Abstract
In recent decades, the importance of information visualization has greatly increased in our daily lives, as it has provided a medium through which to analyze, explore, and express the meanings of datasets. Although much current research has been devoted to addressing the process and various types of visualization, information visualization still lacks the theoretical foundation as a discipline to delineate clearly the complex relationship among information, audiences, and context. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to analyze the complex relationship among information, audience, purpose, and context. This paper presents a point of view framework that helps to describe the design strategies used for to create information artifacts in response to specific design problems. Through examination of the four thematic variations—person, perspective, mode, and principle—we demonstrate the use of this framework to conduct analyses of several examples of information visualizations. This paper contributes to the literature by providing a theoretical framework that models the relationship among information visualization, audiences, and designers in specific contexts and that provides a meta-language that can be used and applied by educators to foster students’ thinking processes and to facilitate in-class critique.
Keywords
Information visualization; mediacy; point of view; narrative
Citation
Jun, S. (2014) Point of View as Mediacy of Information Visualization, in Lim, Y., Niedderer, K., Redström, J., Stolterman, E. and Valtonen, A. (eds.), Design's Big Debates - DRS International Conference 2014, 16-19 June, Umeå, Sweden. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2014/researchpapers/21
Point of View as Mediacy of Information Visualization
In recent decades, the importance of information visualization has greatly increased in our daily lives, as it has provided a medium through which to analyze, explore, and express the meanings of datasets. Although much current research has been devoted to addressing the process and various types of visualization, information visualization still lacks the theoretical foundation as a discipline to delineate clearly the complex relationship among information, audiences, and context. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to analyze the complex relationship among information, audience, purpose, and context. This paper presents a point of view framework that helps to describe the design strategies used for to create information artifacts in response to specific design problems. Through examination of the four thematic variations—person, perspective, mode, and principle—we demonstrate the use of this framework to conduct analyses of several examples of information visualizations. This paper contributes to the literature by providing a theoretical framework that models the relationship among information visualization, audiences, and designers in specific contexts and that provides a meta-language that can be used and applied by educators to foster students’ thinking processes and to facilitate in-class critique.