What’s in the black box?
What the art of MC Escher can teach us about designing with data.
Recently I, along with half of Melbourne, went to see Escher X nendo: Between Two Worlds at the National Gallery of Victoria. Where nendo is the Japanese design studio responsible for the ground-breaking exhibition design and Escher is Escher.
Having long been a fan of Escher’s work, I was excited to see it up close, but one of the things that struck me — even more than how brilliant the exhibition was — was the conversations I overheard.
They were quite different from the conversations I usually hear at art galleries. At almost every picture I got close to, people were talking in depth — not about what the picture was of, or what it meant, but how it had been made.
It occurred to me that data design is another area where the end result usually attracts more attention than the process. And as I went around the exhibition, I started to make connections between how Escher created his art works and my own recent experiences working with data.
Data works best when it reveals something new
One of Escher’s self-portraits is an image of his reflection in a mirror ball, being held up by his own hand. The inclusion of his hand and the use of the mirror ball changed my perception of the picture — instead of looking at someone else, as with any ordinary portrait, I become the artist, looking at himself.
Successfully changing people’s perception is as important in data as it is in art — it works best when it prompts the audience to think again and to change their perspective.
A good friend of mine, Stefanie Posavec, collaborated with information designer Giorgia Lupi on a year-long, hand-drawn data visualisation project. Each week they captured data about their lives that they wouldn’t normally track — from ‘goodbyes’ (who, where, how final) to ‘background sounds’ (organic vs machine) — and sent it to each other in postcard format. The resulting 104-postcard exhibition was beautiful, but what really captivated observers, and Stefanie herself, was the new perspective she gained on the ordinary details of her own life.
The data that’s missing is as important as the data you have
Linographs and woodcuts make up the bulk of Escher’s early work, including some of his most famous tessellations. These are made, not by drawing the image you want, but by cutting away the wood (or linoleum) that you don’t want. It is the exact opposite approach to the usual add add add. I believe Escher’s expertise in relief printmaking and the associated processes provided a starting point for his unique art and view of the world.
Similarly, there’s an allure to the data that’s available to be measured, but this example from World War II shows what can happen if you neglect the data that’s not there.
The Allies examined returning planes for bullet holes to determine which parts were hit most often and should therefore be reinforced.
As you can see, the fuselage, wing tips and the tail wing sustained the most damage. Strengthening just these areas would have outsized benefits. But before they moved ahead, a scientist named Abraham Wald raised an objection: the returning planes were only half the story. They were missing the data on the planes that didn’t come back — the planes that took fatal damage. The fuselage, wing tips and tail wing were the places least in need of strengthening, since damage taken to those parts was clearly survivable.
These data gaps can come from a simple oversight or be the result of systemic and cultural issues that mean we haven’t been tracking the right data. The most important thing is to be aware of them and think about what the data is really showing you.
How the data is produced is as important as the data itself
Escher’s mind-bending illusions were, as always, the hero of the show. They are a reminder that what you’re seeing isn’t necessarily what is happening.
The same is true of data. One set of data can have incredible influence. Often people just take and repeat what they’ve seen or heard as a given. We’ve all seen hyperbolic claims that by 2020, 60% of us will be getting around in self-driving cars, or 25% of clothing purchases will be made using augmented reality, and far too often they are taken at face value.
To help the general public, and our clients, better distinguish between good and bad data, we, as designers, need to start pre-emptively answering the question:
What’s in the black box?
A black box is “a device, object, or system whose inner workings are unknown; only the ‘stimuli inputs’ and ‘output reactions’ are known characteristics”
We can’t afford to let data be a black box. We need to share its story. The story of data — where it came from — is how you can assess the difference between “climate change is happening and it is caused by human activity” and “vaccines cause autism”. The quality of the former data is verified by numerous separate pieces of research and the story of how all of those data sets came to be produced is accurate and believable. The story of the latter is the eerie persistence of a single, flawed study.
The best way to avoid errors is to show your working
Throughout Escher X nendo, NGV plaques — often quoting Escher himself — explained how the illusions were crafted. Pushing this approach even further, the exhibition finished with a corridor displaying various miniature prototypes of all the exhibition spaces — not just the spaces we saw, but the rejected versions that never made it to full scale. This coda provided great insight into how nendo produced the amazing spaces that highlighted and supported my understanding of Escher’s journey.
The models in the corridor are surprisingly among the most Instagrammed parts of the exhibition, showing that there’s a real hunger out there for seeing behind the curtain.
This closely reflects my experience of the changing expectations of clients. It’s no longer acceptable just to provide the shiny object at the end, which, especially when created in isolation, can be full of unintentional biases. Clients and the communities and individuals they serve need to be not just consulted, but to be exposed to how the work has been done. We might not be able to totally remove our own biases from the equation, but we can at least bring them into the light so they can be adjusted for.
After a recent project with the Bureau of Meteorology we did something different from our usual internal review. Instead, we reviewed the project together with Bureau’s User Centred Design team and took them through a visual recap of the journey we had been on as designers, highlighting the dead ends we’d been down and the mistakes we had made along the way.
We found that, far from damaging the reputation of the work, it actually helped develop a mutual appreciation of where we had got to and gave everyone a useful set of learnings and actions to take into their next project.
So — like an Escher staircase — I’ve come full circle.
The thing that amazed me most at the exhibition was the sense of wonder that almost everyone found in understanding how it had been done.
Just like how a magic trick is done can be more impressive that the trick itself.
I’m now trying to be as transparent about my design processes as possible — because sometimes the magic is in how you got there and the mistakes you made along the way. Not what the final result is.
