Boris Anthony and Tom Carden on Interaction Data Visualizations
June 12, 2009
Faculty member Jennifer Bove interviews Dopplr‘s Boris Anthony and Stamen Design‘s Tom Carden on the growing popularity and potential of interactive data visualizations. Below is an excerpt from the post at Creativity Magazine.
There is a lot of buzz about information visualization nowadays. Seems like it’s everywhere! Why do you think it’s gaining such popularity?
Boris: I think we are seeing info visualizations a lot these days for a fairly simple reason: its means of production has reached a level of flexibility and openness, allowing more and more people to use it. As a means of communication, of telling a story, infoviz is incredibly compelling.
Consider this: we’ve gone from custom-made illustrations drawn with ink on paper to single-purpose computer programs that could only handle a specific set of data and present it one way, to now entire frameworks that allow someone who is not necessarily a professional to make any kind of visual representation out of any kind of data set.
It’s very similar to what happened on the web with blogs, and then web publishing frameworks such as Ruby on Rails: someone develops a toolkit, and bang everyone uses it to make different stuff. And the same thing is now happening in hardware frameworks, with Arduino. As you know, Arduino has the same pedigree as Processing, which is one of, if not the top of, the pile of info visualization frameworks.
And I think people intuitively get information visualizations; they “get” how the hurricane moved along it’s path and struck New Orleans, they “get” how this beautiful orb of rays represents the hours of sunlight per day for a year, etc. without having to be bothered with the thinking behind it.
Tom Carden’s travel time tube map of London enables one to click on any (and all) tube stations in London. The map rearranges itself around the travel time from that spot.
What do you see as the potential for information visualizations, say five to ten years from now? Where is it all going?
Tom: I think the potential for information visualizations is about three things: more graphics, more mobile, and more collaboration.
Five to ten years from now? Even modest expectations about hardware and network improvements will probably become reality. I think we can expect to add one or two zeroes to the size of the data sets that we can interactively manipulate on our desktops. On the miniature end of the scale, we’ll have something close to today’s desktop capabilities but in our pockets: you only need compare the performance of the iPhone or Android graphics and display with a PC from 1998 to see what I mean.
I think the move of mobile devices to use the same underlying browser technologies as desktops is huge. I think we’ll see an explosion of collaborative/social infoviz now that that has happened, because there’s no need for separate technologies like Java and Flash. When information visualization on the web can be designed and built by the same people as the rest of the page we’ll see more thorough integration with the mainstream web and that can only be a good thing. Google Maps sets great expectations around online mapping and as designers we need to make software that does that for all kinds of data, not only maps.
15 Comments