The Social in the Visual

We’re very pleased at to see a couple of our information graphics (this, solar power diagram and the World Languages graphic) included in Connie Malamed’s excellent design textbook, Visual Language for Designers published by Rockport. Our experiments between the cardinal points of accuracy and accessibility appear to be working according to Connie. She described our work as using the right amount of detail to depict the visual metaphors employed, but not enough to distract or overwhelm the viewer from the statistics.

We’re big fans at Figures of Shahee Ilyas’ flags as pie charts. That got us thinking about the following information based on national colours. But this post has a clear antecedent in Uriah’s post, The personal body as information design. Have you ever pondered why so many nations seem to have two sets of national colours? Notice how with these examples, Australia, Italy, The Netherlands and Germany, the national football strip does not follow the national flag colours? And there are many more nationalities where the two do not coincide.

In Australia, for all the carry on in recent years surrounding our national flag, when we refer to our national colours we do not refer to those in the flag, the red, white and blue, but instead to the ‘green and gold’. The colours of the wattle, not the flag. In Italy, the blue, once the colour of the royal family, has been clung to despite the abolishment of their monarchy in the 1940s. Similarly, there’s a historical connection in the Dutch strip that precedes the current flag (rather allarmingly, the orange has historical connections with militant protestantism. Surprising for a famously broadminded culture).

In many cases, the national sporting colours seem to have a deeper connection to a national psyche, or to grass-roots sentiments about that country than do the colours imposed upon a nation via national flag through a top-down approach. What are your thoughts on these disconnections between flags and ‘true’ national colours?

In recent posts we’ve been having a chat about, among other things, economic rationalism and creativity. And, as always, information design is the subject of this blog. Here’s a recent find which combines all of these topics in one succinct design. This ‘faceless watch’ was ffffound on the Geek & Hype site. Like a lot of very good design, this is ‘meta-design’: Design that refers to design, in this case, watch design. It acknowledges a typical bracelet design, yet asks a perverse question: do we need the watch part of the watch? Will the bracelet alone do the job? Superb concept. I wonder how well it works in bright daylight?

As the economic rationalist mantra goes: “time equals money”. I wonder how much designer, Hironau Tsuboi, got paid for this design. And how long did it take? It’s difficult, via fffound, and many websites for that matter, to get to the source of an image to find out, as for example in this case, who designed that? As Uriah said in a previous post, the Web definitely throws the issue of ownership up for debate. What do you think of sites like ffffound which, on the one hand, provide endless eye-candy or ‘inspiration’, and yet, on the other, pull so much creative work free of its cultural and personal, authorial anchors? Faceless indeed.

This image was taken from CSU Web Services.

How well does this graphic communicate the social, participatory advantages of online connectivity?

The name of our site privileges the role of the visual and how it relates to the social world – this in fact is one of the main reasons that we got together in the first place. So, we are asking what is the link between creativity and what is visually represented, and how does this relate to the social?

Is creativity to be understood in the sense of ascribing to the standardised Western language of art? If so, does this construct work that is about art itself, i.e., art framed by ideologies and institutions, or about the social world? Is it creativity in the design sense, which arguably also fits within a predetermined ideological framework? Should these differing visual languages be considered as distinct, or rather, what if the social was the central premise for creativity, how can art and design work together productively?

David Gauntlett asks what is the role of creativity and the social in his inaugural lecture, “Participation Culture, Creativity, and Social Change,” from November 2008.

Some of the findings he raises are worth considering as they arguably shift the user from being a passive recipient of information to having an active role in the dissemination of content:

69% of US adults and teens consume citizen media content.

54% of US adults and teens edit their music videos and photos.

32% of people see themselves as broadcasters.

So given these stats, and the amount of time we spend online, on google, wikipedia, social networking sites etc., how can the Figures site construct a space for participation through visual means? Can the visual participation that happens online be made manifest in the physical realm? Maybe the concerns raised in the “Virtual Maps” posting, regarding locative media is one such option.

Otto Neurath’s dream was that his ISOTYPES might be understood by all peoples. Some information design might border on being universal. Taps (or faucets if you’re in the U.S) derive their colour information from nature: red from fire for ‘hot’, blue from water for ‘cold’. Easy. But what about traffic lights? Maybe the red comes from nature: red stands out in a mostly blueish/greenish landscape and we can associate red with some dangerous creatures or the appearance of blood. But whence the green? Don’t taps’ colours establish that blue is the conceptual opposite of red? Perhaps green is used for go because it is the ‘afterimage’ of red: the visual opposite? But then, what about the colour information contained in the software application, Word? Red denotes a spelling error, i.e ‘stop, and correct this’. But does green mean OK to proceed? Of course not. In Word green denotes poor grammar. Is this poor information design? Or does it merely show that we do need to learn to ‘read’ information design as Ellen Lupton or Tomas Maldonado would tell us? Certainly it would limit graphic communication if red only ever meant danger or stop. What are your thoughts?

This image is an attempt to try and create a hybrid of the graphical and the pictorial approach. We’d be interested to know if you think the images (the plate, beans, sauce bottle) are too diverting from the textual content, or do these help to let you know what the data is about and entice you to read closer?

Figures will examine through practice led, interdisciplinary research the feasibility of a news magazine built entirely from information graphics. The research will comprise an examination of the visuality of news information and information graphics. It will attempt to examine if a move away from photography’s dominance in news visualisation will allow for greater contextualisation of events within a broader news landscape. While we adopt Hans Rosling’s (www.gapminder.org) call to liberate the public data held in user-unfriendly formats, our approach is new in exploring the possibilities of a context centred news magazine built solely from information graphics, and in examining what constitutes ‘liberation of data’.We will be carrying out surveys and experiments in this on-line companion to the magazine to determine what kinds of information graphics audiences find accessible.