What can nature teach us to visualize data?
Before we start we should define the word „data“. In this essay data are considered as mere basic observations, which are real facts, not assumed or hypothesized. The visualization of data is the graphical display of abstract information for two purposes: sense-making and communication.
To figure out in what way and where nature could aid us designing visualizations we should first have a look at where nature represents data.
The answer is everywhere. Every single creature, object and thing in nature represents data in some kind. We just need to know how to read the information behind. When we consider information as a story it becomes much easier to understand. Let‘s have a look at trees. Trees are often several decades old and have a long story to tell. How can we read the story? We see its size, the amount of branches, scarfs … This is enough evidence that we can tell, that this tree is ages old, our perception knows already how to read these signs. But we can get even more information of its story — the annual rings in the trunk display not only the exact age of the tree, but they also tell us about the different seasons and their conditions.
This phenomena appear in many different areas in nature. Soil layers, for example, show topographical, geographical and geological information and the layers in glaciers are frozen evidence of the annual climate and amount of carbon dioxide, for the last thousands of years. This data is rater more accessible for scientists, but just because they know how to read them. The layer technique is a well working technique in visualizations. But the main question is, how can we use this reading skills to support our visualizations? The answer is, that we have to adopt nature in our visualizations as metaphors. Metaphors are a great tool to help understand abstract or unfamiliar content. Metaphors refer to something that we know from the physical world, and we can use them creatively to explain complex or uncommon concepts and processes … Since humans love to recognize things, our brain tries its best to make sense of whatever we’re looking at. This enables us to use metaphors in an abstract way.
The visualization Mountains Out of Molehills by David McCandless shows a timeline of global media scare stories.
He uses a landscape with hills and mountains as metaphor for visualizing the data. It‘s a well working concept especially the interactive version is interesting and fun to use. The benefits of the landscape-mode on the one hand is the fast overview and on the other hand the ability to compare sizes precisely.
Also the video Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames utilizes a metaphor to visualize the extreme impact of the powers of ten. The out zooming tracking shot makes possible to realize the tremendous effect of powers of ten. The metaphors of distance and size, through mathematics and geography allow us to compare the shown images, so we get a feeling for the speed and scale and their relation of the whole map we experience in the entire video.
As we can see using the metaphors of nature is a good way to communicate information in a way we can easily understand …