Data Visualization

Information Is Beautiful

"A visual guide to the way the world really works Every day, every hour, every minute we are bombarded by information - from television, from newspapers, from the internet, we're steeped in it, maybe even lost in it. We need a new way to relate to it, to discover the beauty and the fun of information for information's sake. No dry facts, theories or statistics. Instead, Information is Beautiful contains visually stunning displays of information that blend the facts with their connections, their context and their relationships - making information meaningful, entertaining and beautiful. This is information like you have never seen it before - keeping text to a minimum and using unique visuals that offer a blueprint of modern life - a map of beautiful colour illustrations that are tactile to hold and easy to flick through but intriguing and engaging enough to study for hours."

By David McCandless

These are some images from the Book "Information is Beautiful" below:

In this experiment I traced the existing sections from previous sketch of electricity consumption readings and meved them out side of the initial circle.

I coloured segments according to what voltage in watts they use.

Rearranging the segments from conventional visualization added higher visual interest to the graph, but still presenting all the information.

I 'EXPLODED' segments even further in this sketch and created new shape, that looks nothing like a boring pie chart and potentially can be more productive.

Youtube video: David McCandless lecture about : 'The Beauty of data visualization'.

Image of the graph on the book cover

Images from my sketch book: Workshop and "Experiments with data visualization".

These are first sketches of ideas of how to visualize data everyone in the group collected about their electricity consumption.

Photographs of installation.

Pros:

-Visually interesting and eye catching
-Different to conventional graphs and charts
-Easy to engage

Cons:

-Very hard to count and tell exact measurements
-No key for audience to read the purpose
-Lack of data and detail (how much energy was consumed, over what period of time?)

Ideas for Improvements

Questions:

1.How can it be used to enable audience participation to add to the existing ideas?

-if there was a clear key and maybe brief instructions, audience would be able to interact and participate more effectively, knowing the purpose.
-by adding more appliances it would appeal to wider audience, as different people posses various appliances.

2.How you use this to interpret the idea?

-to emphasize the idea and make bigger impact it would be better to increase amount of appliances, so there is more electricity consumption, wich would create greater contrast.
-use pin count as a clock instead of just using random count.

Photos of data visualization by other group 'Living Room'.

My adaptation and deconstruction:

I devided readings in their intensity range by separating them with colours.

Colours are visually more appealing and colour temperature better represents the wattage intensity without having to read the small divisions on x and y axis.

I used tracing paper over the photograph of the original graph to trace the shapes pins and strings were creating.

Instead of connecting all readings with the centre of the graph, I re-connected them with hours. It gives more accurate reading of the time and also creates overlapping figures that are visually more effective.

I cut out all individual segment shapes and arranged them next to each other.

www.visualcomplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

"Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans."

Matt Woolman
Digital Information Graphics

Data Flow 2 expands the definition of contemporary information graphics. The book features new possibilities for diagrams, maps, and charts and investigates the visual and intuitive presentation of processes and data. Eight comprehensive chapters illuminate how techniques such as simplification, abstraction, metaphor, and dramatization function. Data Flow 2 is a valuable reference offering practical advice, background, case studies, and inspiration.