Museum evening

Yuri Engelhardt, Information visualization: From educational posters to animated and interactive graphics

Series of lectures On Information Design

Monday, 16 November 2009, at 7 p.m.
Architecture Museum of Ljubljana, Fužine Castle

You are kindly invited to attend the lecture by Yuri Engelhardt, Information visualization: From educational posters to animated and interactive graphics, on Monday, 16 November at 7 p. m. at the Architecture Museum of Ljubljana, Fužine Castle. It is the first one of the six lectures from the series On Information Design 2009/2010. The lecture will be held in English.

Information visualization: From educational posters to animated and interactive graphics

There are two main topics that I will explore in this presentation. Both of these topics are related to the visualization of information through graphics, such as diagrams, maps, and charts. First, I will explore “graphics for people and the planet”, where I will look at the use of graphics for increasing awareness and understanding of social and environmental issues. Among other examples, I will show and discuss some of the animated graphics that Otto Neurath created for documentary films in the 1930s en 1940s. Second, I will examine the “visual grammar” of graphic representations and propose universal categories of building blocks from which, I claim, all graphics are created.

Graphics for people and the planet: After a very brief excursion into human perception and cognition in relation to visualization, I will focus on initiatives that are driven by a desire to use graphics to do something good for the world. In the first half of the last century, philosopher and sociologist Otto Neurath developed a pictorial language (Isotype) that uses simplified pictures and composition rules to convey social and economic statistical data to a general public. Neurath’s team did not only produce static images, but also created animated graphics for various documentary films. I will show a few of these film fragments and compare them with recent examples of animated statistical graphics, such as those produced by Hans Rosling’s Gapminder foundation. Seventy years after Isotype, Gapminder and other recent projects in data visualization, such as Google Earth Outreach, share the spirit of Neurath's work, with regard to 1) the conscious choice of visuals above words, 2) a passion for making data accessible to ‘ordinary people’, and 3) the conviction that a better comprehension of statistical data through visuals could lead to desirable social change. Digital media, including the recently developed tools for “social data analysis”, have meanwhile enabled – on a previously unimaginable scale – the fulfillment of Neurath’s vision.

Visual grammar:  From looking at how graphics can be used, I will turn to how graphics are constructed. Every known natural language, such as English or Chinese, is based on the possibility of combining language constituents – “building blocks” – of different syntactic categories. Syntactic categories were introduced as “parts of speech” by the Greek philosophers – examples of syntactic categories are “noun”, “verb” and “adjective”. While it may not seem useful to try to find visual analogues of “nouns”, “verbs” and “adjectives” in graphics, various scholars have nevertheless attempted to approach graphics from a linguistic perspective, hoping that this can help us to analyze how we interpret and how we create visual representations. In this second part of my presentation, I will be building on this literature, as well as on my own work, and then propose a set of distinct syntactic categories of building blocks of graphics, each category with its own combination rules. I claim, and will try to show, that this basic set of building blocks applies to every type of visual representation of information.

Finally, I will point out how information visualization through graphics is only one of various sub-fields of the larger discipline of information design, and I will give a very brief overview of the history of information design as a professional field.