A Place for Artists to Step In

I liked a phrase that Shamar used in her response to the post Powering a Nation. It reminds us of the very critical role that designers play not only in creating form and functionality but most importantly in revealing that which is very easily hidden under bloated graphics, poorly understood color theory, use of needless data and even deceptive information.

Visualization can obscure and misled or can have a profound effect on decision makers, enable discovery and influence society. The fluid nature, speed, amount and constant morphing of the incoming data require extremely powerful tools. We have those tools, but it is sometimes difficult if not impossible to realize the power of a single click of a mouse, a minimal interaction akin to a little stone that as it rolls down the mountain of data creates a drowning avalanche of information.

In "Critical Visualization" by Peter Hall, one of many essays on design published by the Museum of Modern Art (NY) in "Design and the Elastic mind" , Hall discusses strategic opinions which run counter to "...the current impulse to begin a visualization with the data itself". He interviews Ben Fry, which together with Casey Reas developed processing, the open source graphic programming environment which many artists, scientists and designers use, among other things, to visualize information:

"Storytelling winds up being the crux of this stuff...Most often I work with people coming from the engineering side, and there's a tendency for them to say 'I have a whole bunch of information and data-what do I do with it?' Their starting point is a pile of stuff that they want to make something interesting and clear out of. But it winds up being the opposite. I'm much more interested in getting people to think about what kind of story they want to tell, or what kind of narrative they're trying to pull out, and working backwards from that, back to the data."

A perfect example of this approach is the famous Cholera Map devised by John Snow in 1854. In a chapter about Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions, Edward Tufte, one of the foremost experts in information design and visual literacy examines "the statistical and graphical reasoning used in making two life-and-death decisions: how to stop a cholera epidemic in London during September 1854; and wether to launch the space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986. By creating statistical graphics that revealed the data, Dr. John Snow was able to discover the cause of the epidemic and bring it to an end. In contrast, by fooling around with displays that obscured the data, those who decided to launch the space shuttle got it wrong, terribly wrong."

At the center of the map (Broad and Cambridge streets) you can see a dot marking the location of a community water pump. Snow marked the deaths from cholera along with the locations of all the community water pump-wells.

So Snow had a "good idea"" , a story to tell, a causal theory, and that, guided him to assemble the data that proved his theory using a "clear logic of data display".

Shamar goes on to say in her post: " People don't need more information. What they need is less information that speaks more powerfully to them."

I cannot agree more, and yes this is the Place for Artists to Step In. I would only use the term designers instead, to encompass basically all of us.