reading notes: Information Visualization and Interface Culture

tim — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 22:13:36 GMT

These are my notes taken while reading Greg J. Smith's article Information Visualization and Interface Culture, which is accessible online (pdf). This isn't related to my master thesis; I read it for a class in qualitative data analysis where we're going to study the impact of infographics and infovisualizations on social networking sites.

Introduction

Artists, theorists and designers are rushing into a realm of practice simultaneously described as data art, information architecture, infographics and information visualization.
According to Edward Tufte (2001), information visualization is concerned with “instruments for reasoning about quantitative information”, with utmost importance placed on clarity and precision.
“Information has become an aestheticized commodity, one driven by an increasing visual literacy” (Smith)
We interact with information visualizations daily in normal, not work-related contexts.
“this discussion will consider information visualization as the distillation of a body of data into a meaningful graphic representation." (Smith)

Defining the Interface

We can consider an information visualization as an interface between the “reader” and the abstract dataset at the heart of the visualization.
Panofsky (1972) describes the transition of a painting surface from a simple material underlay into a “window through which we look out into a section of the visible world” through the discovery of perspective drawing. Panofsky states that perspective projection can be considered the “symbolic form” of contemporary culture.
Lev Manovich (2001) updates this thought, stating that the database has replaced perspective projection as the symbolic form of contemporary culture. (more on Manovich later)
Isn't the means through which we interact with data more important than the organization of the data? Shouldn't the GUI be considered the “symbolic form” of contemporary culture?

Significant Related Technologies

The origin of information visualization is usually traced from statistics, demographics and cartography as starting points, with special interest in the works of William Playfair (1759-1823) and Charles Minard (1781-1870).
This analysis looks at the origins of our current “interface culture“ as a starting point for information visualization, with special interest in Vannevar Bush's Memex, the Head-Up Display in military aviation and the birth of the GUI.

The Battle of the Beams

Britain's air dominance over its own skies in WW2 was largely due to superior radar technology, or, put another way, due to its superior “visualization” of enemy activity.

A Desktop for the Ages: Vannevar Bush and the Memex

In 1945, Vannevar Bush published a paper entitled “As We May Think”, in which he presented his idea of the Memex. This paper anticipated hypertext, the notion of personal desktop computing, and foreshadowed the development of the GUI.
The Memex would allow users to create personal information connections, annotating them, and navigate “writing space” in a non-linear way. This would be possible through an easy-to-use multimedia management user interface.

A Giant Setp for Military Imaging: The Birth of HUD

The aerospace industry has been a major force of innovation in graphic interfaces due to the complexity of aerial navigation. A paper published in 1968 introduced the concept of the HUD, or Heads-Up Display.
Introducing critical visual information directly into the pilot's field of view, instead of displaying them on secondary panels, would allow the pilot to focus more on the actual situation.

The GUI and Pervasive Interface Culture

It is easy to overlook the GUI because it is all the time in front of our faces.
The research underpinning the GUI was lead by Douglas Engelbart at the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute. In the 1960's his team developed the oN-Line System (NLS) which featured hyperlinked text.
The NLS was the basis for the Xerox Alto computer developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973. This system introduced Windows, Buttons, Icons, Widgets and the Computer Mouse, also a development of Engelbart.
The Xerox Alto (1973) and the Star (1981) where the first computers with the desktop metaphor to ease the tasks of office workers. Complex system internals were hidden and replaced by the picture plane as the site of interaction.
The Apple Lisa and Macintosh systems were also based on the desktop metaphor, introducing other concepts like drag and drop, the trash can, scroll bars and a graphical representation of the file system. The Macintosh was the first major commercial success of these systems.
Douglas Engelbart, whom we can consider a key architect of the personal computing revolution, started his professional dedication to imaging and visual work at the military, serving in the US Navy from 1944-46 with the explicit purpose to study the radar and other emerging tele-imaging technologies. The military had a major contribution to our modern “screen culture”.

Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich identifies infovis as deriving from the new priorities of networked culture: making sense of the world and producing knowledge from information. (Manovich 2005)
Manovich points out that modern film-making techniques are “database logic incarnate”. A film isn't created as one continuous piece of work. Instead, the production logistics dictate the creation process. Multiple takes, a shooting schedule which doesn't necessarily follows the story arc, and the material left on the cutting room floor yield a database for many possible films. Modern media follows a different approach than traditional arts, in that they synthesize from large amounts of raw material (Manovich 2002). The same happens with infovis.
While a romantic painter would set out to capture the incomprehensible majesty of light, a modern visualization would consolidate an incredible amount of data and dispassionately communicate it in a single frame.
Manovich characterizes the modern image as being a composition of live footage, animation, typography, motion graphics and information overlays, or, as he puts it, “meta-media” (Manovich 2007). This meta-media is possible through the computer, and we interact with it and coprehend it through the GUI.

John Maeda, Ben Fry and the Era of Post-Visual Arts

John Maeda states that we live in an era of post-visual arts. The information revolution already happened, now it is up to the creative class to make sense of it all.
Ben Fry worked towards a model of adaptive infovisualizations. He stated that representations of static sets of data has been researched extensively, but that the same wasn't true for dynamic data sources. He set out to introduce behaviour of living organisms (reproduction, metabolism, homeostasis, adaptation, etc.) into the behaviour of visualizations. This lead to his Valence and Anemone visualizations projects, which respond to changes in the dataset like living organisms respond to their environment. (Fry 2000)

Alan Liu and the Laws of Cool

According to Alan Liu (2004), when the web arrived we were already living in an era defined by a “single, great canvas”, one that had consolidated all of the posters, typographic experiments, and, most importantly, the ethos of modernist design.
This single canvas of screen, browser and application is a generalized information interface. Our aesthetics of reading it were imported from modernist design ideology. According to Liu, there is a direct correlation between best practices in interface and software design and the “whitewashed universality” of the International Style.

Recent Developments and Contemporary Work

The work at New York Times, which is rebranding itself as a 21^st century newspaper. This is one example of a trend of infovis moving from a tool for specialists to a general audience. (non-official collection: http://www.smallmeans.com/new-york-times-infographics/)
White House 2.0 Research Graphic. The winner to the White House Redux Architectural Competition 2008 condenses a good part of American history into a unified visual artifact. (http://lab-rad.com/whiteHouse2.pdf pdf, 3mb)
MyPocket, by Buran Arikan. Record of personal expenditure and prediction engine. Banal, everyday objects transformed into visualizations that engage us playfully and make us ponder our own expenditures. (http://turbulence.org/Works/mypocket/)

References

Fry, B. (2000). Organic Information Design. Master Thesis @ MIT Program in Media Arts and Sciences Advised by John Maeda.
Liu, A. (2004). The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Manovich, L. (n.d.). After Effects, or Invisible Revolution. Presented at Danube Telelectures #4, Remixing Cinema. November 8th, 2007.
Manovich, L. (2002). Data Visualization as new Abstraction and Anti-Sublime. http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data_art_2.doc (doc)
Manovich, L. (2005). The Shape of Information. http://manovich.net/DOCS/IA_Domus_3.doc (doc)
Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Panofsky, E. (1972). Renaissance an Renascences.
Tufte, E. (2001). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire: Graphics Press.

Leituras 002: Natural User Interfaces are not Natural por Don Norman

carlossantos — Fri, 14 May 2010 09:05:16 GMT

"Are natural user interfaces natural? No. But they will be useful."

Uma reflexão interessante e importante para quem anda a investigar na área do multitouch. Leitura recomendada disponível na "interactions magazine" da ACM.

Esta referência chegou-me através deste tweet do António Figueiredo, que me chamou a atenção depois de ver o vídeo que se segue, da autoria do grupo "DeCATouch" da disciplina de projecto de NTC/UA.

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