Foresight activities tap into information sources of all kinds in order to get a grip on things as well as to allow people to approach abstract information from a variety of angles and in a integrative way exposing relevant or perceived relationships between developments. As such, visualization is not only important in terms of putting a face on the end-product of an exercise, but especially also during the exploratory or visioning process as meaning needs to be formed. Graphs, maps and other visual representations of abstract, relational data are valuable tools to help us to translate into spatial terms that which we find hard to relate to in abstract terms.

In this context, the Daily News recently published an article on the topic of cartograms. In an absolutely fascinating way the map of the world or any geographical area is redrawn on the basis of other, non-geographical data. Famous examples include election data, or the world redrawn in terms of travel distance, etc. For more information on cartograms have a look at Worldmapper and also check out an article our colleague futurist Jamais posted a while ago.

The cartograms also remind me of a slightly wilder experiment in data visualization, namely some infoporn that Wired magazine published a few years ago, made by the renowned architecture firm Asymptote.  Their highly stylized 3D morphing graphs were a fascinating way of visualizing information, albeit widely criticized within the information design community for being ‘chartjunk‘, statistics in service of design instead of design in service of statistics and clarifying meaning.

The seminal work on the art and science of data and information visualization is definitely that of Edward Tufte (e.g. The visual display of quantitative information, Envisioning Information, Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of evidence for making decisions, etc.). For those interested , do also check out the work of people like Paul Mijksenaar, Richard Saul Wurman, Robert Jacobson, etc.

Via Alex Burns’ Futuristics

Related posts:

1. maps to change the world
2. virtual worlds
3. statistics: from data and mind to sense and heart

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 08:09 and is filed under future, trends, visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.