An interview with Andrew Vande Moere, Senior Lecturer at the Design Lab at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning of the University of Sydney, Australia, and author of the Information Aesthetics blog.

Interest in information visualization — blending data analysis, functionality, and aesthetics — has been growing steadily for a while, and now seems to be exploding. Why do you think it’s happening now?

There are many reasons for this.

• Cross-Disciplinary Skills. The blending of “design” with “computer science”. For example, from using design skills to develop new computer interfaces, and vice versa, designers that use computers to express artistic intents.
• Software Availability. New software that is created for, and often developed by, designers, making programming fun.
• Dataset Availability. A new era of opening data up, from science to government. An increasing amount of data is becoming freely available, for everyone, from the interactive media artist to the enthusiastic programmer at home.
• Visualization is Immediate. The attraction of visualization is that the results are immediate and tactile, together with the fact that there are many issues in visualization that still need to be resolved.
• Information Addiction. In this information age, people are getting addicted to information access, and have no problem to take up information simultaneously with other activities, from working to driving. As the information-literacy is increasing, the expectations grow as well.
• Increase in Data Acquisition. We are collecting data in ever-faster ways, resulting in ever-larger data repositories. Like libraries, data never ceases to exist. We always collect it, (almost) never delete it. The continuous development in data generating technology, from security data logging to simple sensor streams, makes that the more and more phenomena are measured, and in ever larger resolutions, requiring ever more sophisticated tools to analyze them. Consider the resolution of your digital camera, for instance.
• Increase of Computational Power, Data Storage and Screen Resolution.
• Data as a Form of Creative Expression.

What groups of creators and data users are seeking new ways to visualize and present information? What are they using it for?

I would say they are everywhere: business, science, government are all creating information faster than they can understand it. They all do realize their datasets are potentially quite valuable, even in financial terms, if they would find a way to explore it and test their hypotheses. At the same time, artists, designers and advocacy groups have realized that using information as the foundation of their works provides for added credibility in communicating viewpoints, emotions and awareness.

The amount of available data is clearly higher now than ever. Is the same observation true for data presented to readers and audiences?

I feel there is an important discrepancy between making data available and making data understandable for the wide, lay audience. Governments can “open up” datasets as much as they want, claiming transparency and good will, but the issue then shifts in making the data accessible for lay people. And it does not stop there. While the traditional way is to use typical visualization methods like pie charts and bar graphs, I think there is sufficient evidence that such graphs will not make a large audience pay attention, nor will they motivate them to engage with the data, or the issues that are connected to the meaning of the data. Hence, I believe there is an urgent need for visualizations that are both informational and enjoyable. Such visualizations often focus on communicating insights about the principles that hide “behind” the data itself, instead of focusing on patterns that happen “within” the data.

What’s the role of rhetoric in information aesthetics? How good is our ‘data literacy’ to process data, compared to our ‘textual literacy’ to process written arguments?

Rhetoric is an important part of information aesthetics, which is slowly becoming a form of visual journalism. As with the written word, it is relatively easy to mislead readers in believing what is being show, although in visualization at least there should always be an objective data source that can be ultimately checked by the readers themselves. Often the visualization will include interactive features that allow readers to test hypotheses, come up with new questions, or communicate insight to fellow readers. Although “numbers never lie”, even the choice itself of mapping specific attributes (and not others) is already a subjective one given that it attempts to highlight specific trends above others. With the increase in data availability and new visualization methods that allow users to explore the data for themselves (while enjoying the time doing so), hopefully people will get more proficient in being critical while being exposed to visualization.

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