Data & Diagrams

This reading was more helpful to me and got my mind thinking more about how I can represent the data I collect for this project. I did think that some of the explanations got a little wordy, but I liked the quote on page 26 that says, "Although we often hear that data speak for themselves, their voices can be soft and sly." One must be careful in how he/she represents information, choosing to tell the truth or manipulate it somehow and give the audience an illusion. One can get a better sense of scale/size if an image is representational and is depicted in its actual surroundings, not cropped to fit just the piece itself. Having spatial depth can really get the viewer involved in a piece, rather than being purely 2-D. The chapter on magic showed the power that diagrams can hold. Animating words with use of variations on text/font has a great effect, like the word "GONE" in the disappearing water glass picture. I was surprised at how many aspects to an image can signal motion. I see it all the time in the informational design that I see every day, but reading about many at one time in this chapter really got me thinking about representation and how often we DO see it. Varying angles, ghosting multiple images, and dotted/dashed lines can signal motion very well. As I was looking at the labels for the Automaton Chess Player, I was reminded of house and apartment layouts--how one must collect information about the built-in aspects to every room and scale it down to represent something that someone looks at quickly and decides, "Hey I'm going to check out this place. It has a neat layout." I think a house/apt. layout would have been a nice addition to the diagrams I read about.