Demystifying Data (Visualization)
Originally published at https://medium.com on February 16, 2022 in the The Visual Agency Editorial by Paolo Ciuccarelli, Founding Director of the Center for Design at Northeastern
On January 27th I had the pleasure to moderate a conversation hosted by the Design Museum Everywhere Foundation, with Giorgia Lupi, partner at Pentagram, and the Boston-based artist Nathalie Miebach as guests; Both work on data representations with a very open, multisensorial, designerly and artistic — often integrated — approach.
The intended aim of the talk was to ‘demystify’ data visualization, by sharing with the audience thoughts on what data visualization is and what it isn’t about — something that might easily scale up to a higher, more philosophical or conceptual level of conversation, as it actually did. The first shift was kind of obvious: before demystifying data visualization we need to demystify data first: what data is about and what it isn’t. A shared vision of data being a human-made abstraction, socially framed, naturally biased, set the stage for a broader discussion about potential ways to fill the gap between the nuanced complexity of social, natural, and cultural phenomena and the intrinsic reductionism of data and its science-rooted, conventional, visual representations.
Few notes on what captured my attention, while moderating the conversation.
Photo by John Schaidler
Nathalie escapes reductionism through her work of “translating science data into sculpture, installation and musical scores” — as written in her website. The technique of weaving baskets is particularly interesting, in the way it seems to mirror the effort of weaving the many dimensions of complex phenomena.
The Weather Score Project, with musical scores created out of weather data, is also relevant, at two different levels: as an example of multiple, interrelated, interpretations — data are first encoded in the musical score and then performed, with different interpreters likely leading to different interpretations -. The design of data-driven music scores can also be framed as a metadesign exercise: they are designed for other ‘designers’, the interpreters that will instantiate them through the musical performance. According to the artist, the collaboration with the musicians is two-fold: “to convey a nuance or level of emotionality surrounding my research that is harder for me to reach through my sculptures, and to reveal patterns or stories in the data musicians might identify which I have failed to see”.
Giorgia — like Nathalie — positioned herself as a translator, framing data and visualization as languages — and media on their own, I might add — and raised the literacy issue: too many people are still left out of in the data discourses, and the way we represent data, the language we choose for the translation, plays a major role.
She also noted how as new types of data become available (e.g. big data), new languages are needed to fully capture their features. How to effectively visualize the intrinsic uncertainty and the interconnectedness of big data might be a good example, or — as Giorgia might prefer — the nuances of small, personal, data. Arguably led by her background in architecture and design, Giorgia experimented with an impressive array of ‘devices’, or media: from the clothes collection with & Other Stories, “revealing the amazing achievements of three female science trailblazers”, to the tiles designed for Huguet Mallorca, from the pages of a Moleskine sketchbook to the interiors of stores and museums, making data more approachable and gathering new publics around it.
Book of Life, the new artist book created for the Moleskine Foundation.
Both Giorgia and Nathalie are as much designers as artists, in the way they reflect on the role of the ‘other’ — the user — in the design of their data representations: it all starts with investigating who the user or the audience is, what might spark their interest and attract them, what is their prior knowledge on the phenomenon to be represented.
Two key concepts emerged several times in the conversation across art, science and humanities: poetry and beauty, with the latter especially relaunched and discussed also in some of the questions and comments the audience contributed in the chat. Both connect to what seemed to be the overarching, leading concern in the talks — accessibility of data and its representations — with a shared consensus around art, emotion, media diversification and integration (analogue and digital), as remedies for abstraction and reduction and potential drivers for the engagement of a hopefully much broader public.
Originally published at https://medium.com on February 16, 2022 in the The Visual Agency Editorial by Paolo Ciuccarelli, Founding Director of the Center for Design at Northeastern
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