PUBLIC MARKS with tag visualization

Over the past few months I’ve been talking with many people passionate about Information Visualization who share a sense of saturation over a growing number of frivolous projects. The criticism is slightly different from person to person, but it usually goes along these lines: “It’s just visualization for the sake of visualization”, “It’s just eye-candy”, “They all look the same”.

I like to compare this practice to a game designer who lays out an intended context, rules and narrative for the game, but then has this moment of delight when users engender their own narrative, their own path. This is intrinsic to the conception of Information Visualization as a discovery tool.

One of the 8 works I created for the Data Art Show at the Pink Hobo Gallery in Minneapolis.

All these pieces are a pun on the new craze for data visualization. The goals of data visualization as I understand them are to make complicated issues more understandable, to make obscured connections visible and to reveal hidden patterns in the data. After all these tasks have been solved ideally the result should be aesthetically pleasing as well.

But when I look around what is being done in data visualization today I have the suspicion that in many cases the design is more important than the actual information and that the use of data is more an excuse to justify the use of aesthetics.

Since I do not have a problem with aesthetics for their own sake in these pieces I deliberately took the opposite direction. Since I wanted to create something visually interesting I made up my own data which would give me the desired results. All these works are the result of generative algorithms, so all the elements and their connections are actually data and not something I assembled manually in Illustrator.

The visualization grows a "tree" for each TimesPeople activity, adding users as they perform that the same action. The tree "decays" as the corresponding activity declines in frequency.

Parallel Sets (ParSets) is a visualization application for categorical data, like census and survey data, inventory, and many other kinds of data that can be summed up in a cross-tabulation. ParSets provide a simple, interactive way to explore and analyze such data.

Terre Natale (Exits 2) is a half-hour immersive visualization of human migration data.

Visitors enter a dark rotunda to discover a mirror-image Earth revolving around the room, printing animated maps and data to the wall's curved surface. Divided into five narratives, this piece quantifies both voluntary and forced movement across the globe due to political, economic, and environmental factors.

Hotmap was released internally at Microsoft in 2006 as a research prototype; its use was monitored as it was developed further. A public edition of Hotmap was released in 2007; the authors have collected feedback on that tool since.