The beauty of visualization
I am not an artist, and I also did not have artistic sense and I have not learned an art education. However, I believe that visual effect is one of the most a sure method. When I was an elementary student, I didn’t like the presentation class because it was a boring class. However, one of my classmates used a Microsoft PowerPoint at first, and I had never seen it before. I didn’t remember what my classmate was talking about, but I remember that was impressing. After that, we emulated my classmate’s method, but we just only followed the visual and sound effect of PowerPoint, not well-organized content.
In this week, I watched David McCandless’s “The beauty of data visualization” and I believe that it is helpful to understand the relationship between information needs, behavior, and organization. And furthermore, it is useful to comprehend changing of a perspective of information. David McCandless, who is data journalist, insists that data visualization can solve the information overload and let the dataset change our mindset.
First of all, information needs and behavior and organization can be resolved, expressed, and constructed by visual effect, such as color, shape, and movement in the visualization world. This video can show easily more than me. As development technology, I believe that information visualization will evolve and develop and information needs are solved by many ways of behavior.
Second, the user can have various points of view through the information visualization. David McCandless said that when he made the full political image, even he has the Left-leaning person, it was not uncomfortable because it was not forced to someone. Also, I want to add that visualization can change the people’s stereotype and perspective. For example, according to picture 1, USA and China have high GDP levels. However, according to World Happiness Report, China is not in 20 happiest countries in the world. Also, USA is not in the top 10. Furthermore, the happiest country Switzerland does not have the high rate of GDP. We can assume that some people who live in the country that has enough economic strength may be happy because an economy is one of the standards of happy. However, we showed that it is not true because information of GDP is not the absolute value. We just can’t recognize the other information. Visualization helps people’s information behavior.
People have information needs, and they behave to solve their needs through information organization. Now we are living in the flow of information, and our point of view can be closed up because the information overload. Information visualization would help that people don’t have a narrow viewpoint. In the end, I would like to quote from David McCandless’s presentation.
Data is the new soil and visualization feels like flowers blooming.
