Design

There is almost universal agreement that any extraneous elements in a chart or visualization, elements that do not represent numbers, are detrimental to understanding the data. A paper that was presented at CHI recently described a study to figure out just how bad all this chart junk really was. As it turns out, it's actually rather helpful.

As one of the Tutorials Chairs at this year's VisWeek (which is the combination of the IEEE Vis and InfoVis conferences, and the VAST symposium), I want to make you aware of the upcoming deadline for submitting tutorial proposals: April 28. We are looking for a wide variety of ideas, but I want to especially encourage the submission of tutorials on design for visualization. VisWeek will take place October 10–16 in Atlantic City, NJ.

Jeff Heer asked me to talk more about the Design, Vision, and Visualization workshop at VisWeek, so here is a list of questions we came up with. While we were not able to discuss them at great length, I think they're very valid, and might lead to a better understanding about how to connect the design and visualization worlds.