David Mccandless, much on theme with what we have been discussing over the past few lectures, suggests that the best way to navigate our information overloaded world may just be to change the way we see the world. This change might come in the form of visualizations—“beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections”.
Visualizations allow audiences to digest and actually make meaning out of massive amounts of data. They allow you to make comparisons, understand numbers, tell a story, and just look really cool. Data visualizations allow new patterns to be revealed. The audience is prompted to ask different kinds of questions, and allows everyone to digest large amounts of information. Mccandless says: “If you ask the right kind of question or work it [the data] in the right way, interesting things can emerge”, and I couldn’t agree more. Visualizations are extraordinarily powerful and very well could be the future of the way our information is presented and absorbed. In this week’s readings, I was especially interested in The Knotted Line and Freedom’s Ring. Both of these artistic and interpretive timelines inspired me to create a similar visualization, on a smaller scale, for a case study on Coca Cola’s role as a sponsor of the Olympic Games. After a little research, I found a timeline creation tool that allows you to input timeline data and connect those data points to multimedia. The tool pulls all of the data from a google doc spreadsheet, and creates an interactive timeline!
In our world, we are bombarded with information: we have access to it, can collect our own and are constantly being presented with new facts and figures. This information a lot of the time, is difficult to digest and is often reported out of context. Mccandless stressed, “Absolute figures, in an interconnected world don’t actually give you the full picture”. Data visualizations, if more widely implemented, can be the solution to misinterpretation or misunderstanding of data. Data can shape and change perspectives. And if presented in the right way, becomes fun to engage with. What is important is that designers of visualizations collect and utilize only the data necessary for a story to be told or for an argument to be made.
Visualizations might be the solution to our overwhelming exposure to information. But they must incorporate the right data, and present it in context. It must be well thought-out and designed. They must have a user-friendly interface otherwise the data will remain obsolete. Generally, visualizations should probably also follow the Eight Golden Rules–guidelines that help to design and execute a great user interface.
Mccandles closed his TED Talk by saying, “Design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions. And information design is about solving information problems.” It’s exciting to be learning about these tools that are on the cutting edge of information design, and to be a part of a new information age.