousand words then we can be sure that good visualisations that pick out interesting data to discuss are going to play a big part in it. Of course, sometimes you can be too verbose. I didn't have time to write a short post here, so I wrote a long one instead, as Mark Twain might have said. Maybe I could have just written "Current trend = banal & uninteresting => doomed; new trend = original & creative => interesting => successful; effective visualisations help identify original & creative content". Then again, that's more than 140 characters.
pie 17y ago
It's been interesting watching visualization (and similarly, intuitive usage of data mining) struggle through what appears to be a very long and very awkward infancy stage. Academics and developers continue clinging to things like hyperbolic trees and treemaps as flagship tools for understanding large data sets. Most of these have never seemed particularly useful to me, from the first time I saw a presentation of "cutting edge" visualization techniques in 2001. Similarly, people have this seemingly endless fascination with tag clouds, which are often of dubious utility. This article mentions Wordle, a tag cloud generator that adds typographic design to the equation, and the audience is wowed anew. It's always amazing when excellent, conscientious design meets large datasets, and when the end result promotes understanding and insight. I'm blanking on current examples at the moment, but two chestnuts are from information-laden maps such as the New York City MTA map and Gapminder's world data visualization.