Sam K R05

Time based graphics—how ironic that I’d be reading this at such an unusual hour. It is for this reason that I will stick strictly to summarizing this information so that I may imagine how I could apply the information to my personal graphic designs.

Tufte opens with a discussion of Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s satellites and his sketches of their nightly shifts. It was through these sketches that he discovered their unequal rotation cycles, and it is this kind of discovery that we, as infographic designers, aim to replicate and communicate to our audiences. It is indeed a time series in that he is recording movement from day to day—movement in its simplest form. (In this spot today—in that spot tomorrow.) He has very little chart junk, however if he were to try to arrange all of these sketches into one cohesive infographic, he would need to add some labels and explanations.

The next infographic of note is the corkscrew diagrams. These expand upon Galileo’s idea of recording the unequal rotations by charting and comparing the satellites’ cycles. The resulting graphic is simply beautiful, and the labeling is done well. They name each line by their corresponding satellite along with a roman numeral. Later down the chart, where we might lose track of which line is called what, it is re-labeled with just the roman numeral. The time-based lines are unobtrusive and scaled back—something that I need to do on my graphic.

The next notable graphics are the diagrams of flight and railroad schedules and stops. Tufte seems to find these as successful. Perhaps it’s just scale, but I find them to be unorganized, random and disorienting. They are also in another language, from another culture, but if I had seen this graphic with English labels, I still think I’d be confused as a first-time reader. On the Czech one, some dots are bigger and some are smaller. The times are crammed in along the inside edges of circles. Some lines are of one weight and others are of others. There seems to be no grid-like arrangement and no sound way to make comparisons. The same can be said about the Chinese train schedule. I am confused as to why Tufte thinks there are so wonderful.

Tufte ends this chapter by revisiting the dangers of trapped white space and tables, and redesigns.

AndreaLR04

The reading "Narrative of Space and Time" seems to reiterate what our previous reading assignments have told us. Successful clarity in graphs leads to conclusions. Discoveries made by Galileo would not have happened without proper recording of the information he was gathering.
Successful graphics are not only important to realizing discoveries, they are also important to sharing and explaining these discoveries to others. Galileo's star graphs shown in the reading still make sense today. It is most important for a graph to make sense to the uninformed viewer. It is easy to make a graph that makes sense to ones self.
The writing about the scheduling for mass transit was interesting. I feel that schedules are inherently confusing because they are containing so much data in so little, easy to distribute space. Fonts are forced to be small and there is little room for expressive measures. Schedules are especially difficult to the untrained eye. Reading a map or schedule for a transit that you have never used before is a very daunting task. Even the examples of good maps and schedules are confusing to me. With the mix of numbers and lines I think that items like this will never be completely "user-friendly".
I have no idea what details the "Graphic Illustration of Tokyo City" map is trying to tell me, but I do find it very beautiful, and I want to investigate it. I think perhaps if maps and info graphics were made with more design elements, people would have an easier time investigating them, because they have a design to. I lot of the graphs in this reading, as well as the other readings we've had, are exhausting to me, before I even try to dive into them. If something appears ugly and dry, I lose all desire to investigate it, even if I need the document for something I am doing.

JenniferL_R04

Today's reading was about narrations of space and time. Putting these multiples together often results in info graphics that intertwine the map and time-series formats.

In the first example of these types of narrative graphics we were presented with Galileo's drawn observations of Jupiter's satellites. I found it interesting that Galileo not only used space-time drawings to record what he saw, but he also used a sequence of them to pull more data and conclusions out of what he had seen. By comparing the changes in each drawing, he was able to conclude that the starlets were actually orbiting Jupiter. Him and others than took this information and made accurate, moving 3d models of Jupiter's satellites as well as the whole solar system. These 3d models could even be considered a form of narrative information in physical form.

Another example we were given was a comparison of two map-schedule combination graphics. It was amazing to think that the second one, containing the railroads of China, held 200 pages worth of information. Even though the graphic was lacking in certain design areas, it was successful in showing geographical space.

The examples at the end of the chapter I found the most intriguing. These graphs contained data that either spilled off or did not fit into the rigid grid that contained the information. Although the article claims that William Playfair's choice to take outlying data and put it to the bottom of the graph was "ingenious," I find myself disagreeing. I suppose for at the time the graph was made, this was acceptable and necessary to keep the information legible. I feel though, that in our time with our technology, this would be unacceptable in a design. I think a designer these days would strive to find another answer to this design problem. Making the graph smaller would be the first go-to conclusion, and with today's high tech printing, the readability of the information would not be compromised.

GordonGR04

Information Design ~ Day 5 We are covering our 4th reading assignment that gives insight into the Narratives of Time and Space.

The author, Tufte, doesn’t mess around when he introduces us to the workaday reality of three-space and time. He brings in the heavy hitter – Galileo Galilei! Not a bad way to start a lesson… after all, Galileo does bring along a fair amount of credibility. But even with charts and graphs… who’d a thunk it?

Back in 1610, Galileo while using his new invention, the telescope, discovered starlets hanging around Jupiter. He noted their postion and drew a sketch to document them. He continued this nightly observance keeping a detailed diary of his findings. Galileo’s almost inherent use of the principles of Information Design is inspiring. His notes and finding – so eloquently drawn out, were the building blocks for a deeper understand of our planetary system. Tufte’s fine example in Galileo goes on through the construction of Jovilabes, a nomogram-like computation device for recounting Jupiter’s four satellite orbits. This incredible example of envisioning information was then quickly juxtaposed by the sample of the poorly designed “pocket” schedule of the New York – New Haven Timetable, Metro – north Commuter Railroad.

I’m sad to say that this little collateral piece of “traveler’s aide” was designed in 1983. In the words of Tufte “some tables are better than others…” an understatement to say the least. This bureaucratic beauty was printed by the millions and served to confuse the traveling masses for years. Now it’s easy to play armchair quarterback and point out the flaws after the fact. This piece however, is just a plain example of groupthink gone groupstink.

In the reading, we did get to see other examples of Information Design where large amounts of data and imagery were successfully united. These pieces conveyed both time and spatial experience in a flatland format. I particularly liked the design of the brochure for the Czechoslovakia Air Transport Company – flight times circa 1933.

In class we critiqued our work-in-process timeline designs. We also analyzed several other charts. I think the fact that we are designing our own charts – early on in the course, quickly immerses us in the deluge of details that one must successfully communicate in the “simple” form of a chart or graph. The key lesson for the day was to understand, recognize, and then execute the balance between “pretty” and the importance of information. The first example, “Fallout”, the information would have been more accessible had the designer incorporated layers of hierarchy. The overall information – critical to the survival of Honey and Wild Bees is downplayed by the use of soft and friendly pastel colors. A more jarring palette would underscore the impending severity of the issue and possibly elicit an emotional investment in both the document and issue. The next example “Oprahland” was a klutzy concept lost in cuteness. The game metaphor used by this designer could have possibly worked. The lack of information familiarity and the amount of data disconnects were just too much for this format. Even the mighty Oprah with her mug scattered all over the piece couldn’t save this bad boy. And lastly, the chart “The Evolution of College Going-gear” showed us - ever so clearly - what not to do. Cute, meaningless graphics along with a weak association to the topic makes for the de-evolution design of a College Gear-going chart.

Andrew+M+R05

My favorite examples were of the bending bar graphs. I’ve never seen this approach and I’ve never thought of it before and I must say that it is a pretty bad approach. The viewer definitely loses all sense of scale, and therefore impact, with a visual that does not consistently compare to similar data depictions. The meandering river that wraps around the page is the only example I could see as being valid, since a river does meander, but even that example loses it’s visual meaning as a representation of data that is to be compared to other representation of data.

Handling extraneous outliers is always a problem and spans disciplines from art to mathematics. Wile working on my income/expense/school/work graph I was hoping I would not have any dramatic points that would “go off the charts” as they are often design roadblocks. The worst attribute of an outlier is that if you should choose to force it into your current design, it can become too small to see or so big the rest of the data is lost. However, an outlier could reveal a weakness in your approach to presenting data; and if an outlier happens once, it could be a reoccurring trend that has yet to unfold.

Tuft describes William Playfair’s graph as “ingeniously spilling outlying data over…” the edge of the graph, but this approach feels very dramatic or like a cry for attention. Being such a dramatic approach, spilling over should only be used for special representations, such as epidemics or violence. I also feel this approach is similar to those people who give 110%; there is no such thing, if you’re going past 100% then you need to recalibrate your data or how you interpret it.

Outliers don’t have to be a negative occurrence; they can provide an opportunity to rethink how you’re displaying your data. If you have one outlier now, chances are you will find more as data collection and presentation continues. Catching and successfully incorporating outliers early on will prevent you from reorganizing your entire presentation later in a project. They can also inspire a new layout, which can either emphasize or mute the outlier. The rules of hierarchy can be often be used to reduce the visual significance of data by reducing it’s visual contrast, unless the outlier is welcome, then it can tower over your data using it’s size to give hierarchical importance.

It’s important to remember the purpose of creating charts and info graphics, which is to convey information; keeping this in mind will aid in how to treat data that does not paly nice with the data around it. Is this data important to the goal of the graphic or is it a distraction, maybe it shows a flaw in how the data was initially collected. Either way, there’s nothing like a good outlier to bring an entire project to a halt or even be its undoing.

Kate+D+R04

A narrative itinerary is one of the more interesting pieces of information I pulled from this article. I’ve always been interested in mapping especially when used as an art form. Tufte wrote about schedules and how they one of the most widely used information displays and he gave some brilliantly designed and creative examples. These types of displays have the ability to be informative as well as beautiful and unlike other types of information graphics, schedules must retain a high quality of information in order to do its job. The example Tufte uses of a transportation system is excellent because it shows both time and space working together in a complex and beautiful network. The map of the Czechoslovakian Air Transport Company from 1933 was amazing in the way it shows the connectivity between the flight times and identification numbers. Not knowing the language was obviously a barrier in understanding but it was interesting to look at.
This article made me think some more about different ways to show information and how I can use it in my final project. I’ve been having some issues in trying to show a quantitative comparison in my graph while still having both pieces of information read completely. Part of it is my inexperience in the graphing area and also how I can make a style of graph that best represents my data. It was nice to see some examples of beautiful mapping that is displaying precise information. The corkscrew drawings of Jupiter’s satellites are interesting in how they show the four satellites and their spirals each represented by a different line but all displayed as a unit. Each line read as a separate satellite and provided a quantitative backdrop for one another.
Overall this article lends itself to the importance of effective design in the ease of reading information. We saw in class today how the designs of some graphs were easier to read than others and lots of good suggestions for improvement were offered. Personally I need to work on adding depth of information in my sample graph while making it quantifiable and understandable. Right now my sample isn’t understandable unless I verbally explain it, which is not very effective! I’ve been enjoying seeing different styles of information graphics and how they can be used differently when relaying information.

Narratives of Space and Time

I was a bit confused about some of the language used in the article. Just what are “four-variable narrations of space-time”? The hyphenated terms are not something I am used to working with. Then I noticed in the previous sentence the reference to “the world’s workaday reality of three-space and time”, in other words, the three dimensions of space + time = four variable of space-time. It is just simple arithmetic! It took me awhile to realize that we had already been working with these ideas when looking at time-series graphs and in particular the time-series of Napolean’s March to St. Petersburg which relates both time and space information but also forward and backward motion.
It was interesting to see how Galileo’s observations were eventually presented so that this knowledge could be understood and passed on. The printing press was still the latest technological innovation at the time so it would be natural to simply collate and organize the data into a table and print it. The 1668 Cassini example in the article is effective in the fact that it fixes a time, 10:00 PM, and the position of Jupiter and shows the relative positions of Jupiter’s satellites over a period of nine days. In a way, each of the rows of the table is a small-multiple that makes for a quick comparison of the satellite positions. The same can be said of the Connaissance des Temps example of 1767. However, presentation of data in this format is static and fails to provide the reviewer with information on the specific movements of the satellites which is the major point of the data: the satellites are moving around the planet! Galileo and other mechanically minded engineers attempt to solve this problem by building watch-like models of the movements of the celestial bodies. This method was in keeping with the view of the universe as a well-ordered machine that was in vogue at the time and suited the mentality of a scientist and engineer. It also could be easily understood by any mildly educated person when observed in operation, however, it was not congenial to replication and dissemination. The development of the spiral grids over time were a much more elegant solution since the satellite movements could be clearly indicated on a flat surface. In a way, it was an artistic solution, one that combined scientific data with artistic expression.
A similar type of artistic solution if offered in theCzechoslovakian Air Transport Company map/schedule. The graphic map of the airports and flight paths is very easy to understand at first sight. Its geographical layout is effective in determining how one might get from one location to another. I particularly like the split arrows at the ends of the lines for two-way flights showing both arrival and departure times. This type of schedule works well for the limited number of flights available in 1933, but would quickly become unworkable as the number of flights increased. As it is, the space for listing the flight times within the circles is very limited, the major weakness of the design.
The examples with the serpentine data formations spilling over and around the surface of the graphic were fun. It would be a great way to comically emphasize data in a design. They certainly anticipated billboards that were outfitted with appendages to draw attention by breaking out of the rectangle.