Hiroshi Sugimoto, Radio City Music Hall (1978)
In the past few months, I’ve come across a variety of work dealing, in one way or another, with compression of time as a method for visualization. Despite the wide range of work, there are particular generalizable attributes which I will identify.
The first few examples are time lapse renderings, in which the view remains fixed as all information gathered over a period of time is displayed simultaneously.
Over the years, a wealth of data has become available online. With the accessibility of this raw information comes the incentive to understand its relevance or significance. Beyond making it engaging and interesting, there is, more than ever, a need for providing interpretation and perspective. Fundamentally, interpretation is a form of information control.
Stamen Design, Digg Labs Big Spy Visualization
Following the train of thought from Browsing informal hierarchies, this post investigates visualization as navigation. When can navigation double as visualization and provide the user with visual cues reflecting the organization of content on a web site or another digital media device? Already in use on many web sites, informal hierarchies have the potential to replace the widely used static, tabular navigation and its often arbitrarily determined categories with a more flexible and adaptive device, one which not only is more effective in orienting users within a particular hierarchy, but is also an iconic representation of the web site itself, providing a distinct visual identity which people will recognize.
As Adam Richardson of Frog Design has pointed out, we are moving from an information age into a recommendation age. What does this mean? As we are faced with making choices from an ever increasing array of options, we seek trusted sources to help us make better decisions. The information itself is simply becoming too complex, too vast to parse on our own, which is why the opinion of a third party to navigate these complexities is becoming more and more important.
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.