I have discovered the art of infographics, and I'm in love.
I love visualizing things, organizing data, and retelling information beautifully. Until recent times, I thought that meant boring grided layouts, 2D charts, etc.....
There is this new burgeoning field of information graphics, and it's VERY trendy right now. But let's not forget our history! Information Graphics has been with us for a long time!! The image above is the Paris Metro System, designed by Harry Beck in 1933, and it's still an example of the blending and representation of information in visual form. Now we just have fancier computers that make everything look better.
Info= Information
Graphics= Images.
The goal is to communicate information in the least amount of words. Visual images communicating language and meaning to you. How very semiotic. Peirce would be so proud *tear*
Some of the computer generated images created are really.....well just look!
This little blurb explains it way better than I ever will:For 2006, the concept was based on a very old concept of encoding text. As Muller explains: "We assigned a numerical value to every letter of the alphabet. Adding the values of all letters, one gets a number that represents the overall word. (For example, the number 99 would represent the word "poetry")".Using this system, an entire poem could be arranged on a circular path. The diameter of the circle is based on the length of the poem. So the short poems are in the centre of the poster, while the longer ones form the outer circles.
Red rings on the circular path represent a number. As many different words can share the same number ("poetry" shares the 99 with words like "thought" and "letters"), most rings represents different words. The thickness of the ring depends on the amount of words that share the same number.Finally, gray lines connect the words of the poem in their original sequence. So solid lines represent repetitive patterns in the poem.
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And here are more images: I'm not going to post their blurbs because it's too much reading, I know you'll get bored. Just enjoy!
And since I love Astronomy...I love this art installation on celestial mechanics (don't ask me to explain it because I can't....)
On an aesthetic note (how could I ever forget to speak aesthetically....it's really in my nature), I love to observe the modern organic forms created in these images. The repetition of form, the colors, the visual space and spatial motion created through these images can truly help to understand them. I mean, what better way to showcase celestial mechanics than to visualize data in space?
I also love that information graphics can have the ability to visualize sensoral data that is not visual in form.....ie smell? sound? touch?
I don't know about any of you but I put on my Itunes visualizer and sometimes ZONE out for half hours at a time.
Hypnotic stuff, really.
Wonderful material, V! You may be interested in the seminal book by Edward Tufte, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information."
ReplyDeleteNew computer-aided forms of representation have expanded the realm of information design, but you are right to go back to Harry Beck - he's a major figure in this. Do be careful , though - he didn't design the Paris Metro, nor was this image from 1933. That was the year of his astounding redesign of the London Tube map. There's a long and fascinating tale about the ways that French and English riders see the world as you look at the success of his London design and the failure of his Paris map. Though the French pride themselves on rationality, it is often coupled with intuition that Beck's map would eliminate as it rationally reconfigured the map of the subway (but not the subway itself). Like any cartographic projection, these maps address the "ground truth" of their cities and rail lines in distinct ways.
Dr. Housefield,
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for that book recommendation, I will definitely look into it. Also, I hear that a class on information graphics is being offered at UCD in the spring....I pray to my lucky stars that I can get in and not suffer the waitlist wrath (DES 191C).
As for my little factoid error, thank you so much for catching that! I must have overlooked the description and misinterpreted it.
I would love to learn more about environmental and informational graphics, and I hope some of these topics might be included in future lectures!