Visualization: Why The Fusion of Art and Tech Matters
When we speak of visualization in data management or in business intelligence domains, visual arts hardly come to mind. Information visualization, or data visualization is one thing, and visual arts is quite the other one. However, there’s a certain point where those two intersect, and in this write-up I will show how visually appealing displays of data or information make a difference as compared to dull graphs, tables, or reports.
There are two basic environments where any visual display can possibly exist: time and space. For visual arts, space is the environment. Arts come into the picture *no pun intended* as we look to portray a physical object or a group of objects on a painting, or as a sculpture, which is also a visual, albeit tangible. This might sound like a paradox, but ethereal visual arts are more down-to-earth than they appear because they can’t exist if there’s no tangible 3D object that has to be rendered into a visual. This powerful painting depicts a dramatic event happening in the physical world, where people struggle to save their lives amid the ruthless ocean waves. The sky seems to be more merciful than the ocean, as suggested by the warmer colors.
The emotions that this painting evokes leave a certain footprint in our minds and hearts. Like, even in the hardest times the hope is always there. The painter uses art to bring this message across.
How is then a visualization different from a painting? Visualizations deal with abstract concepts, not with the physical objects. Ironically, dry technical reports are supposed to turn the non-tangible concepts into the tangible ones— the opposite of what paintings do! Timelines, as a method for visualization, represent a time-oriented display of concepts or data. Other ways of visualizing concepts and how they connect with each other include mind maps, lists, boards (or dashboards). Think of to-do’s and to-do lists and various ways to visualize them. A to-do, a task or a project is an abstract concept as well.
Why should this matter at all? John Dewey has something to say in his essay “Art as Experience”:
“Art appeals directly to sense and the sensuous imagination, and many aesthetic and religious experiences occur as the result of energy and material used to expand and intensify the experience of life.”
Of course, we are not talking about religious experiences here. But all of us are looking for the ways to make our intuition and creative abilities work at their best as we search for a solution to a technical or to an organizational problem. The cutting edge of brilliant performance with data insights and analysis is so elusive and so sought after that we hopelessly give up, thinking that it’s not us, but someone else who has this ability to take a brilliant decision backed by intuition. Look into this quote from the John Dewey’s essay closer. The key is: appeals directly to sense and sensuous imagination. If a timeline, or a list, or a dashboard is visually appealing, then an analyst or a stakeholder will not simply spend less time on grasping the overview, but will be more likely to generate a crucial insight or to take a well-rounded decision as the visual nicety will contribute to that by itself. I’m sure there is some scientific research nowadays that backs up this argument from the neuroscience standpoint. The bottomline is: there’s more pragmatism to art than what it seems. If we surround ourselves with artful things, be it in our office space, or in our digital space, we’re more likely to perform better as decision-makers, stakeholders, or analysts, or as developers and QAs — or as anyone else who uses visualizations in their work.
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This story was updated and re-written from one of my earlier articles.
