Meta Skills

Visualization, Translation, Distillation, and Interpretation

In other chapters I will refer to these meta-skills, which I consider to be the highest level skills which a visualization designer possesses and deploys in their work. I consider all four skills to lie along a ‘continuum of agency’ for the designer: visualization being the least full of agency, translation, distillation, and interpretation falling further toward the pole of agency from there. What I mean by agency is how much freedom the designer has to build visualizations the way she believes best. Below are the specific definitions and overtones with which I will use these words in this document.

Visualization

The act of materializing something in visual form. The concrete decision making of what color, shape, location, and arrangement an image should be given a known objective. In my usage, visualization affords the designer the least agency because it is simply the decision of how best to represent an established and unchanging concept. The designer is not free to choose what should be visualized, she is simply making the objective visible. This is not to say that visualization is inferior or requires less skill than the other meta skills, it does not, it is simply that the designer has the least opportunity to influence the objective.

Translation

The act of recapitulating something in another language or modality. A designer might translate a data structure into a color scale, thereby choosing how that data is to be represented. This affords the designer more agency because the choice of modality or visual channel significantly impacts how the original item to be translated will be understood. Although the designer does not have the power here to choose what to translate, nonetheless her ability to impact the final outcome is increased vis-a-vis visualization.

Distillation

The act of selecting a subsegment of critical content to represent, thus reducing the amount of information expressed, but focusing it into a more comprehensible form. An example might be a designer choosing which data variables to represent from a large and complex data set, before translating and visualizing those variables. Here the designer is afforded significantly more agency because she is able to begin to choose what represent, not just how it should be represented. This commonly occurs when an expert collaborator has an excess of unsorted information or knowledge, which the designer must comprehend and recognize the key aspects of.

Interpretation

The act of casting or reflecting distilled information into a novel or unexpected form in such a way that a previously un-seen aspect of the information is revealed. This act affords the designer the most agency in that it allows her full control of what is to be represented as well as how it is to be represented. This degree of latitude is usually only afforded a designer in the context of an intimately trusting collaboration with experts.