Lebbeus Woods, Same Difference
Form inevitably creates narrative, disclosing the intent and the hand of the author. Whether linear or non-linear, any narrative contains a particular point of view. On the other hand, formlessness allows for unencumbered individual interpretation. I think of formlessness in its purest state as randomness. The only true opposition to structure, it gives equal importance to each structural entity. It is the only truly democratic (objective) view of information.
Josh On, They Rule
All visualization begins with a hypothesis, a hypothesis about the data that the choice of a particular formal expression aims to address. As previously determined, visualization is an expressive medium, and as such aims to communicate abstract ideas through the use of data. Any successful visualization, therefore, allows drawing conclusions about the underlying data. These conclusions, while often revealing or surprising even for the author of the piece, are nonetheless driven by a particular hypothesis—a hypothesis as general as simply selecting a topic or a particular type or range of data from within a certain context, with the anticipation of usefulness or insight, or as specific as setting out to prove or disprove a claim based on the characteristics of the data source.
The design of information can be understood as visual rhetoric. While often used in the pejorative sense, rhetoric means the art of speech and writing. As Hugues C. Boekraad writes in his essay in Copy Proof, rhetoric lessens or erases the distance between the message and the recipient. That is what communication design, at least in practice, sets out to achieve, and information design should be no different. The quality of the message being communicated is entirely dependent on intent, or, in other words, visual rhetoric.