talk
23/11/2023
University of Edinburgh
Information+ is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers, educators, and practitioners in information design and data visualization to discuss common questions and challenges in these rapidly changing fields. Information+ seeks to foster productive exchanges amongst the variety of people involved in the theories, practices and pedagogies of analyzing and communicating information.
My talk will elaborate on the epistemological question of insight and its relation to design:
»Within the data visualization literature, a powerful idea underlies the motive why visualizations are designed. Applied researchers and partitioners claim that insights are discovered, knowledge is gained, and truth is produced through the visualization of data. But once investigating how insight, knowledge, and truth emerge from the design process a void becomes evident. From an applied visualization-oriented perspective there is no theory of how design relates to nor produces insights. This talk will glimpse into a theory I have developed over the past seven years that I am calling the calculus of design. It is a computational design theory towards the relationship between design and insight and as such tremendously important for the visualization design community.
Within the theory, form exists as reductions of the space by a designer over time. Insight is the result of this self-abstraction from reality. I am evolving the argument that insights are not discovered, gained, explored, revealed, or mined, but are operatively de—signed. To understand what insights are, we have to map the processes leading towards them. The operation to de—sign is counterintuitively not the creation of signs, but their removal, the exclusion of possible sign propositions of space. De—sign is thus an act of exclusion; the possibilities of space are crossed into form. The process, structures, and perspective the designer is embedded in and operates from need to be rendered into focus. The diagrammatic notation of the calculus of design draws out the layers of the design operation. It is an approach towards visualizing the step-by-step procedures of design.«