The Boston View — back to the roots
A column by Paolo Ciuccarelli
The stream of events and meetings related to art, science and research in Boston is astonishing, even overwhelming. I try to cope with it navigating its richness in search of contributions that could spark both unexpected and applicable connections with data visualization and information design — with a slight preference for the latter. My interventions in the brand-new The Visual Agency newsletter will mostly report about those encounters.
On February the 27th the School of Journalism and the Information Design and Visualization program of Northeastern University — two areas that recently joined forces in the Co-Lab for Data Impact initiative with the aim of reinventing the way news spread — invited Manuel Lima to talk to students and faculties. Manuel is a well-known figure in both the Data Visualization and Design worlds: TED speaker, named “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds” by Creativity magazine, he is Senior UX Manager at Google and has over fifteen years of experience designing digital experiences and leading product teams at companies like Codecademy, Microsoft, Nokia, R/GA.
I couldn’t be happier about the talk, for three reasons:
- The title of Manuel’s talk “UX and DataViz. A Tale of Convergent Paths” — beside being a synthesis of his personal career — it’s a timely, cogent and urgent manifesto for the future of data transformations: with the complexity of both the phenomena we are facing and the data which represent them — and the increasing number of new needs and stakeholders arising — data visualizations (and other forms of representations) need to be conceived in the frame of a larger experience. More and more making sense of data will be the result of a journey, marked by interaction with multiple touchpoints in different moments. Data visualization will probably remain one of the most important moments of this journey, but times are ripe for rethinking the discipline in the light of a factual convergence between information and experience design.
- In 2005 Manuel launched Visualcomplexity.com, a “unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks” — a website that reached 1000 projects showcased. That was time I got interested and excited about visualization as a language that could help in making complex phenomena visible and accessible to foster better decisions — something that became the mission of DensityDesign, the research lab I founded at Politecnico di Milano. VisualComplexity — no surprise — became one of the main references for the lab and all the teaching activities it generated.
Nowadays, Big Data and algorithms are making the uncertainty and the wickedness of data processes (i.e. their complexity) evident and inevitable: a visit to Manuel’s website and some good readings on the subject matter can help anyone in coping with it. - After the talk we had the chance to discuss a little bit about current projects and initiatives and the investments of Google in its Data Studio platform. I couldn’t help saying how conservative the platform seems to be, so attached to the classical archetype of the dashboard and mostly based on the usual visual patterns — as most of the competitors. In the light of the above-mentioned evidence of the complexity of the world around us (and the data we use to represent it) why we’ve not yet been able to propose anything more articulated and richer than that? I mean, something emerges times by times from research and custom projects, but the gap between tailor made visualizations and the platforms used for day-by-day visual analytics is still puzzlingly large.
Despite all the connections I never had the chance to meet Manuel in person before, but it was like we were good friends since long time. I guess one of the main reasons is that we share a couple of fundamental pillars in our paths through complexity and data visualization: Barabasi’s book “Linked” and the Atlas of Cyberspace. Roots always matter.
Paolo Ciuccarelli
Center for Design, Northeastern University
