March 16, 2007
Information Design Watch
From Dynamic Diagrams
Design for Understanding
All of these articles first appeared on our Information Design Watch blog. Please visit the blog to view additional entries not included in the newsletter. You also can register and comment on most posts.
In This Issue:
VISUAL EXPLANATION
- PowerPoint Gives the Game Away
- Visual Identity: Identicon
- Visual Information for Origami
TECHNOLOGY
- How Digg Works. Or Not.
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
- Information Design Consultant Needed
VISUAL EXPLANATION
PowerPoint Gives the Game Away
Posted by Henry Woodbury
PowerPoint despair makes it to the Guardian Unlimited, in an essay by Jonathan Wolff:
What is it about PowerPoint? Perhaps it is the only thrill left to the jaded academic: not knowing whether the technology you are using will actually allow you to give your talk.
While Wolff mocks the dog-and-pony-show marketing of PowerPoint, he focuses on a larger point:
For those who prefer to project the idea that a talk is a unique event, a voyage of discovery that could go in any one of a number of directions, and may well go in all of them, PowerPoint gives the game away. As someone once said: "The art is hiding the art." With PowerPoint, everything is on display. Elegantly effortless performance is hard enough as it is. PowerPoint makes it impossible.
As another well-known detractor points out, PowerPoint is relentlessly sequential, undermines a presenter's ability to present rich data in context, and sets up "a speaker's dominance over the audience."
I doubt Edward Tufte is going to change his mind, but if Wolff ever watches Steve Jobs at work he might acknowledge that elegantly effortless performance with presentation software is possible.
Okay, so Jobs uses Keynote. But it's not the software that makes the difference. It's the approach.
We do a lot of work in PowerPoint. We have two fundamental strategies for creating elegant presentations. First, we approach the entire presentation as a single narrative or composition. Each slide is a storyboard that advances the theme. This lets us leverage PowerPoint's sequential format to our advantage. We can set up suspense in one slide and resolve it in another. We can establish a motif, then evoke it again and again. We can use pattern and variation.
Second, we treat every slide as a potential visual explanation. Sometimes all you need is text, but with images you can represent concepts, show connections, and evoke emotion. Images also make presenters inherently more interesting. Instead of repeating bullet points on a screen (which people can read for themselves), the presenter speaks to that which the audience sees.
But Tufte and Wolff cannot be ignored. Sometimes the multimedia presentation is simply a bad choice of format. Let us give Wolff the last word. Referring to the power of the image (say, the portrait of a famous philosopher) he writes:
These days, of course, digital pictures of Descartes are cheaper than ten-a-penny, but I'm still unsure of the benefits of showing his bony face to the audience. They have already got me to look at. And if they are looking at me, rather than a screen, I can look back at them. And I can judge whether they have understood what I have just said, and, if not, have another go at making the point.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,2027064,00.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
Visual Identity: Identicon
Posted by Lisa Agustin
Reading a string of comments on a blog is not the most stimulating user experience. Moreover, if a blog post is riveting enough to start an online conversation via comments, following the exchanges between participants may require closer reading to see who said what. Enter the Identicon. Programmer Don Park developed the Identicon as a way of enhancing the commenter's identity by using a privacy protecting derivative of each commenter's IP address to build a 9-block image to identify the writer. Referred to in its debut as "IP-ID," the Identicon is written in Java and based on the first four bytes of SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm). The Identicon's visualization consists of a small quilt of 9 blocks that uses 3 types of patches, out of 16 available, in 9 positions. To try this yourself, visit Park's blog and scroll down to the comment form, which will display your current Identicon. Mine at the time of this writing:
How it works: the Identicon code selects 3 patches: one for center position, one for 4 sides, and one for 4 corners. There are additional details in the code for determining positioning, rotation, color, and inversion of the blocks. The following shows how the process would start if the selected digits were 1, 5, 9, and 16:
For users with dynamic IP addresses, their Identicons will change over time. However, according to Park, it doesn't appear to change often enough to affect identification beyond a "typical comment activity cluster" (presumably a single session during which a comment might be posted). Park adds:
I originally came up with this idea to be used as an easy means of visually distinguishing multiple units of information, anything that can be reduced to bits. It's not just IPs but also people, places, and things. IMHO, too much of the web what we read are textual or numeric information which are not easy to distinguish at a glance when they are jumbled up together.
Besides the intended purpose of identifying individual users among a sea of many (e.g., wiki authors, customer tracking in CRM tools, etc.), there may be other uses as well, such as identification of individual computers within a large network. Plus the Identicon seems to be gaining in popularity: a PHP version is now available, as well as one that works for WordPress.
http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/2007/01/18/visual-security-9-block-ip-identification
Visual Information for Origami
Posted by Henry Woodbury
The New Yorker has a long article on physicist and origami artist Robert J. Lang that also illuminates the dynamically changing world of origami. In short, this ancient artform has changed radically with the application of modern mathematical tools:
In 1970, no one could figure out how to make a credible-looking origami spider, but soon folders could make not just spiders but spiders of any species, with any length of leg, and cicadas with wings, and sawyer beetles with horns. For centuries, origami patterns had at most thirty steps; now they could have hundreds. And as origami became more complex it also became more practical. Scientists began applying these folding techniques to anything--medical, electrical, optical, or nanotechnical devices, and even to strands of DNA--that had a fixed size and shape but needed to be packed tightly and in an orderly way.
Lang's personal origami site is rich with images and ideas. For many of his constructions, Lang provides a "crease pattern," a one-page diagram of singular complexity (see above). Lang explains:
Crease patterns have become much more popular in the last 15 years as a means of conveying origami. Part of the reason is that it's a lot easier to draw a single crease pattern than to draw a detailed step-by step folding sequence. Part of the reason is that many origami composers (including myself) construct crease patterns as part of their design process, so the finished crease pattern comes "for free." And part of the reason is that with the general rise in folding ability worldwide, a reasonable number of people now have the skill to "read" a crease pattern and fold the encoded form.
Further on, Lange expands on his last point:
...a crease pattern can sometimes be more illuminating than a detailed folding sequence, conveying not just "how to fold," but also how the figure was originally designed. And thus, it can actually give the folder insight into the thought processes of the origami composer in a way that a step-by-step folding sequence cannot.
Lang's entire essay is enormously interesting for anyone concerned with models, diagrams, and visual explanations. Crease patterns need to show both details and large scale features of a pattern. They may be simplified for readability, or be augmented with additional lines or symbols that indicate key elements of the design. Like a musical score, they are designed for the trained eye but democratically open to anyone who wishes to learn their language.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070219fa_fact_orlean
http://www.langorigami.com
TECHNOLOGY
How Digg Works. Or Not.
Posted by Henry Woodbury
What is Digg?
Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that's important to you!
Like a search engine, the Digg engine -- trading in its own version of hits -- invites optimizers. In Wired News, Annalee Newitz writes how she created an intentionally pointless blog, then promoted it on Digg using a paid service:
If the corporate brass at Digg were right, this would be a complete waste of my money. CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg "have failed," and that Digg "can tell when there are paid users." Adelson added, "When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don't remove their account so they don't realize they've been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn't work."
What's most interesting about Newitz's story isn't that Digg can be gamed. It's that her pointless blog made the popular list because authentic Digg users added their honest votes to her paid ones:
Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my blog. There's a perverse incentive here: Diggers who vote early on stories that become wildly popular become more "reputable" in the Digg system. If you're trying to move up the Digg ranks, it's in your best interest to vote on anything that looks like it's gaining popularity. And my blog, with its flurry of paid votes, fit the pattern.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/internet/0,72832-1.html
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
Information Design Consultant Needed
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http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/about/careers.html
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