In its history, information visualisation has often stood somewhere between fact and narrative, between science and art. Medieval European maps, for example, were usually a mixture of geographical fact and theological order. The T-O map (so-called because it looks like a capital T within a letter O) represents the three continents known to Medieval Europeans, with Asia on one half and Europe and Africa taking a quarter each. This placed Jerusalem at the centre of a divine balanced order, an understanding of the world that is at once geographical and spiritual.
In recent times, mapping and all kinds of information visualisation are usually associated with a kind of cool scientific objectivity. But the chart’s capacity for interpretation and subjectivity is already apparent in the many choices of colour, visual effects and graph types that we’re presented with when it comes to designing a visualisation. We can rationalise these choices in terms of making information easier to understand, but this ignores the other side – that each choice has a different emotional effect, gives a different impression and tells a different narrative.
One practitioner who enjoys the artistic and subjective end of the data visualisation spectrum is Giorgia Lupi. Her Room of Change, created with datavis studio Accurat for the 2019 Milan Design Triennale, blends objective data and artistic presentation into a beautiful whole:
Each band, stretching the length of the wall, tells a different story of change over recent world history. The charts are not annotated with numbers though, so there’s no way to get the exact data out of them. And that’s part of the point – it’s more about the impression. No visitor to the gallery will be able to take in that many figures, but everyone is able to walk away with a powerful sense and general impression of the course of species extinctions, birth rates, global happiness and natural disasters. As you walk around the room from left to right, you traverse history in a minute, a kind of sublime data vertigo. Some of the bands show uplifting trends, others are depressing, all of them are somehow epic and infused with humanity. It’s like a datavis mural painting, a data Guernica.
Picasso’s Guernica, an anti-war mural that depicts the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, being installed.
As Lupi says in her ‘Data Humanism Manifesto’, “we are ready to question the impersonality of a merely technical approach to data”. Data can impart facts, but also impressions and feelings. Data can be cool, but also warm.
Lupi believes it’s important to “connect numbers to what they really stand for: knowledge, behaviors, people.” She describes her well-known ‘Dear Data’ postcard project with Stephanie Posavec as “Data as an excuse to tell something about ourselves.”
A week of boyfriend/husband (from the Dear Data series)
I understand the motivation behind this ‘small data’. I’ve always felt that Strava maps of my riding history, Audible graphs of my listening history, or any number of other chart vestiges of my personal data are as much portrait as they are data science. They’re creatively designed images, made for the purpose of self-reflection – and for me, the border between that and a portrait in oils is murky.
Data visualisation is the process of making information visual. But by that definition, a lot of art is data visualisation. MoMA actually added Dear Data to their collection. We’re used to thinking about data vis as ‘a way to present data in the most understandable way’ – which might be the most common use case – but as Giorgia Lupi points out, it can be other things as well. It can convey emotion, impressions, identity, personality and really anything we want it to.
As Lupi says: “The more ubiquitous data becomes, the more we need to experiment with how to make it unique, contextual, intimate”.
