The Aesthetics of the Underworld

Although the development of computational aesthetics has largely concentrated on 3D geometry and illustrative rendering, aesthetics are equally an important principle underlying 2D graphics and information visualization. A canonical example is Beck’s design of the London underground map, which not only produced an informative and practical artefact, but also established a design aesthetic that has been widely adopted in other applications. This paper contributes a novel hybrid view to the debate on aesthetics. It arises from a practical industrial problem, that of mapping the vast network of underground assets, and producing outputs that can be readily comprehended by a range of users, from back-office planning staff through to on-site excavation teams. This work describes the link between asset drawing aesthetics and tasks, and discusses methods developed to support the presentation of integrated asset data. It distinguishes a holistic approach to visual complexity, taking clutter as one component of aesthetics, from the graph-theoretic reductionist model needed to measure and remove clutter. We argue that ‘de-cluttering’ does not mean loss of information, but rather repackaging details to make them more accessible. In this respect, aesthetics have a fundamental role in implementing Schneiderman’s mantra of ‘overview, zoom & filter, details-on-demand’ for information visualization.