The Social in the Visual

Here are some of the postcards which you will be able to see in following posts. In all there are ten in the set. We hope that the use of postcards will refer to the relaxed lifestyle that we often take for granted in Western Australia, but that the kinds of graphics we have put on the cards will not necessarily put the reader in a holiday mood!

On the subject of incongruous contexts and odd juxtaposition, we’d love your input on just where these postcards could be found. We’ve been thinking places of relaxation and conversation such as cafés. What are your thoughts?

Here is the first concrete output of Figures. On 3 June 2008 an explosion occurred on Western Australia’s Varanus Island which cut off a major gas supply for the state for many weeks. While the explosion was remote from any major centres in the state, its effects are still being felt by industry and, as a consequence, by individuals employed or laid off by those industries, and the families of those individuals. The news media has concentrated on the state government’s over reliance on one main supply but has not effectively described how the explosion has led to the loss of hundreds of jobs.

We chose this story as our first test-case at Figures. Our own Uriah Mathews developed the illustrations after many days of painstaking research to find reliable sources of data on gas use in Western Australia. To emphasise the locative aspects of the story (connections to the celebrated WA lifestyle, and so on) and to invite interaction with the public. We decided that a book of postcards, which direct contributors to this website, would be an appropriate medium for the message.

The fallout from this explosion continues to drift across the state’s political landscape. The story continues: can you help us piece it together by adding your own contribution and/or by commenting on our approach?

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?

This graphic is an attempt to get away from the sometimes impenetrable aesthetics of information design. We are firmly of the belief that social statistics should be mapped in a way that makes them accessible.

But is the approach here too flippant: a board game product shot to sum up the complexities of human speech? As you can see, I ran out of space to graph all the ‘major’ languages, so this particular analogy to a ‘word game’ is not ideal.

But is it worth it to create visual interest? Does it make you want to read the stats, and are any of them surprising? Is it at least successful on that level? We would like to know what you think.

Designed by our own Uriah Mathews based on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Happy Australia shows a correlation between relationships and subjective well-being. Let us know how effective you think this graphic is. We’d be very interested to read your comments on:

Whether the format (appearance, use of shapes) seems objective or biased, credible or questionable;
Whether the format seems too dense or difficult to decrypt, too far removed from its subject matter; and
Whether the colours seem too similar or whether this clearly shows that the bandwidth of perceived happiness is quite narrow: that noone seems 100% happy, nor less than 50% happy.

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.