“Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans.”

Matt Woolman
Digital Information Graphics

Image: Danny Holten, Heirarchical Edge Bundles,  2006

Diagram: A simplified and structured visual representation of concepts, ideas, constructions, relations, statistical data, anatomy etc used in all aspects of human activities to visualize and clarify the topic.

Map: A graphic that facilitates a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.

As information is increasingly more readily at our finger-tips, we have begun to value the ability to convey ideas as opposed to simply conveying information. Can ideas tactfully be directly linked to the actual information?

In terms of graphical representation, how are ideas being materialized? It would seem that age old methods of distillation and simplification, although still having a lot of value, are becoming insufficient. It would stand to reason that we would like to be able to take the simplicity of the formal diagram, as well as the clarity and objectivity from a mapped instance and combine them into something more; a graphic/strategy that would house not only hard, point for point data (without distillation) and an idealogic method for conveying the design intent. This would serve a number of purposes, it would retain the communicative properties that make these tools informative, perhaps shedding a new clarity on complex system, or creating a new understanding of an organization by percolating its different layers to the surface, but it would also serve as a lossless method to convert information into different media and dimension (2D to 3D, digital to physical, etc.), while still retaining the essence of the host.

Image: Felix Heinen,  Data Visualisation of a Social Network,  March 2007

Resources:
Visual Complexity
Amaznode
ELSE/WHERE: Mapping

Came across a nifty little plug-in for the Adobe Illustrator creative suites, which actually allows you to run some pretty interesting scripts within Illustrator for generating 2 dimensional graphics based on both raster and vector inputs…check it out…

 Scriptographer 2.0

MS