What we see influences the way we process information — and ultimately, decision-making itself. Intelligence alone doesn’t enable you to make sense of information. Working with information to understand it, determine what should be done about it, and effectively communicate that message to others requires more than raw knowledge. Artists/designers enable information to communicate visually. Design comes down to eliminating any thing that distracts from passing on content. Visual displays (graphics, artworks, photographs, videos, ect.) are not only an appropriate and proper compliment to human capabilities, but such designs are frequently the optimal way to understand information.

The degree to which a visual display effectively and efficiently communicates depends on how well the project can tap into the power of design/art, and critically assess what works, what doesn’t, and why. And this is where an artist/ designer can be a positive addition to any science team. Making a graph pretty is a by-product of doing the job. First and foremost is the need to paint a clear and powerful picture that makes people sit up, take notice, and say “Ah ha!”

Why should we be interested in visualization?

When compared to our other senses (hearing, smell, taste, and touch), which are like narrow alleyways paved in cobblestones, vision is like a superhighway. The eye and the brain form a massively parallel processor that provides the highestbandwidth. “At higher levels of processing, perception and cognition are closely interrelated, which is the reason why the words “understanding” and “seeing” are synonymous. “ 1

Art and science each hold the allure of a powerful cultural ‘other’. Artists wish to appropriate science, and scientists wish to harness art for the benefit of their own practices. To what extent can this desire be collaborative and mutually beneficial?

Visualization – the use of digital media to design and develop graphics to convey information – has the potential of having an impact on how the audience “gets it”. Using computer-based tools, artist/designers can effectively communicate the necessary information to their target audience. Artist/designers are not scientists or engineers, but by using 2-D and 3-D visualizations tools they have the ability to transform key scientific concepts and complex relationships into visual representations that communicate ideas in a way that make information easier to understand. It helps put the members of a research team on the same track and helps them to collaborate more efficiently and achieve their goals.

Digital Media in the Computer Science Curriculum, by Professor PI Yue- Ling Wong, and Professor Jennifer Burg is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. With support of the NSF grant, three books are being written with parallel chapters: A Primer of Digital Media (Y.-L. Wong), The Science of Digital Media (J. Burg), and Digital Media: Its Art and Science (Y.-L. Wong). The Science of Digital Media treats digital media as a subdiscipline within computer science, covering digital imaging, audio, and video, and multimedia programming. The text is supplemented with interactive online tutorials, worksheets, programming assignments, and MatLab exercises. To view material for all three books, go to http://digitalmedia.wfu.edu. The materials explain the what, how and why things look, especially from a science perspective. “Superior methods [for displaying and analyzing data] are more likely to produce truthful, credible, and precise findings.” 2

Creating and presenting visual information requires special skills for a designer- -collecting and editing data accurately, translating the data and employing imagination to make the complex understandable. There have always been designers who are interested in making beautiful images and solving problems. Design supports a holistic, inter-disciplinary, collaborative and inclusive approach to visualization by facilitating cross collaboration with the scientists and other professionals from business, engineering and related disciplines.

Footnotes:

1. Tapping the Power of Visual Perception, Stephen Few, Intelligent Enterprise Magazine, 2004
2. Envisioning Information, Edmund R. Tufte, Graphics Press LLC, P.O. box 430, Cheshire, CT, 06410,