Data Visualization Infographics v.s. Products

I was fortunate to participate in a panel discussion concerning data science hosted by Toptal. As a designer, my contribution was to share examples on how data presentations can mislead one when presented as real facts, and how data visualization products require high sets of personalization. When data is used for presentations, designers and/or data scientists have to be selective with its range and subject to make their points to the audience, however, the act of extracting also risks adding bias. With that considered, when we provide tools for users to analyze data by themselves, the key is to make the tools easy to personalize, so individual stories from data can be more accessible. Since the time was limited during the discussion, I wanted to share some follow up here.

Framing Data

Years ago, I heard about a fascinating artist exhibition on from a podcast. The artist collected data and studied the taxonomy of shape profiles from objects in nature. The same profile analysis was done with alphabets in various languages. By comparing two results, the artist found that the distribution pattern for each study showed similarities. From the story, the exhibition seemed to conclude with a beautiful hypothesis; our languages evolved based on humans’ pattern recognition capabilities that have been cultivated through nature.

One question later stuck in my head. What if the artist had the hypothesis even before running this analysis. The data presentation could be biased to come…