Principles of Information Visualization featuring Isabel Meirelles
Bottom: Ali T., Deron L.
On Valentine’s day, we had a one of the most lovely & thoughtful ladies come into Sheridan and talk about information visualization: Isabel Meirelles.
Here we’ll try and sum up some of the main points from her talk.
First off, what exactly is information visualization? Isabel defined it as “external aids meant to enhance cognitive abilities”. Perhaps a more familiar term would be infographics.
Information visualization is an area of design that serves the purpose of revealing patterns, relationships, and insights.
— Isabel Meirelles
As such don’t visualize information just because it’ll look pretty.
So what is the process one takes to go about visualizing information?
- Context: Always design with the context in mind. Think up before you think down. Essentially, the small module that you’re designing functions within a larger environment and it is important to take that into consideration.
Always design a thing in the next larger context — Eliel Saarinen
- E.g. if you’re designing a chair, you need to think about how it will fit into a room, if you’re designing a room, how it’ll fit into a hallway, and so on. Only after you’ve ‘thought up’ should you ‘think down’ and focus in on the details of the thing you’re designing.
- “There is not a single answer to a given problem” Because people are so different, there is never one set way to understand something. However, you can do your best to tailor your design/visualization to your audience as well as the task at hand.
E.g. Displaying 9 blocks stacked makes it easier for viewers to state how tall the tower is while displaying them in a 3x3 arrangement makes it easier to state the area - Solving a problem requires finding the right representation Choose the right medium to convey your information. Interactive, non-interactive, 3D, or print, each medium has different affordances depending on the complexity of information to be embedded
However, Isabel cautions against the misuse of information.
Visuals are not evidence of the truth
— Isabel Meirelles
When information or data is visualized, it seems to suddenly possess that much more ‘oomph’ and plausibility. However, one needs to be conscious and aware that visualizations can be manipulated to be misleading, axis on graphs can be shortened or lengthened to tell a different story, data can be massaged. It is important to think critically about information presented and establish a frame of context in which to evaluate the information.
E.g. 1 out of every 3 doctors recommend x, but if they only interviewed 3 doctors, that number is really not very high.
Meirelles also made it a point to note that “visualizations are powerful but they are NOT the answer to all problems”.
Put beautifully
Designers encode, audiences decode
— Isabel Meirelles
Find her on twitter @IsabelMeirelles & check out her work at her website
Resources to check out:
Books
- Donald Norman — Things that Make Us Smart
- Colin Ware — Perception for Design
- Daniel Kahneman — Thinking Fast and Slow
- Jacques Bertin — Semiology of Graphics
Interactive Visualizations
- Wind map
- How different groups spend their day
- Mike Bostock — Interactive Visualizations for the NY Times and more
- Stamen design — Maps, so many maps holy
- Marcos Weskamp — Designer of windmaps and Flipboard, lots of blobs
- Eric Fischer — Maps by tweets
- Jan Willem Tulp — Lots of work done with processing. Just stunning
