I have a special passion for data and data visualization. We do it every day in our life. Simple data, complex data, fast data, contextual data… These days, we are surrounded by data as never before. Think about typical engineer 50-60 years ago. Blueprints, some physical models… Not much information. Nowadays the situation is completely different. Multiple design and engineering data, historical data about product use, history of design revisions, social information, data about how product is performing coming in real time from sensors, etc. Our ability to discover and use data becomes very important.
The ways we present data for decision making can influence a lot and change our ability to design in context of right data. To present data for engineers and designers these days can become as important as presenting right information to airplane pilots before. Five years ago, I posted about Visual Search Engines on 3D perspective blog. I found the article is still alive. Navigate your browser here to have a read. What I liked in the idea of visual search is to present information in the way people can easy understand.
Few days ago, my attention was caught by TechCrunch article about Collective Experience of Empathetic Data Systems (CEEDS) project developed in Europe.
[The project ]… involves a consortium of 16 different research partners across nine European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. The “immersive multi-modal environment” where the data sets are displayed, as pictured above — called an eXperience Induction Machine (XIM) — is located at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona.
Read the article, watch video and draw your conclusion. It made me think about the potential of data visualization for design. Here is my favorite passage from the article explaining the approach:
“We are integrating virtual reality and mixed reality platforms to allow us to screen information in an immersive way. We also have systems to help us extract information from these platforms. We use tracking systems to understand how a person moves within a given space. We also have various physiological sensors (heart rate, breathing etc.) that capture signals produced by the user – both conscious and subconscious. Our main challenge is how to integrate all this information coherently.”
Here is the thing. The challenge is how to integrated all the information coherently. Different data can be presented differently – 3D geometry, 2D schema, 2D drawings, graphics, tables, graphs, lists. In many situations we can get this information presented separately using different design and visualization tools. However, the efficiency is questionable. Many data can be lost during visualization. However, what I learned from CEEDS project materials, data can be also lost during the process of understanding. Blindspotting. Our brain will miss the data even we (think) that we present it in a best way.
What is my conclusion? Visualization of data for better understanding will play an increased role in the future. We just in the beginning of the process of data collection. We understand the power of data and therefore collect an increased amount of data every day. However, to process of data and visualizing for better design can be an interesting topic to work for coming years. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
