In parallel to mobile devices, sited media is also becoming less about hardware. We are already living in an environment where information is largely freed from its hardware dependencies. While in the past, specific information was associated with specific hardware, today information is disembodied, accessible, and adaptive—available in various formats and levels of detail suited to the context we absorb it in.

Devices are generally becoming more universal, in terms of the content they are able to display. The same content can now be viewed on a multitude of devices, from laptops to mobile phones. Sited media, too, appears more often than not as an unconstrained, ‘generic’ display surface for information, rather than a content/hardware compound. By not constraining the type of information it can display, sited media places less emphasis on technique or hardware, and more on content.

If, conceptually, we can speak of a physical, tangible plane on the one hand, and an information plane on the other, sited media is at the intersection of the two: it creates moments during which the physical plane, augmented with information, becomes a hybrid space or heterotopia (to borrow from Foucault). For both mobile and sited media, the display will continue to become invisible, while information, in its various levels of detail, will become the primary entity—in some cases referential of place, in other cases defining it.

Organizational Chart of the House Democrats’ Health Plan

A chart depicting the health plan proposed by the House Democrats has recently come to the forefront of the media. It is hard to overlook the rhetorical bias of this visualization—with almost comical overstatement and unnecessary visual complexity it depicts the proposed heath care system through a flow chart consisting of an entangled mess of arbitrarily-colored nodes, positioned with seemingly little rationale. Designed by the office of Rep John Boehner, it makes its rhetorical intent abundantly clear to any conscious observer.

Undoubtedly due to the controversy surrounding the Obama Health Care Plan, the chart has been widely referenced, including by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post in When Health-Care Reform Stops Being Polite and Starts Making Charts, and recently by Infosthetics. Graphic designer Robert Palmer responded by creating a saner, more legible chart from the same source information. In a letter to Rep Boehner he writes: “By releasing your chart, instead of meaningfully educating the public, you willfully obfuscated an already complicated proposal.”

It is certainly not the first time that information design rhetoric has found its way into the political arena, as an earlier visualization of Nancy Pelosi’s Energy Tax from the same Representative’s office demonstrates. Edward Tufte devoted an entire chapter in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information to deceitful information graphics, writing: “For many people the first word that comes to mind when they think about statistical charts is ‘lie.’” True as this may be, those visualizations that appear unbiased and objective may ultimately be more deceitful, as they are accepted without scrutiny.

Rep John Boehner’s flow chart reminds of the inherent rhetorical quality of any visualization—a topic I wrote about earlier. Any chart, graph or dynamic data visualization has an agenda or conceptual model that it reflects, no matter how seemingly objective it is, and no matter whether the author of the piece is conscious of it. Therein lies its rhetoric, whether aimed at explanation or deception. Visualization is rhetorical because its objective is to communicate.

Visualization is a medium, as Eric Rodenbeck has said. And like other media, it contains a fundamental paradox: data visualization creates an expectation of objectivity, yet is inherently rhetorical. This paradox of perception is analogous to photography, which more directly depicts the eye and mind of the photographer, rather than an objective reality. Information visualization is part storytelling, part evidence, and for a visualization to be convincing both need to be considered together. Something the above Health Plan flow chart clearly fails to do.

Mapping Foreclosures in the New York Region

Given that the New York Times Graphics Department is a winner in this year’s National Design Awards, it seemed opportune to look back at some of its recent work. Over the past few years, the Times has published many excellent interactive visualizations as counterparts to the equally brilliant static information graphics found in the paper, including the previously mentioned 31 Days in Iraq by Alicia Cheng. Each interactive is predicated upon a hypothesis and the evidence that supports it. Here, visualization is treated as a medium for journalistic inquiry by creating an editorial framework for the data on display.

Through its relationship to published news articles in the Times, every piece has a specific agenda and questions it seeks to find answers to, which builds immediate engagement with the viewer. A New York Times visualization generally summarizes an issue that has been reported on over a stretch of time, offering analysis and insight while it is still noteworthy. Most visualizations are attributed a specific date and represent a data-snapshot of a particular moment in time. The multivariate data and open-ended modes of interaction allow viewers to ask further questions of the issue and find answers through exploration.

Three of these visualizations have struck me as particularly successful. One of the most recent maps foreclosures in the New York region.

Foreclosures in the New York region (zoomed-in to city level)

The premise of this piece is that foreclosures were most frequent in those areas of the New York region with large minority populations, clearly shown by plotting each foreclosure, aggregated by individual buildings, on a map of the area, in addition to showing the percentage of foreclosures per residential units per census tract. The map makes use of three levels of detail in accordance to zoom-level. At the highest zoom-level, only the census tracts are visible. Zooming in, individual foreclosures by building form clusters around neighborhoods and major roads.

Foreclosures in the New York region (zoomed-in to street level)

At the lowest zoom-level, the granularity increases to show individual streets, blocks and intersections. According to its premise, the visualization highlights the neighborhoods most stricken by the housing crisis, and it turns out that they are indeed areas with high minority populations, including Bushwick in Brooklyn, Jamaica, Queens, and Newark, NJ. In addition to retrieving the exact percentages on hover, one can also move between 2005 and 2009 to see the change in foreclosures over time.

The visualization method takes after Dr. John Snow’s map of the London cholera epidemic and while (like the latter) it is uncertain whether the visualization served to formulate a hypothesis or to validate it, it is nonetheless a very effective use of a geographic scatter plot. Improvements might include more granular hover states to the building level, and aggregate numbers for not only for census tracts and cities, but also neighborhoods and boroughs.

A Year of Heavy Losses is a treemap visualization showing the change in market capitalization of 29 selected financial companies on Wall Street over the course of a year (October 2007 to September 2008).

A Year of Heavy Losses (October 2007)

A Year of Heavy Losses (September 2008)

What makes this visualization successful is its simplicity. The treemap format effectively shows the relative sizes of market cap, and the before/after comparison makes the overall sector loss abundantly clear—with rather brilliant subtlety, the boundary of the October 2007 visualization remains visible in the September 2008 comparison. Through color one is also able to compare five types of financial company: Investment banks, national banks, financial services, regional banks, and asset managers/investors. Finally, the toggle used to switch between years also depicts the size of financial sector in relation to the total stock market. Overall, this is an effective and elegantly compact information graphic.

Casualties of War, finally, offers an on-going analysis of US military fatalities from the Iraq war, by location of death, age, race, military branch, and type of duty.

Casualties of War (initial invasion)

Casualties of War (since troop buildup began)

Casualties of War (home states)

Mike Migurski of Stamen Design reviewed this piece in early 2007. I won’t add much more apart from summarizing the aspects that make it an effective visualization, from the flexibility of the timeline, which not only allows the variable selection of time-ranges, but also charts the number of casualties, to the side-by-side display of multiple data records and the inclusion of preset key milestones. Its data rich presentation allows open-ended exploration with a seemingly infinite number of possible time-ranges.

The characteristically understated (one might say transparent) presentation—showing difference through the smallest possible stylistic variation—respects the gravitas of the subject matter, and the only hint of political affiliation (apart from the choice of subject matter in itself) is the terminology used within the preset milestones. Rounding out the core analysis are stories of the fallen and an expressive visualization of each service member who died in Iraq, represented in a grid in order of death—a virtual memorial.

Following Tufte’s principle of data density, these three interactive pieces, among many others published by the Times, are exercises in the effectiveness of information visualization as a technology, for both sense-making and storytelling.

A phone conversation for instance has a particular protocol, yet is largely freeform. The same could be said for email, still the ‘killer app’ of online communications due to its asynchrony and formal flexibility. While it has competition from IM, SMS and online networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, email will not face extinction anytime soon.

Many have also written about the collective consciousness in relation to social media, referring to an emerging sense of connectedness by which we increasingly operate as members of a larger community and less as autonomous individuals. The theory is enticing and, one might think, validated through observation. Many sites, for instance, bring to the forefront the affinities and relationships found in content generated by individuals, such as photos bookmarked in ffffound and videos uploaded to YouTube. When these affinities occur, however, are they predicated upon shared experience, as we might assume, or do they occur because of the structures and protocols present within the systems we use? Could it be that the collective consciousness that some see in social media is an illusion created by restricted means of expression?

One could claim that communication is increasingly shaped, even instantiated, by the technologies we create and employ, through the protocols (the conventions) they establish. Naturally, people seek convention for a sense of security and belongness among a particular community, and the communication technologies we adopt commoditize conventions. This is apparent for example in the way in which Twitter appropriates the convention of short messaging.

Following that thought, social media does create a sense of presence and collectiveness, though not through shared experience, as might be assumed, but through protocol. Which finally raises the question—returning to the initial argument that online mediated interactions are becoming less meaningful—whether we need platforms for interaction that are as accessible as current social media, yet ultimately more expressive.

Lebbeus Woods, Same Difference

Form inevitably creates narrative, disclosing the intent and the hand of the author. Whether linear or non-linear, any narrative contains a particular point of view. On the other hand, formlessness allows for unencumbered individual interpretation. I think of formlessness in its purest state as randomness. The only true opposition to structure, it gives equal importance to each structural entity. It is the only truly democratic (objective) view of information.

Every day we absorb greater quantities of information. While the desire for interpreted information is undeniably growing, so is our skepticism of individual bias. And particularly when the trusted sources we rely on fail, we seek refuge in the ideal of objectivity.

In contemporary culture we tend to place emphasis on objectivity over the individual perspective, on the quantifiable and scalable over the qualitative. The desire to commoditize (or genericize) is integral to the capitalist mindset, so as to allow for the creation and repetition of models and processes. The models that we consider to have the most authority or credibility are those that are the furthest removed from an individual or individualistic perspective.

Consequently, if uniqueness of form implies individuality, there is a certain authority to be found in formlessness.

Design by its very definition implies creating form, and as such must be in opposition to randomness. However, if we imagine form as a vector, ranging from pure subjectivity to pure objectivity, could design encompass lesser grades of formlessness along that vector? If we accept that this could be the case, what then are other ways in which formlessness can manifest itself? Perhaps, if in one context giving form is about invention or innovation, formlessness could instead mean relying on established convention, in an attempt to assume objectivity. The hand of the author/designer is concealed behind the known and familiar.

Much of design strikes me as the reflection of an implied superiority of the designer/author, involving knowing the appropriate techniques for conveying a particular message—a message effectively interpreted by the designer. Yet what if, instead of relying on visual rhetoric, design focused on a generic, homogeneous presentation of material that relies primarily on the intelligence of the viewer, not the author? In this interpretation, the search for formlessness becomes the search for convention, as the pursuit of the most fundamental structures or intrinsic forms within common knowledge—a kind of universal order.