You can also see below an insightful talk by Raworth at the Royal Society of Arts where she explains the theoretical framework behind the image.

“I’m really stoked by the traction this diagram has had […] and I’m asking myself why?”, stated Raworth during her talk, and she then exposed three reasons to explain the diagram’s recent popularity (in her own words):

(1) The framing of planetary boundaries is a very very powerful one, it makes the complexity of earth system science accessible to non-scientists and helps us to see the planet as a whole, as a system of interlocking processes that we depend upon for our well-being.

(2) By putting that social foundation in the heart of it, it brings into one simple picture the world of development and the world of environment, and it helps to end the false dichotomy that we face that either you are for development and ending poverty, or you are for protecting the environment (…)

(3) People are interested in it because it gives us a chance to rethink economic development, instead of starting with economic growth, we start with the fundamentals of what we care about (…)

It’s particularly interesting to recall that less than four years ago the term infographic used to cover any type of chart, graph, diagram, histogram, table or illustration conveying a specific data attribute. We called it simply, an information graphic. But over the past few years, the expression has become closely associated with a long vertical table encompassing a variety of graphical elements, such as maps, uncanny clip art, miscellaneous charts, large text and bulky numbers. This association is currently so strong that it seems almost impossible to keep the two concepts apart. Consequently, the recent outburst of popularity of infographics has caused the emergence of various companies dedicated almost exclusively to the production of this type of graphic for private clients, institutions, blogs, and mainstream media; making it arguably one the strongest economic forces within the information design landscape.

But as with many other types of contemporary graphics, the idea in itself is not entirely novel. The papyrus roll from Ancient Egypt, the direct ancestor of the modern book, is conceivably also the ancient forefather of modern infographics. Consisting of papyrus sheets pasted edge to edge with a slight overlap, the text and graphics was set out in columns, and drawn up at right angles to the edge of the rolls. Even though most papyrus were meant to be read from left to right, unrolling them as the reader went along, some also explored a vertical top-down linear narrative. This concept was further propelled across Middle Age Europe, where scholars were at loss trying to integrate all the new knowledge coming from the ancient world, and biblical exegesis was evolving from a simple allegorical division to a complex analytical process. During this stage we can witness a variety of parchment scrolls employing a diagrammatic representation of  biblical tales, family trees, systems of law, knowledge maps, amongst many other topics. On the left we can see two compelling medieval specimens. The first on the left is a small part of a remarkable genealogy of Christ from circa 1130-1205, while the second is a depiction of the genealogical tree of the House of Habsburg, circa 1540.

But out of all the cases I’ve seen in the past, the chart below is perhaps one of the best examples of a prototypical infographic and a strong progenitor of such a concept, abundantly explored in the last few years. This 19th century piece is showcased in the magnificent book The Cartographies of Time, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010.

Printed by Joshua Himes in 1842, A Chronological Chart of the Visions of Daniel and John, integrates the visual logic of the timeline, chronological calculus and apocalyptic symbolism in a single scheme. The final date in the left-hand column, 1843, indicates the coming of the end of the world. As BibliOdyssey explains in a post: “This infographic is based on the religious revivalist predictions of the New England minister, William Miller. From the 1830s, Miller’s followers produced stirring books, pamphlets, broadsides and innovative graphics to spread the word of the coming apocalypse, often displayed and distributed at popular camp meetings.”

The resemblance with modern-day infographics is primarily based on three features: (1) The portrayal of a specific story or topic in a long top-down graphical layout. (2) The use of specific illustrations or clip art (in the case of present-day versions) with complementary text to better elucidate the various components of the subject. (3) The inclusion of large numbers to convey specific quantities pertaining to the analyzed topic.

Here’s a comparison of the 1834 chart next to two modern infographic approaches:

About two years ago, in November 2010, I wrote a post stating I much I enjoyed and admired the “remarkable examples of visual storytelling” produced by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and CognitiveMedia in their enticing RSA Animate series. Earlier this year I received an email from RSA telling me that they were considering turning my original RSA talk, from December 2011, into an RSAnimate. I was absolutely over the moon. In May 2012, the 12th video of the series was released, based on my talk “The Power of Networks“. The final result exceeded all my expectations, and to this day I’m still dumbfounded by the phenomenal creativity of Andrew Park and his team, and the fantastic visual metaphors they continuously come up with.

Apart from the video you can also download a pdf of the complete final drawing, or order a printed A0 poster (well worth it). Here are some images of the final composition:

Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information

The book has been featured on:

WIRED Magazine Wish List
New York Times Book Review
and many others

Posters: Syntax of a New Language

The 15 visual methods of network visualization as showcased in Chapter 5 of Visual Complexity.
You can read more here.

Here’s a glimpse at the growing collection (click image for main article):

**This text was part of an extinct chapter of Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, which never saw the light of day. Instead of being forgotten in a dusty folder, I decided to make it available to the general public and invite any constructive criticism by our growing community. Hope you will find it useful.**

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Data and information visualization are fundamentally about showing quantitative and qualitative information so that a viewer can see patterns, trends, or anomalies, constancy or variation, in ways that other forms – text and tables – do not allow.

Michael Friendly

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The concept of visualization is certainly not new. Humans have been involved in the visual representation of information for more than 30,000 years. During this time, there has been a variety of portrayed subjects, many of them pertaining to natural phenomena, but the common underlying purpose of communicating a message has always been present. Whether we talk about cave paintings, cuneiforms, maps, or charts, we are always alluding to information in a quality of a message from a sender to one or more receivers. “The progress of civilization can be read in the invention of visual artifacts, from writing to mathematics, to maps, to printing, to diagrams, to visual computing.”[1], say Card, Mackinlay and Shneiderman. Historian Alfred W. Crosby attests to the importance of visual aids throughout the ages, by claiming that visualization and measurement were the two factors most responsible for the rapid development of all of modern science[2].

Even though visual artifacts have always been a central element in the history of humankind, over the last 25 years the term “visualization” has become immensely popular, being fragmented in a profusion of subfields, carrying a diversity of specialized labels such as Information Visualization, Data Visualization, Scientific Visualization, Software Visualization, Geographic Visualization, Knowledge Visualization, Flow Visualization, and even Music Visualization. Many of these areas emerged in the midst of existing parallel areas like Information Design, Information Graphics, and Visual Communication. The distinction between them is occasionally thin, and in some cases almost inexistent. This rich plethora of labels is certainly indicative of the outburst of a new practice, but one that is still struggling to define itself. While some consider this to be the birth of a new medium, or even a new science, the consensus on a definite descriptive label is not so obvious.

According to Michael Friendly, the renowned professor of Psychology at York University in Canada, information visualization is the broadest term that could be taken to include all the developments in visualization, since “almost anything, if sufficiently organized, is information of a sort: tables, graphs, maps and even text, whether static or dynamic, provide some means to see what lies within, determine the answer to a question, find relations, and perhaps apprehend things which could not be seen so readily in other forms.”[3] But even able to accommodate the broadest of scopes, information visualization has also been the definite title of a multidisciplinary field emerging out of the computer science community in the late 1980s.

With roughly two decades, information visualization has already been the target of some criticism and dismissal. Most of it comes from an inadequacy of the field to swiftly adapt to recent changes, caused by a large adoption from eager art and design communities and an escalating curiosity from media, advertising, and publishing. As a close-knit group, naturally inclined towards the computer science community, as a result of its own heritage, information visualization must take a stance to either adjust to these changes and fully accept its growing popularity, or instead, remain a niche inward-looking academic practice. Some signs of an embrace between traditional circles and the new wave of enthusiasts are already starting to surface, and this initial hesitation might simply go down in history as the normal shyness of a first date. Nonetheless, it is not surprising that under the present uncertainty, some voices have come forward suggesting new terms and definitions. Ben Fry in his PhD thesis defended a new label called “Computational Information Design”, able to properly integrate information visualization, data mining and graphic design, while Robert Kosara is a promoter of “Visual Analytics”, with a stronger emphasis on analytical reasoning. While many of the arguments for new labels reinforcing specific scientific or design concerns are certainly valid, there’s a major concern of an excessive breakup of a field that’s still defining itself.

Instead of trying to devise new titles for alternative branches highlighting a particular area of focus, the effort should be in creating a bridge between the existing body of research and the abundance of novel demands, in an attempt to revise and renovate the field, steering information visualization into a mature, integrated, and in demand hotspot. If willing to adapt, the field is broad enough to fully encompass most requirements, from a stronger prominence of design to a reinforced attention to analytics. This doesn’t mean the discipline can incorporate any attempt at visualizing data. But in essence, all interactive visual representations, able to make the depicted subject more intelligible and transparent, or find a new explicit insight within it, can and should be embraced by information visualization.

Unified Framework

Information visualization is well known for its multidisciplinary nature, assembling people from a vast assortment of backgrounds, but notwithstanding the contribution of innumerous disciplines, we can still highlight three main spheres of activity that best characterize its key attributes and capabilities. Readers familiarized with research publications in the field will find this conception slightly different from previous frameworks developed by Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay, Ben Shneiderman, and Ed Chi. The deliberate intent of this reframing is to emphasize the leading role of design, in both visual and interactive choices, and the fundamental function of statistics and data mining. This is ultimately an integrating, yet diverse framework, keeping alive the heterogeneous nature of the discipline. Here we describe the three central layers of information visualization: Data Transformation, Visual Mapping and Interactive Framing. Even though there’s a natural progression between the three stages that doesn’t mean they sustain in a fixed order. There’s a lot of refinement taking place in a continuous iterative process that forces each step to be occasionally revisited.

Data Transformation

This is the very first stage in the development of any information visualization project. Without data no visualization would even be possible, hence everything starts by attaining access to a particular dataset relevant to the project’s pursuit. After getting hold of the data, what follows is a long process of data analysis, which includes inspecting, cleaning, filtering, and parsing the data, while organizing the relevant parts and removing the irrelevant. The subsequent process of data mining is crucial in order to have a better understanding of the natural affordances of the dataset. It encompasses a series of queries and algorithms in order to extract particular patterns in the data for some quick modeling and visualization tests, which will be of great importance in the build up of the second stage. Data transformation is the essential foundation of a successful execution, and covers areas like programming, statistics, data analysis, data mining, analytics, and machine learning.

Visual mapping

Visual mapping is a critical step in information visualization, where data finally comes to life through a deliberate visual form. It takes into consideration key factors like top-to-bottom hierarchy, color, legibility, typeface, contrast, spacing, position, size, shape, orientation, layout, and depth. This central task contemplates not only individual views or modules, but also the composition of the entire contiguous environment. The choice of a particular method (or methods) is tied with the specific goal of the piece – its intrinsic purpose – and might be defined a priori or during project development, as the natural affordances of the data come into place. It’s also highly dependent on end users, their immediate context and expressed needs – when, where, and how the final execution will be used. Visual mapping is tied with various areas of visual design, including graphic design, information design, interface design, visual perception, cognitive psychology, aesthetics, and typography. Furthermore, it’s essentially made of two components: graphical objects and textual objects.

Interactive Framing

Information visualization is ultimately a discovery tool, and interactivity provides the final coalescing layer for exploration. “Visual representations and interaction techniques take advantage of the human eye’s broad bandwidth pathway into the mind to allow users to see, explore, and understand large amounts of information at once”[6], elucidate James Thomas and Kristin Cook, and they further explain, “Visual representations alone cannot satisfy analytical needs. Interaction techniques are required to support the dialogue between the analyst and the data. While basic interactions such as search techniques are common in software today, more sophisticated interactions are also needed to support the analytical reasoning process.”[7]

Some don’t see the clear-cut need for interaction in information visualization, so it’s important to clarify this assertion. In a broader definition of visualization, it’s broadly consensual that information can be successfully conveyed in either static or interactive executions. However, we have to question what really sets information visualization apart from other parallel fields such as information design or information graphics. It’s in fact its computer-supported interactive nature that truly makes it distinct, and this unique offering becomes imperative as the degree of complexity of the portrayed system increases. The representation of complex networks is just an instance where interactivity is vital. Coupled with a relevant time-variant dataset, interactivity can also be a critical driver in a shift from short-term casual engagement to long-term active engagement, substantiating information visualization as a significant tool for exploration.

But interactive framing is not limited to the constraints of a computer screen. It covers any responsive visualization where a two-way communication between user and layout is established, from reactive surfaces to highly immersive visualization environments. This ultimate unifying layer is critical for explorative analysis, enabling users to inquire, filter, manipulate, reshape, and examine the visual outcome in order to identify properties, relationships, regularities, or patterns. Finally, it’s important to elucidate that even though interactivity is a central component of information visualization, the field doesn’t aim at replacing static depictions of information, since they can successfully complement each other. It simply provides an alternative, yet extremely powerful medium.

Structural Foundation

Even though there is a widespread consensus on its qualifications, information visualization, as a recent emergent field, still lacks a structural foundation able to uphold and expand its projection well into the future. We cannot consciously claim to be a new medium or a new science, when innumerous questions are still unresolved. It is critical for such an introspection effort to happen without delay, since there’s too much work to be done, and once we all agree on what we do as a community, it will be easier for external parties to recognize the goals and boundaries of our discipline. It’s obvious that we are still pulling together the different parts that make this practice and trying to understand when best to use them, but in order for information visualization to take the next step, and grow into a cohesive field of study, it requires the consolidation of three critical components:

Theory

Assemble a clear underlying theory able to combine many of the learnings, knowledge and insights from the variety of disciplines that make information visualization. If recent years have been marked by a significant profusion of new projects, this sturdy practice needs to be sustained by a reliable system of ideas and ideological principles. The purpose is to ultimately provide a broad consensual framework able to evaluate past, present and future endeavors. The current unguided exploration is by no means detrimental, since it’s the perfect setup for innovation to sprout, however, if the discipline wishes to mature as a reliable knowledge domain, it needs a supporting body of theory capable of accommodating all recent advances. Cognitive psychology might be one of the most reliable instruments in the edification of such a system, able to easily translate cognitive behaviors into objective design principles. A theory of information visualization will have to embrace diversity, and consequently several theories might need to coexist in opposition to one universal all-encompassing framework.

Taxonomy

Define the spectrum of representational methods and techniques of information visualization. The central aim should be to consolidate and further exemplify, by recognizing the different data types and structures that underlie a common typology of patterns. Chaomei Chen, an important figure in the field, asserts on this current call to arms: “a taxonomy of information visualization is needed so that designers can select appropriate techniques to meet given requirements”[8]. This is not meant to be a fixed and definite taxonomy, but an evolving, ever-growing, ever-expanding endeavor. This effort doesn’t contemplate a mere collection of techniques either; it should foremost supply a set of foundational principles able to guide present and future practitioners. Some initial steps in the description of common information visualization patterns have started to arise, but we still have a long way to go.

Evaluation

Provide easy evaluation methodologies for existing tools and approaches. Information visualization requires a common rule system that can accordingly distinguish the good from the bad, the appropriate from the inappropriate, the usable from the unusable, the effective from the ineffective. Case studies and success stories are a great first step in this direction. If information visualization is a vehicle for evidence and clarity, it should embrace the same ideology in the definition of its own practice, by creating a systematic body of analysis able to properly evaluate the success of any project. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods should be welcomed, including observational studies, participatory assessment, usability testing, contextual interviews, and user feedback. This effort should, most importantly, go hands in hands with the development of an adequate language of criticism.

In the Preface of Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of information, I exposed my astonishment with the amount of dead links and error messages encountered while reviewing projects to feature in the book. It’s therefore not surprising that preserving many of these projects for posterity became a central drive for the book’s completion. This took an even more serious tone when I started digging deeper into an unsettling prospect commonly referred to as the Digital Dark Age. This expression essentially contemplates a future scenario where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical documents or artifacts, because they have been stored in an obsolete digital format. Even though this is a widespread dilemma of modern technology, affecting a variety of knowledge domains, when it comes to information visualization, the possibility of many present-day digital projects vanishing within a few decades is a considerable worrying prospect.

As I researched many of the projects to showcase in the book, I was surprised to find that it was easier to retrieve an illustration from Joachim of Fiore, produced 800 years ago, than to attain an image of a visualization of web routers, developed in 2001. As I expressed in the Preface:

The reasons for the disappearance are never the same. In most instances, pieces are simply neglected over time, with authors not bothering to update the code, rendering it obsolete. In other cases, the plug-in version might become incapable of reading older formats or the API from an early dataset source might change, making it extremely difficult to reuse the code that generated the original visualization. Lastly, projects are occasionally moved into different folders or domains or just taken down from the servers, simply because they highlight an outdated model that does not fit the current ambitions of their respective author or company.

Just yesterday while researching for meaningful tree visualizations, the project Ecotonoha came to mind, as it always does, so many times I lost count. Sponsored by NEC and developed by Yugo Nakamura in 2003, Ecotonoha was a project to nurture a virtual tree collaboratively, and at the same time contribute to the actual environment to cope with global warming. More important, Ecotonoha has been a major inspiration for several artists/designers over the last decade and influenced numerous new media projects. If you try to access its website today, there’s a simple message that reads:

The Ecotonoha campaign launched in 2003 has come to an end. We thank you very much for participating in this initiative. During the campaign, 7,423 trees were planted based on messages generated. We believe that your messages in shape of these trees will contribute greatly to sustaining the earth. We hope to have your continued support in our activities and to the conservation of the earth.

But Ecotonoha is a success story in the current landscape. Most online visualization projects have a much shorter lifespan, and very few will reach Ecotonoha’s milestone of 8 years. Overall, this digital laissez-faire contributes to the ephemeral nature of most online artifacts, and consequently the whole field suffers from memory loss.

New York Times  - Timelapse

A few months back I saw a canny post by Philip Vieira, which made me rethink about the dangers of our current digital laissez-faire. Due to an errant cron task that ran twice an hour from September 2010 to July 2011, Philip Vieira, a developer based in Toronto, Canada, accidentally collected 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the nytimes.com. With this rich content at hand, Philip created a time-lapse video showing the dinamic, ever-changing nature of the New York Times online frontpage over months. The result was utterly fascinating and absorbing, but it also led Philip to equate how how much is being lost, every minute of the day, across numeral digital artifacts.

As Philip Vieira expresses on his post:

Having worked with and developed on a number of content management systems I can tell you that as a rule of thumb no one is storing their frontpage layout data. It’s all gone, and once newspapers shutter their physical distribution operations I get this feeling that we’re no longer going to have a comprehensive archive of how our news-sources of note looked on a daily basis.

His concern is valid and entirely in line with mine:

This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.

Digital Archeology

Of course many others are also concerned with the prospect of a Digital Dark Age. In October 2010 the exhibit Digital Archeology opened in London as part of Internet Week Europe, with the primary purpose of harvesting and uncovering dozens of websites created in the last 20 years. As the organizers state on their website:

Over this short time, technological and communications developments have been so fast that the groundbreaking work of the early creative pioneers, produced on now defunct hardware and software, have disappeared almost as soon as they appeared, like Mayflies in spring doomed to die as the daylight fades.

Concerned that “the evidence of this explosion of creativity may be consigned to digital oblivion”, this exhibit is timely and extremely relevant:

Soon we will know less about these HTML blossomings than we do about the relief carvings in Mohenjo-Daro or the Yucatán. While they helped define our new culture, almost none of the websites of less than two decades ago can be seen at all. Today, when almost a quarter of the earth’s population is online, this most recent artistic, commercial and social history is being wiped from the face of earth and a hundred million hard drives lie festering in recycling yards or rusting in landfills.

The Deleted City

Another recent, and even more evocative project on this topic is The Deleted City. The installation is an interactive visualization of a 650 gigabyte backup of Geocities made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighborhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain. As the authors explain:

Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of “homesteaders” as the digital tennants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating toFacebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted.

In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.

The need to preserve

Today there are numerous cuneiform records - one of the earliest known forms of written expression, some 6,000 years old - which communicate a great number of insights about Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian cultures and societies. Can we safely guarantee that some, if any, modern-day digital artifacts will last this long?

I’m not surprised by the news of Amazon’s e-book sales surpassing printed ones, or by any recent story on the conversion of atoms into bits. As Benny Landa once said in respect to this inevitable progress: “Everything that can be digital, will be”. I’m not concerned with mass digitization, I’m simply fearful we are not making enough effort to preserve it. After all, what good is all this information if we cannot safely guard it for future generations?

As stated in the intro paragraph of the chapter: “Despite this rich graphical diversity, many projects tend to follow noticeable trends and common principles, which in turn result in a type of emergent taxonomy. This embryonic and evolving taxonomy provides a portrait of the current state of the practice and reveals the initial building blocks shaping a new visual language.”

Here’s a link to the 3 posters created:
VC Book Posters

The following quotes should be read as an ode to functional beauty, an enduring formula for great designs:

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“The care for the beautiful leads us to the same selection as the care for the useful… The buildings we admire are those in which the architect has succeeded in proportioning the means to the end, in which the columns seem to carry the burdens imposed on them lightly and without effort.”

Henry Poincaré (1908)
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“Moreover, the perfection of mathematical beauty is such, that whatsoever is most beautiful and regular is also found to be the most useful and excellent.”

D’Arcy Thompson - On Growth and Form (1917)
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“The philosophical definition of beauty must set forth its purpose or function in the universe. The nature or constitution of beauty, then, can be only the combination of qualities fitted to bring about this end.”

Ethel D. Puffer, The Philosophical Review, (1904)
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“Pressing beyond a Kantian aesthetic of form and beauty, we might suggest an aesthetic of function. The art may have served a practical function for its original viewers, and the aesthetics of the art should then be related directly to that function - an aesthetic that encompasses the art’s ritual purpose for which it was created.”

Thomas Heyd and John Clegg, Aesthetics and Rock Art, (2005)
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“Above all else, a visualization is beautiful when it is useful. A visualization is beautiful when it elegantly and appropriately makes the viewer think about the information organized in the visual display. A visualization is beautiful when it allows the viewer to gain insight and understanding into the information, especially when that information was not appreciated in some other form, such as written prose. A visualization is beautiful when the information is thoughtfully arranged in such a way that patterns and structures are revealed.”

David J. Staley - Computers, Visualization, and History (2002)
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“All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”

Philip Johnson
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