Is Beautiful Information useful?

Filed under: Identity

Browsing through the Information is Beautiful blog is like a leisurely Sunday afternoon stroll through a new exhibition at a modern art museum. Everything looks very pretty (sometimes!) but most of it is lost on you the moment you leave into the cool spring air.

Few would critique creating innovative representations of information. Who isn't tired of the same lame bar charts and pie diagrams so often employed to essentialise otherwise complex data patterns?

The Guardian is a huge fan of this blog and data visualisation is all the rage in digital media at the moment but - as with all trends - it makes sense to take a step back and try and analyse the real impact. Smoothmedia is not suggesting crafting beautiful visuals is a bad thing, just that it should not be excused critical analysis because of its IV line into the current zeitgeist.

Information has identity too. It is not just a meta commodity deployed to create. It often has intrinsic meaning struggling to transmit through the commoditisation of powerpoint graphs. There is every reason to explore new ways of representing data, particularly if something beautiful is crafted in the process. But there are also a few reasons to think twice about this undertaking.

Beautiful visuals are often slow to create. Digital media is fast. There is usually a significant lag between the time the data is released in the public domain and the resulting visual. Digital media is real-time. Creating stunning visuals usually requires dedicated graphic design resources. Digital media is all about multi-skilling.

But perhaps most critically of all, beautiful visualisations often struggle to communicate information to the watching brain beyond aesthetics. Just as commoditised charts lose meaning through repetition, so too can beautiful art be all about the artistic representation and not the meaning.

For example this representation of the scientific evidence for popular health supplements is very effective but this attempt to represent political attitudes of the 'left' and 'right' in the US grossly oversimplifies and raises more questions than it answers. Visualising information is an emerging craft that needs to balance function or utility in its relentless pursuit of aesthetics.