Categories such as time, space, cause, and number represent the most general relations which exist between things; surpassing all our other ideas in extension, they dominate all the details of our intellectual life. If humankind did not agree upon these essential ideas at every moment, if they did not have the same conception of time, space, cause, and number, all contact between their minds would be impossible.
Many of our examples suggest that clarity and excellent in thinking is very much like clarity and excellence in the display of data. When principle of design replicate principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight.
My 3 books on information design stand in the following relations:
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is about pictures of number, how to depict data and enforce statistical honesty.
- Envisioning Information is about pictures of nouns (maps and aerial photographs, for example, consist of a great many nouns lying on the ground). Envisioning also deals with visual strategies for design: color, layering, and interaction effects.
- Visual Explanations is about pictures of verbs, the representation of mechanism and motion, of process and dynamics, of causes and effects, of explanation and narrative. Since such displays are often used to reach conclusions and make decisions, there is a special concern with the integrity of the content and the design.
And yet it took 5K years to change the name of the coordinates from west-east and north-south to empirically measured variables X and Y.
This is a classic of scientific visualization. Nevertheless, a redesign can improve the animation’s context, precision, and visual character.
How big is that cloud? What direction is it moving? What are the dimensions of the grid? These fundamentals of scale, orientation, and labels — for centuries routine in maps and statistical graphics — are often missing in the colorful images emanating from computer visualizations.
Enthusiasts, partisans, and liars have long tinkered with graphical evidence by dequantifying images, selecting and hyping advantageous visual effects, distorting data.
One way to enforce some standard of truth-telling is to insist that the innocent, unprocessed, natural image be shown along with the manipulated image, and, further, that the manipulators and their methods be identified.
It was now time to act; after all, the reason we seek causal explanations is in order to intervene, to govern the cause so as to govern the effect: “Policy-thinking is and must be causality-thinking.”
Snow had a good idea — a causal theory about how the disease spread — that guided the gathering and assessment of evidence.
Scientists are not “admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond their competence.” If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs. The art of research is the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.
Considering alternative explanations and contrary cases. Sometimes it can be difficult for researchers — who both report and advocate their findings — to face up to threats to their conclusions, such as alternative explanations and contrary cases. The point is to get it right, not to win the case, not to sweep under the rug all the assorted puzzles and inconsistencies that frequently occur in collections of data.
A further difficulty arises, a result of fast computing. It is easy now to sort through thousands of plausible varieties of graphical and statistical aggregations — and then to select for publication only those findings strongly favorable to the point of view being advocated. Such searches are described as data mining, multiplicity, or specification searching. Thus a prudent judge of evidence might well presume that those graphs, tables, and calculations revealed in a presentation are the best of all possible results chosen expressly for advancing the advocate’s case.
Good design brings absolute attention to data.
These problems are more than just poor design, for a lack of visual clarity in arranging evidence is a sign of a lack of intellectual clarity in reasoning about evidence.
If displays of data are to be truthful and revealing, then the design logic of the display must reflect the intellectual logic of the analysis.
Magicians, like other theatrical performers, are professionals in communicating and presenting informations. To create illusions is to engage in disinformation design, to corrupt optical information, to deceive the audience. Thus the strategies of magic suggest what not to do if our goal is truth-telling rather than illusion-making.
Also, drawings sometimes have a useful abstracting, idealizing quality; a generic heart is depicted, not a particular or idiosyncratic heart.
Heavy arrows conduct the rhythm of images, while streamers indicate finer movements of fingers and coins.
Although movement attracts attention, it also diminishes visibility. When a thread is used to support a light object, it can be seen from a surprising distance even when its color matches the background. However, the slightest movement makes it disappear. A large movement can be used to conceal a small one.
Paul Rand describes the triumph of decoration over information, similar to the mishmash of chartjunk for statistical graphics.
The first rule to be borne in mind by the aspirant magician is this: “Never tell your audience beforehand what you are going to do.” If you do so, you at once give their vigilance the direction which it is most necessary to avoid, and increase ten-fold the chances of detection. It follows that you should never perform the same trick twice on the same evening. The audience knows precisely what is coming, and have all their faculties directed to find out at what point you cheated their eyes on the first occasion.
These techniques of disinformation design, when reversed, reinforce strategies of presentation used by good teachers. Your audience should know beforehand what you are going to do; then they can evaluate how your verbal and visual evidence supports your argument.
Near the beginning of your presentation, tell the audience:
- What the problem is
- Why the problem is important
- What the solution to the problem is
Magicians rarely perform the same trick twice in front of the same audience because they are aware that repetition helps people learn, remember, and understand. Unlike magicians, you should give your audience a second chance to get the point. And a third. Repeated variations on the same theme will often clarify and develop an idea.
Along with the perils of disinformation design, the practice of magic also exemplifies the stagecraft of theatrical performance, the professional techniques that can help us improve our presentations. The literature on the staging of magic reveals that there is a lot going on in a good performance, and that mastery of this detail requires constant attention and enthusiastic practice (sometimes several years are needed to perfect a few minutes of material for a magic act).
The message for our own work is clear: Analyze the details of your presentation; then master those details by practice, practice, practice.
Complexity organized, like a fugue, the sentences roll and rumble — and sting with latent sarcasm. All this in the one-dimensional flow of words.
Parallelism connects visual elements. Connections are built among images by position, orientation, overlap, synchronization, and similarities in content. Parallelism grows from a common viewpoint that relates like to like. Congruity of structure across multiple images gives the eye a context for assessing data variation. Parallelism is not simply a matter of design arrangements, for the perceiving mind itself active works to detect and indeed to generate links, clusters, and matches among assorted visual elements.
In short, codes obstruct parallelism; replacing code with direct labels unifies the information.
Captions to pictures, legends on maps, labels, and codes are partial representations of the image itself, running in parallel with the image. Above, we see a mix of photograph, drawing, number, and word that make 5 partial, parallel descriptions.
Embodying inherent links and connections, parallelism synchronizes multiple channels of information, draw analogies, enforces contrasts and comparisons. Parallelism provides a coherent architecture for organizing and learning from images — as well from words and numbers, the allies of images. And by establishing a structure of rhythms and relationships, parallelism becomes the poetry of visual information.
Multiple images reveal repetition and change, pattern and surprise — the defining elements in the idea of information.
Multiples directly depict comparisons, the essence of statistical thinking.
Multiples enhance the dimensionality of the flatlands of paper and computer screen, giving depth to vision by arraying panels and slices of information.
Multiples create visual lists of objects and activities, nouns and verbs, helping viewers to analyze, compare, differentiate, decide.
Multiples represent and narrate sequences of motion.
Multiple amplify, intensify, and reinforce the meaning of images.
Charts and flowsheets are bulky, difficult to file and retrieve, and sometimes even illegible. Medical records are gradually being computerized, making them more legible but hardly more comprehensible — since data are as easily lost in pages of printout as in tangles of handwriting.
Arranging multiples of frequency of occurrence or along some other illuminating dimension (rather than alphabetically, randomly, or taxonomically) may lead to quite efficient learning, whether in water or in air.
As for a picture, if it isn’t worth a thousand words, the hell with it.
He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and the Water Genie explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories.
As I have drawn it, an event is the interaction of noun and verb, of subject and action — something happens. A plane of events, a slice at a particular time, consists of all possible combinations of nouns and verbs at that time, with as many planes as there are times. A story is a progression of noun-verb incidents; each long strand in the diagram represents one story.
Circled callouts annotate the central image, drawings commenting on a drawing.
Unlike maps or photographs, confections are not direct representations of pre-existing scenes, nor are they the result of placing data into conventional formats such as statistical charts, tables, or maps.
And accordingly, what collage is for art, confections are for the design of information:
The collage technique, that art of reassembling fragments of pre-existing images in such a way as to form a new image, is the most important innovation in the art of this century. Found objects, chance creations, ready-made (mass-produced items promoted into art objects) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized.
There are many differences between The Constructor and The Ultimate Designer — taste, subtlety, craft, skill. But most of all, it is a difference in the quality of the thought.
Speech alone is sometimes an altogether inefficient, low-resolution method for communicating information, a point to be considered by teachers who rely on lectures, people running committees, and newscasters. Whenever possible, give your audience words and images written down on paper, even if only to supplement spoken words.
Although a television account would look much like any other disaster story (and thus contain little information), the printed report here is eloquent and memorable because of its specific and scary detail. Also the printed page allows readers to control the order and pace of one-dimensional ordering imposed by the rush of voice with video.
Each technology does what it is good at: the computer selects, organizes, customizes data; paper makes visible the high-resolution information in portable permanent form.
Another weak approach is to make the interface itself a conspicuous visual statement, with a great deal of creative effort going into styling a billboard that masks a data dump. Believed to be boring and in need of decorative spice, the content becomes trivialized and incidental. Too many interfaces for information compilations have suffered from television-disease: thin substance, contempt for the audience and the content, short attention span, and over-produced styling.
The development of perspective by Florentine architects during the 15th-century Italian Renaissance was a special gift to the world of visual thinking, for now people could see diverse objects located in a geometrically correct context. Confectionary designs are a similar gift to understanding. Like perspective, confections give the mind an eye. Confections place selected, diverse images into the narrative context of a coherent argument. And, by virtue of the architecture of their arguments, confections make reading and seeing and thinking identical.