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[rjnsklwrites]

how to: jan 25, 2014

Listen and take direction as long as the initial insight is good.

Add one thing that makes it better, and be able to explain it, advocate for it, and take credit for it. 

Don't overcomplicate. Add all your ideas to the page if you need to get them out, but be ruthless about removing ones that don't make sense for the project. 

[rjnsklwrites]

creativity from structure

If we want visual expression to be as rich and nuanced as verbal / written language, then there are certain templates and defaults we must accept. The way new words, new sentences, new meanings are created are through a discrete combinatorial system (a theory of mind and language I've mostly learned from Steven Pinker's writing), which all fits back into a universal grammar but can be cut up, remixed, and recombined with ease due to the very fact that an underlying structure exists.

This goes back to a tweet from Lev Manovich, which I won't try to dig up, but said something about how templates and software defaults provide that rigid structure from which creativity and innovation arise. It threw me a little because the basis of my MFA thesis, and most of my research interests before and after, are about questioning and thwarting those defaults and biases.

Arguing with myself about the value of embracing uncertainty and constantly interrogating those defaults is something I've gotten used to. Of course you have to be prepared to accept that this practice isn't as helpful or productive as maybe it could be. Of course you need to stick to certain beliefs and ways of seeing the world to stand on enough solid ground and make something. Of course creating something new will always come from the manipulation of something that already exists, and communication will always rely some shared, established context.

[rjnsklwrites]

One of the Culprits Behind PRISM? Design Thinking (Really) — Sam Jacob (Wired)

"Perhaps because of the converging digital tools we use across disciplinary boundaries, design thinking is a product of the fact that the digital is both where we design and what we design. 

It’s also a product of how digital culture shows us the world: of networks and accumulations of big data. Design thinking is marked by the scale and scope of its operations. Rather than isolating particular problems, it attempts to survey the whole scenario.

Design thinking conceives the field of operation as the system rather than the object. In doing so, it transforms the designed world into an ecosystem. Design thinking treats this synthetic ecosystem as its project, attempting to redesign it according to particular goals, to achieve its desired outcomes.

By seeing the world through the lens of this conceptual design ecosystem, design thinking abstracts the world into a series of interactions with outputs and it remains poised to provide a solution for anything. (Never mind the fact that there are many who would argue with the idea of design as a solution-focused activity, that this conception of design is pure ideological can’t.)

A problem-solving methodology born out of art school creativity hijacked by management theory, design thinking suggests the synthetic way in which designers are (supposed to be) thinking can be applied to almost any subject. Its power is its ability to transform anything into a design problem: the way organizations work, profitability, market share, information, the gathering and processing of intelligence … and, it seems, national security."

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/06/the-real-culprit-behind-prism-design-thinking-yes/

[rjnsklwrites]

designers who don't read

http://fr.slideshare.net/EmilandDC/dear-nsa-let-me-take-care-ou

I like to hate on ugly slideshows as much as any other designer, but to say that the look of this particular presentation offends you more than the content is troubling. It was meant for an internal audience, not a room of venture capitalists looking to fund a mobile app. The aesthetics of powerpoint may seem laughable to us, but it's still a powerful communication tool used by powerful people who make far-reaching decisions, while we push pixels in Adobe.

Visual language matters in a big way. It colors our perception and alters how we interpret the messages we receive. In most cases, this fact is overlooked and needs to be argued in more detail. But for the life of me I can't understand why someone would do this particular redesign of the PRISM powerpoint... there's an opportunity to make substantive critique here, but all this person has done is replace one set of generic design elements with another. 

A similar thing happened back when CERN announced early evidence of the Higgs boson, and my twitter feed filled with complaints along the lines of "COMIC SANS. MY EYES." So they didn't have someone with InDesign skills on staff...but you know what? They were pretty busy making breakthrough discoveries about the origin of matter in the universe. How superficial can you be to itch to replace everything with Helvetica Neue Light when information about how we experience and understand our world is making tectonic shifts beneath our feet?

[visualizinguncertainty]

[rjnsklwrites]

Close your eyes and picture “data.” What do you see?

Jake Porway begins his lunch talk at Hyperakt, hosted by the studio on the first spring-like Friday in April, by posing this question to the audience. The responses paint a predictably dry portrait: spreadsheets, rooms of servers, and the anonymous, matrix-like flickerings of 0’s and 1’s. These commonly held assumptions, he laments, can obscure all the very intimate ways we produce and are produced by our data.

Realising the personal and meaningful potential of data is something he’s built quite the career out of. By now, hackathons are a familiar and celebrated staple of the urban landscape — a flexing of creative and technical muscle under hectic conditions. But at a session Porway once attended, he felt that the output was out of sync with big picture issues. The brightest minds were churning out apps to find parking and restaurant ratings — tools to make the lives of the comfortable just ever so slightly more convenient.

To help foster more meaningful collaborations, he co-founded DataKind, which funnels that surplus energy and talent towards nonprofits, NGO’s, and government agencies that need it the most. Their DataDives adopt the hackathon model, where data scientists spend a marathon weekend with groups that have well-defined problems to tackle. DataCorps is a longer venture, pairing volunteers with the organizations for 1-6 months for a more in-depth exploration.

Transforming intimidating fields of numbers into an appropriate visual expression is work that can easily be taken for granted. But the results vouch for themselves, providing the organizations the “ah-ha” moment of new insight into their own content. For most of DataKind’s partnerships, the effort goes into cleaning and visualizing the data to build exploratory tools, though this also sets the groundwork to make insight available to users at many literacy levels. Although a line is usually drawn between visualization for internal, academic purposes and those designed for public communication, the conversation between Porway and audience members turns to how even experts benefit from the use of intuitive, visual metaphors. As the saying goes, “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

With the growing popularity of data visualization have come a fair share of guidelines, tutorials, and manifestos. One of the often-repeated commandments tells us that “form follows data,” which seems to overshadow the nature of data as a cultural artifact. Porway shows a few examples of how deeper interrogation unravels these assumptions. Among them was an argument between a New York Times report unfavorably reviewing the new Tesla Model S, and the motor company disputing the review based on information collected by the car itself. Of course, this is only one of many examples of how the forensic process of finding the narrative in a spreadsheet can yield many, differing readings. 

Porway finds his work indeed has more of the organic quirks of scientific processes, as initial expectations about a dataset fall apart when deeper investigation reveals missing information, noise, and biases. One of the benefits of DataKind collaborations to the data scientists is the exposure to policy experts, who have the qualitative expertise to help navigate the quantitative. It’s perhaps what influences his next open question to the audience: What responsibilities do we have as data scientists and visualizers? And to whom? No simple answers can be offered, though the audience — a mix from academia, statistics, and design — share concerns from their various perspectives.

  The last few slides give a glimpse at the recently released NYPD stop and frisk data. Instead of launching into the “raw” information first, Porway rounds out the talk with another question: What questions can we ask before we even look at the data? This time the room fires back with suggestions: whether or not there are quotas, how strictly stop and frisks are recorded, and how racial categories might be defined, to name a few. Even this short exercise seems to bring a more invigorated, critical perspective to discovering the problem at large, or, at the very least, bringing a heightened awareness to the problem at hand.

——

  Catch Jake Porway on the latest Data Stories Podcast and follow @jakeporway and @DataKind

Hyperakt is a design and data visualization studio in Brooklyn, NY. Follow them @Hyperakt for information about their regular lunch talks. All event photos courtesy of Hyperakt. 

[rjnsklwrites]

one of the reasons

Sometimes I regret the things I say, but never the images I make.

[rjnsklwrites]

generalist problems

you never know until you arbitrarily pick something and try it out

[rjnsklwrites]

Scientific American: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age

I usually stop reading immediately when the materiality (or smell) of books is brought up as a legitimate reason for how they are ultimately better than digital texts. Why waste energy making moot points while the world around you carries on guided by more nuanced and interesting reasons?

That said, I'm also enormously skeptical of those who would do away with skeuomorphism entirely. The future doesn't unfold in leaps and bounds, and there's very, very little that is innately intuitive to the digital and analog interfaces we interact with daily. How we use our technology evolves, maybe not at the genetic level, but changes in cognitive habits certainly take place. I could do without the design prescriptions at the end of this article, but I love that it brings up how text and typography itself is a learned technology. We're able to read not because a dedicated mass of neurons, but because our eyes were trained to recognize objects as hunter-gatherers. 

"We often think of reading as a cerebral activity concerned with the abstract—with thoughts and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs. As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit. In fact, the brain essentially regards letters as physical objects because it does not really have another way of understanding them. As Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid, we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=reading-paper-screens

[rjnsklwrites]

why talk

An advisor had asked me a while back, regarding my thesis, to consider why humans need to communicate at all. At the time I thought it would lead me to the most effective truth that could come out of my specific investigation, but it should be something we all ask ourselves.

Given two children raised without language, they'll develop a very basic pidgin vocabulary on their own. (The scaffolding of basic grammar is pretty much universal across humans. Evolution is pretty rad, right?) In another generation or two, pidgin develops into a more fully formed language/dialect. 

So why this overwhelming need to talk to one another?

:

Consciousness is too much to bear alone. 

(This is my favorite pet theory at least). Even day-to-day speech often revolves around acknowledging shared experiences and observations, checking to make sure we share the same reality. More often than not, when our realities don't line up, finding a peaceable compromise depends on how well we articulate our individual experience to another. And there’s so much pleasure to derive from the realization of common experiences and common thoughts with another thinking, breathing person — when everything lines up it feels like a pretty good reason for being.

[rjnsklwrites]

why science trumps "social construction"

Our minds are ruled by narrative archetypes and visual arcs, developed throughout our evolutionary history to help make some operational use of all the sensory chaos that could potentially come to us.

Objective science is susceptible to these human biases of course, but more often than not it gets us to inquire after counter-intuitive new theories about how the world works. In a way, the scientific method actually has more in common with Dada / Surrealism / and other avant garde techniques. Through microscopes, telescopes, mathematics, logic, and other extensions of our physical and cognitive selves, the unimaginable becomes tested and deduced — and not towards the end of a finite, established body of knowledge, but functional truths and functional uncertainties that will change over time. 

It remains essential for that science to be communicated in a way that makes it as intuitive as possible to our primitive brains, but I love that much of it is already beyond imagination. 

[rjnsklwrites]

playing with text

Threw my thesis into a Markov chain generator, which "reads" and outputs word sequences based on the structure and vocabulary of input text. I know it has to do with probability and redundancy inherent in language, but that's all I could really explain about the whole thing. Here's 2500 words:

"is still, very much a matter of metaphor.” They act as an essential pieces than finished products and juxtaposing them in a self-aware and media-aware way. 

McLuhan seemed after my own heart when he writes, "I am curious to know what would happen in code or in digital space. I’ve physically taken apart objects, taken while they were meant to describe. And they are capable of breaking free of a templated dependency on our media, I propose remediation—translating content through the plastic relief of a digital age now, the convergence of hand-drawn elements in their own defaults and proclivities. 

If you chase the implications: cabinets, folders, trash, etc) — part of a graphical user interface that helps us approach the class a language changes in time. A day’s length is traced by the hour hand, which completes 365 turns to move the year around once. This mapping of our solar system is “very much a matter of metaphor.” They act as an essential mechanisms that evolve languages that defined landmarks — dual seductions — sometimes referred to as absorbed coping, where the awareness recedes into transparency as one becomes absorbed coping, where the awareness recedes into translate nicely into design, and are in fact, previous iterations of our times. Even if it’s to resist popular urges, we must be aware of these technological optimism comes a bit too easy in the biographies of almost all the firms I admire and humbly consider some time, to have it display the category, question, and Watson’s score — which they directly act. So that, while man apparently is working out his own salvation and benefitting himself anew, nor Gary Kasparov or Ken Jennings perhaps unsatisfying explanation for why some people act differently then they fail, but that distracts from this investigation and may still take form. One of these wavering, ephemerality to migrate daily updates appeal to some of the most clearly — essentially, when we bring them back into a physical delay that demonstration worked incredibly well in placing the user in a state of anxiety and frustration within the intersection of meaning operates not unlike the computer science and polymath wannabe, is to migrate the produced, she but draws from real language borrowed from or directly imitated familiar through social connections, and the use of the book more apparently is working out the gallery interface that he or she will be a fruitful and evolving virtual world, to algorithms that dictate."

[rjnsklwrites]

Spurred by Olympics and elections in 2012, the world of data and its visual manifestations celebrated exciting developments in new programming languages, journalistic insight, and design fluency that tended to be the rule rather than exception for once. However, the fervor over this growing domain comes with its fair share of disillusionment, and the calls for slow data, skepticism, and more intimate messages are growing into an audible din. As these things tend to go when preceded by a flood of hype, much of the nuance and interesting details surface after the dust settles.

One facet of this, the role of art in data visualization, has been subject to ongoing debate as the community has expanded and diversified. Among some high-visibility practitioners, there seems to be a tendency to put art and science on separate and opposing ends of the spectrum. In the most extreme cases, use of a personal aesthetic becomes associated with frivolous decoration and the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake. At the same time, efforts from designers working independently from data scientists and the original data sources can indeed produce the superficial results that critics point to in problematizing the use of style. But for the sake of progress, we may as well avoid the lowest common denominators.

 There are, of course, important technical considerations for exploratory visualizations contained within a field; and sometimes all it takes is a bar chart or scatter plot. But as the overall body of knowledge continues to grow, so does the dire need to capture the attention of others and accurately share insights to unfamiliar audiences. It’s worth keeping in mind that these pieces are ultimately communications to other humans—and not just an amorphous “public,” but individual interpreters having discrete experiences. If we take a step back, reexamine our intentions, and unpack some of these generalizations, we may be better able to understand the mechanisms by which art and science conspire to distill and communicate meaningful information.

  Process, not style 

“The biggest failure of data art, in my opinion, is in neglecting to address the individual character of a data set. We have all kinds of quite beautiful methods to visualize datasets of a specific sort – say network data sets – but they tend to be general use algorithms and techniques. As a result, visualizations of varied data sets tend to look the same.”

— Jer Thorp 

With powerful tools at hand to work with, it’s easy to see why many default to templated, established, formal solutions. It’s hard to disagree that visualizations should communicate clearly and refrain from too much novelty, but should we settle for visual sameness and stagnation? This isn’t to say that the answer is in arbitrarily applying veneers of style (hand-drawn sketchiness, nostalgic print treatments, etc). In any creative endeavor, it’s more important to focus on the process than the final “look” of a piece. No instagram filter could ever replace the thoughtful consideration of color and composition, of semiotics and visual perception that actually tighten a message and make it more deliberate and impactful. 

Of course, it’s easier to talk about these things in broad terms and metaphors than to understand and employ the right creative strategies. The following is merely a quick survey of designers and artists working around the periphery of data representation, hopefully in ways that can be inspiring and instructive across a broader range of practice.

Know the source.

When the topic of the human touch in information design come up, it’s impossible to overlook the data-crafted approach of Stephanie Posavec. Her work is often cited for the beauty of the final diagrams—uniquely organized through her own visual intuition—but it’s worth calling attention to the labor of love that is her data gathering process. As described in a short documentary by Protein, she explains: “by reading and rereading these texts, I’m able to understand more about a specific text or a specific subject matter than I would otherwise, than I would if I wrote a computer program to analyze that text for me.” Posavec chose to work with On The Road because of the novel’s personal significance, and in encoding the text by hand in her Writing Without Words series, she’s able to interpret the shades of meaning to be gained from great literature specifically by humans, just beyond any current algorithm’s reach.

Becoming more deeply involved in data collection and analysis may be one path towards crafting visualizations that resonate on a more poignant, intimate frequency. Also, in order to reach others at a personal scale, why not begin with personal interests and causes?

  Get Personal.

This is how Ai Weiwei began his investigation into the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Following the devastating natural disaster and subsequent Chinese government cover-up, the artist took it upon himself to bring in a team to find the names and birthdates of child casualties that resulted from shoddy public school construction. Though the final visual outcome wasn’t a direct numerical representation of the original data, even the simple act of publishing those names to his blog formalized the message in a powerful way that rallied supporters and attracted harassment from local authorities. For a 2010 retrospective at Haus der Kunst in Munich, he used 9000 colored backpacks to write out a phrase from a mother of one of the victims—“she lived happily for seven years in this world.” In the documentary Never Sorry, he explains how the idea to use the backpacks came from being on the ground. Seeing those objects strewn about the rubble as the physical reminders of lost lives, and ultimately incorporated them into a message that is at once intimate and forceful.

Cultivating projects for a human scale doesn’t have to do with the size of the original datasets, but the point along the design process where you shift between the birds-eye-view and taking a reader through the experience on the ground. The map is not the territory, but there’s value to both take and give from getting closer to a first-person perspective.

  Maximize specificity.

Without venturing into the modern data visualization canon, I’ll end with an example from Berlin-based design firm ART+COM, which employs media specificity as a fully formed design philosophy and methodology. By embracing the fact that the tools, platforms, interfaces, and context all become part of the DNA of the message, they’re able to execute an impressive array of works that fit a unique niche for both their clients and audiences.

Mobility was a project built specifically to stand out in the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and speak to the concerns for handicapped people. Commissioned by Otto Bock HealthCare, they took the opportunity to utilize their client’s prosthetics in the installation, which combined neatly with an ancient form of information exchange—reflecting light in mirrors. Each hand was fitted with a mirror, then painstakingly positioned and choreographed to realign into the Chinese character for movement.

 A screen or wall of LED’s would also have done the job, but given the bright, chaotic surroundings at the 2010 and earlier World Expositions, their decidedly lo-fi route provided a moment of respite in an experience otherwise pervaded by grandiose architecture and a bombardment of flashing, colored lights. As with the previous examples, the combination of human intuition and sheer effort that went into researching and crafting these simple messages comes through.

  Abstract shapes on screens are capable of doing a great number of things, and in many environments, but ubiquity has never been the goal. Just as the richness in biological life comes from highly specialized adaptations—pushed into unimaginably unique arrangements through competition or predation or symbiosis—so could the digital environment nurture more diverse ways of distilling and communicating information. Not just for novelty’s sake, but also for the robust dialogue that would follow, and the chance for ever better ways to comprehend this growing wealth of information. Because what if the fertile ground lies not in the sheer volume and spectacle of data, but in the details of human experience? By bringing the rapid changes we’re experiencing down to scale, we may find compelling moments that actually help put some order to the seeming chaos of modernity.

  ­

[rjnsklwrites]

"By negating the idea of a designer’s influence, we also negate the idea of style within the UX discipline. We’re saying that, done properly, it should be impossible to tell one UX designer’s work from another’s. There should be no signature elements, no philosophical movements, no overarching tenets except that of transparency."

&

"Given its academic influences, it’s not surprising that UCD has been sold as a science. Empiricism runs through its discourse, to the unfortunate extent that the UX industry often oversells the certainty it can offer.

Scientism—akin to Colbert’s “truthiness”—is the veneer of science where little scientific validity exists. While UCD is methodical, it is manifestly not scientific. There can never be a universal truth to design. Solutions applied in one context may fail magnificently in another, and the few governing principles (Fitts’s Law, the Gestalt principles, and affordance, say) give at best partial guidance....

To treat design as a science is to retreat to the illusory safety of numbers, where designers are mostly seen as agents of skewing the odds in your favor. This can start a race to the bottom as design gets less and less leeway. "

[rjnskl]

on the new S&W identity

“Saying things like we shouldn’t question other’s success because obviously they’re successful so “they must be doing something right”  is simply hiding in the shadow of economy as ethics. This thinking dangerously ignores the factors that allow for such success in the first place and undermines the progress that has been made so far.”

http://travisstearns.blogspot.com/2013/01/op002-for-good-time-call-sagmeister.html

[rjnsklwrites]

Lessons from a Genius

You haven't really realised something until you can understand it visually and intuitively. This attitude of Feyman's may have been outgrown in his own field of quantum physics, with its increasing unfathomability, but it uncovers a fundamental truth about humans — that knowledge is inextricable from communication, and the communication of something new (and information must always be new) is very much reliant on another conscious person's ability to see it. 

[rjnsklwrites]

well put

"In the disagreements that occurred between the brothers during their discussions of the peasantry, Sergei Ivanovich always defeated his brother, precisely because Sergei Ivanovich had definite notions about the peasantry, their character, properties and tastes, whereas Konstantin Levin had no definite and unchanging notions, so that in these arguments Konstantin was always caught contradicting himself."

[rjnsklwrites]

depth, uncertainty

At this point last year I more or less knew the direction my thesis should have been going, though I didn't choose to take it. What I ended up doing was still important, more expansive, but the pragmatic route would've been to focus more squarely on the world of information visualization. 

There's something to be said about making the most of the resources and people around you, though. And I hate to let things go to waste—perhaps knowledge above all. So the task at hand now is to bring media theory, programmatic concepts, and man/machine mythologies all back into the fold of how best to turn data into meaning—which is not such a stretch, given how far the field has come with each new interactive project and the entire worlds and their alien physics built from scratch. For the most part it remains a visual field built on rigid rules, complete fear or insensitivity to more subjective design aspects, and very little criticism and development of the visual communications itself. 

One of my Tufte books was one of the few damaged in hurricane flood water, and it's just as well. It's not that his ideas are obsolete, but that particular brand and dogma don't hold up in a more animated, digital reality. With the increasing ability for visual communications to talk back, a great, layered density of information can now occupy small spaces—more or less common knowledge at this point, right?

But with a few exceptions, there remains a poverty in both aesthetic diversity and depth of interaction in much of today's visualization work. When trying to communicate something clear and quantitative in abstract forms, it's difficult to stray too far beyond the handful of basic chart types that already exist, but that's not to say it's impossible to slowly introduce deviations and bring in fresh but understandable metaphors to do the job.

Maybe I just spend too much time on the internet looking at things that are made to be looked at, but there's a sameness to it that our digital design tools seem to breed. Basically the same sameness exists in analog tools as well? So there aren't really fingers to point or any individuals at fault, just a nagging sense that we're not taking advantage of the media richness available to us.

-

Trying to break ground in an area built by specialists sometimes shakes my faith in a broad, multidisciplinary background. But to think in a more expansive way about these things is so important to moving forward. This is not to say that progress isn't still hard won by the people immersed in the work, but I am kind of banking on the hope that there's value in finding connections and bringing my broad, messy array of knowledge to bear on this one field.