Representation

My colleague Celine Latulipe has made a nice website about her Dance.Draw project. In what she calls Exquisite Interaction, three dancers wield inertial mice and thus control shapes in a projection behind them. The result is interesting and beautiful.

When peanuts are bombs, clown-shaped cake ornaments are muzzle fires, and young guys are skateboards, we are talking about representation. We take it for granted that words can refer to things or abstract concepts, and colored spots on a piece of paper can depict data. Representation is really quite remarkable, and a better understanding of it will make a big difference in how we build visualizations.

Chernoff Faces are discussed in every information visualization course, and are referenced in many papers that talk about glyphs. Yet the only serious use of faces in visualization is for calibration, not for data display. Faces are so special that we better know their perceptual properties really well before we can use them, which we don't.

Visualization people often talk about mapping. Mapping is the process that translates data into a visual representation, and the main challenge in the visualization of abstract data. A good mapping is one that leads to insights into the data, while a bad mapping does not. It is important, however, to keep in mind what the purpose of the depiction is, or one runs the risk of applying the wrong standards.

Visual representations of time are particularly interesting, because they seem so logical. A point in time is a point in the visualization, an interval is a line. But things are not always that simple: planning and temporal uncertainty require more powerful visual tools. Sets of Possible Occurrences (SOPOs) are an example of a visual representation of time that is very flexible and powerful – and totally unintuitive.

Making visualization more aesthetically pleasing is certainly an important goal. Another one is to make visualization a part of our everyday lives. Ambient information displays are a way of doing both, and they are often inspired by pieces of art. But what if the viewers think they are just looking at a picture, and don't realize that it presents information to them?