The Social in the Visual

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?

To further explore the potential of locative information graphics I looked at Australian suburbia, which has undergone a massive change since its beginnings. A new model for suburbia is The Estate. These environments encourage a style of architecture, paint colours, town plan, and so on. All of these physical aspects can be seen in The Brochure. A certain lifestyle is for sale, often reserved for a particular person with a certain class, occupation, social qualities and family values. What if these ideal living standards were made public and transparent? What if Figures obtained this role. As an example, our service would be this mailer, targeted to particular suburbs and using the local area statistics from the ABS we can talk about the citizens this particular area attracts.

For this example I have used the Leeming suburb, not an estate structure, but hopefully the mailer will still raise awareness of the suburb’s social qualities. The mailer acts as a how-to manual to living the ideal lifestyle in Leeming. It shows the average occupation, family structure and time management. For example, if you are a male in Leeming you are expected to perform 5-14 hours of housework, while females should perform 15-29. For your occupation, the majority of residents are professionals; your choice of work would be education, technical service or healthcare. This manual includes a survey, which requires the Leeming residents to participate with the mailer; asking them to record their average spending, time, family, etc. With this information the mailer informs the citizen if they fit the mould for Leeming or whether they should be reassigned to a better-suited suburb.

Could this tongue-in-cheek mailer be taken seriously? Is it an informative way to introduce readers to designing a lifestyle? What else could be placed in the mailer or other how-to services for the uninformed suburbians?

If you live or have lived in Leeming please respond.

Could colour be used as a human geographical tool? Stuart’s post raises some great questions about colour as information. I argue that the shift towards modernity has severed the link between colour and the natural material.The boom of the textile industry and of mass produced products has caused the public in developed parts of the world, to behave as an information design. Unique and bespoke items are reserved for the rich and elite.Large quantities of identical coloured shirts, indicates that groups of people are wearing the same colour at the same time. What can these patterns tell us? Certain patterns of colour can be attached to an occupation. Designers wear black t-shirts; blue scrubs and white for medical services; bright orange for road workers. Would particular patterns emerge if we examined one occupation, like education? Read the rest of this entry »

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.

We’ve decided to start some categories here at Figures. At the risk of being branded crack-pots, one of those categories needs to be ‘Crazy Notions’. This will be a place where strange whims (seldom indulged in the ‘rhetoric of neutrality’—as Robin Kinross has described it—the realm of information design) may be played out, to see what they might develop into. Good design process should never disregard crazy notions, at least not to begin with! And so, in that spirit of exploration, though it might lead us into dead ends, here is the first crazy notion post.

So, what if buildings were bar charts? What are city skylines showing us? The 20th century (economically rationalist) city is typified by the skyscraper, why? Generally speaking, the modern CBD rises towards the middle: The tallest buildings are to be found where the rental of floor space per metre is at its highest. Presumeably the rent is highest in the city at this position because its the most desireable position in the city from which to conduct business: Because it’s central (and/or it’s located near transport corridors or other influential, maybe geographical features). In this regard then, a skyline can be a bar chart measuring rental costs through altitude: The taller the building, the higher the rent at that point in the city. Of course this should mean that city skylines would be pyramidical in elevation, triangular in profile. Some are, but many aren’t. In the US, due to the more recent development of their cities compared with the old world, one is more likely to see this pattern. It occurs in Europe too, especially where cities were destroyed by bombing during WWII and were rebuilt from the middle of the century. Some German cities, Frankfurt and Köln for example, have a skyscraper skyline. Meanwhile, Rome insists that no buildings exceed the height of St Peter’s. Could one say that the ‘bar chart of buildings’ in Europe measures the degree to which your city was bombed during the war?

Could tall buildings also be a bar chart of the importance placed on economic rationalism in a city? Paris has its tall buildings tucked away in one quarter, La Defense, while it brands itself as a romantic city whose appearance precedes the 2oth century. London does something similar: Most of the skyscrapers exist at Canary Wharf to the south east of the CBD. Though in London, the tall ones do march more closely into the centre of the city. Is this an indication of a more economically rationalist nationalism? Or is it because much of London was also wiped out in WWII? We’d love your thoughts on this half-formed notion. Especially if you’re a town-planner or an architect!

Pics are borrowed from: Frankfurt; New York; Paris; Rome; Perth

Mapping using the Internet, like most applications on the web, seems to begin by using existing models of visualisation. It makes sense to use what we know and understand about paper maps from their long history. When maps are used as a tool to try and locate a place there is a relationship between that visualised place and the actual place. The main difference between a printed map and a virtual might be the passage of time. The Internet, with its ability to change and update quickly, gives us the ability to apply filters to the visualisations.

Google maps is a good example. These maps employ the aesthetic of a road map: A bird’s eye view; small icons; various line widths and colours to denote area. Read the rest of this entry »

Our friends over at Hidden Shoal Recordings had a gig in December ‘08 for which Uriah and I designed this flash animation of music biz statistics (from stats gathered by Uriah and Dr Malcom Riddoch). We looked at various music technologies and how each has been superceded. We tried to show that the markets have arrived at favouring digital downloads (at least for the present): Hidden Shoal’s main method of distribution. At the gig, this animation was projected directly on to a matt black wall in an almost completely black room. Amazingly this experiment paid off. The effect is much as you see here: bright white lines on a black ground, but with the added advantage of a borderless background for the graphics to float upon. Anyway, we think we have something that’s aesthetically engaging, but what about consistency? Are these hard to decipher? Your thoughts would be appreciated.

This is an infographic sign we designed to explain some location-specific stats. Mosman Park in Perth is unusual in that it has a pronounced split between the haves and the have nots. This side of the two-sided sign faces the less affluent part of the suburb. The sign explains several points of interest. These include that the more affluent are more likely to use their cars for most trips, however short; and that the poorer denizens spend around one third of their income on car running costs, while the richer spend less than one eighth. Its placement in a place of leisure and relaxation is deliberate: This is a place to reflect on the day-to-day, and to recharge the batteries before returning to the weekly grind.

What are your thoughts on guerilla infographics? What might they contain and where might they might be placed?

Here are a couple of the postcards in close-up. We had some interesting comments about these in particular when we presented the concept at a recent conference in Adelaide. The idea of creating a news article as a book of postcards seemed to go over well. We had the added notion of turning the book stub into a flick-book once the postcards are removed. Senseless wastage seemed inappropriate especially in a discussion about energy use.
In our pursuit of ‘accessability’ here at Figures, we have kept the graphics clear and crisp. However, on the back of each of the cards is an ironic statement that may be a little more obscure. For example, “Haven’t you heard we are in the middle of a ‘BOOM’?” We hope these work a little like news ’soundbites’ but prompt people into thinking about where they live and what their lifestyle requires in terms of energy.