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Meaningful Images for Communication | |
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Data Visualisation: Meaningful Images A brief course outline Prof M P Ranjan Faculty of Design National Institute of Design, Ahmedbad 20 July 2005 Description of a course that was conducted for students of Information & Digital Design and Software User Interface Design at NID in 2004 as information towards a second iteration at the new Gandhinagar campus in August 2005 from 22 August 2005 to 2 September 2005 (Two Week Units) The Context and Intention The area of visualization of data is growing in importance day by day. This phenomenon is impacted with the increasing use of networked data sources and a massive growth in the channels for communication available to all professions. This massive dissemination as well as the growth in bandwidth and increased computing resources being available at the user end terminals is driving growth for such representations of data. Here the demand is both in print media and the broadcast media strategies and it is ready to explode in the Internet applications that are coming of age in the second-generation Internet products being offered as a result of demand and affordability. The areas of application will eventually cover all fields of human activity from medical images to scientific data analysis tools and in financial markets that have to support exploding data streams that are difficult to keep track of using traditional modeling and analysis tools. The human mind and our sensory mechanisms are far too overloaded by the bombardment of these data streams that we are compelled to look for new and improved ways to “See the Data” rather than just look at numbers, because while plenty of data is now available through real time systems from monitoring, making sense of this data is becoming increasingly difficult due to human limitations of perception, cognition and response action. The fields of application extend from playful ones in the area of game design as well as to life critical applications such a monitoring traffic flows in the sky and trend mapping in financial and medical situations, and the need to make sense of what we can now see and record with our available and emerging technologies. Geographic data from satellites, surveillance data from spy cameras, medical data from toilets, home monitoring devices and investment needs of individuals through home banking and all provide opportunities for new levels of visualization given the tools available to all of us. The media too has its needs for professional data managers and visualisers in mapping and modeling expressive action sequences to make current events both interesting and comprehensible to both experts and public alike. Decision makers will look for coherent presentations with viasualisations of management and planning strategies and time-line models in new and complex business settings where an investment decision can make or break a company. Maps, charts, diagrams, models, statistical graphs, are all examples of visualization types that we are familiar with in today’s media and representation systems. We are entering a new area of dynamic data displays with advanced animation and representation systems that will make the reception and delivery of data several notches up the value chain and those who do it well will be at a premium in the competitive market place of tomorrow. |
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