The Beginning Of DATA

Within just a fear years, the once unglamorous task of giving form to abstract data has become favourite among designers. This book is evidence. Published a mere 18 months after its predecessor, Data Flow 2 is   filled to the brim with interesting , innovative and inspiring examples of creative visualisation.

The enormous increase in interest shouldn't come as any surprise: information visualisation is an ideal challenge for graphic designers. Trained to communicate precisely through visual language and experienced in creative problem solving, designers can put all their skills to use. I t just did not happen earlier because large amounts of data where only available in the elitist spheres of science and business. Even if they had been easilly accessible, incomprehensible scientific data sets or boring business stats are usually turn offs for most creative folks.

These days however, we have all kinds of data on our hands. We can pick almost any topic we are interested in and retrieve corresponding data. We can record are own dat with GPS devices, pedometeres and other sensors, access huge data bases from governments and other institutions, or use the petybytes of

information generated from social networks.
That is exactly what designers, programmers and even artists have been doing for the past few years. There seems to be almost nothing that hasn't been turned into a graph.

Extract from Data Flow 2


       
         "The purpose of Visualization is insight,                      

                                                not Pictures."


                                            - Ben Shneiderman 
                                                                                                                       USING VISION TO THINK (1999)