Disorderly reasoning in information design

The importance of information visualization as a means of transforming data into visual, understandable form is now embraced across university campuses and research institutes worldwide. Yet the role of designers in this field of activity is often overlooked by the dominant scientific and technological interests in data visualization, and a corporate culture reliant on off-the-shelf visualization tools. This article is an attempt to describe the value of design thinking in information visualization with reference to Horst Rittel’s definition of “disorderly reasoning,” and to frame design as a critical act of translating between scientific, technical and aesthetic interests. In a discussion of the aesthetics of information visualization, Warren Sack addresses a common misconception of artistic data visualization as “an exercise in beautiful image-making to render data “friendly””(Sack, 2009). This characterization is, according to Sack, “unsatisfactory for most artists and designers concerned with information visualization. It is tantamount to an understanding that the artistic work is only an attempt to “pretty things up,” i.e., to make computer images easy to understand.” Sack’s work is helpful in its efforts to define a new aesthetics of information and the network, and its characterization of a prevailing view of aesthetics as superficial. The work of many artists using data visualization is more user-unfriendly in its critical modes of challenging and calling attention to network conventions. But to dismiss user friendliness as “prettying things up” is to throw out the baby with the bath