"'Computational thinking', an idea borrowed from computer science, quickly radicalized design disciplines and created productive debate around what and how to represent data in the design process. Making complex maps using large datasets is one option enabling designers to bridge the gap between human and machine observation. Maps are efficient, evocative, and indeterminate. They model data well enough for us to infer relations, forecast possibilities, while maintaining data consistency. Additionally, maps are reproducible and transmittable to other designers." (Winifred E Newman, "Data Visualization for Design Thinking: Applied Mapping", 2017)
"Making a map is the physical production including conceptualization and design. Mapping is the mental interpretation of the world and although it must precede the map, it does not necessarily result in a map artifact. Mapping defined in mathematics is the correspondence between each element of a given set with each element of another. Similarly in linguistics emphasis is on the correspondence between associated elements of different types. For designers all drawings are maps - they represent relationships between objects, places and ideas." (Winifred E Newman, "Data Visualization for Design Thinking: Applied Mapping", 2017)
"Mapping is based on our perceptions of what we are experiencing and our conceptions framing how we interpret sensorial input. The map isn’t ‘real’ but the objects in the map are at some point in the world or of the world. Just as we have to disabuse ourselves of the idea maps, as semiotic texts are value neutral, similarly mapping calls into question how we interpret perceptions." (Winifred E Newman, "Data Visualization for Design Thinking: Applied Mapping", 2017)
"[...] mapping is the collective set of practices structuring correspondence between physical phenomena, lived experience, or conceptual frameworks." (Winifred E Newman, "Data Visualization for Design Thinking: Applied Mapping", 2017)
"Maps are parenthetical - maps frame what you want to hold apart from the real in the world. Maps do this by creating conceptual representations of the milieu using symbols and relations between symbols. [...] Maps, any map and every map, begin with a frame. This is the literal and conceptual demarcation between what is in the map and what is not. Making a map begins with an observation which is both a thought about thinking and the object of thought itself. The undifferentiated world cannot be apprehended, therefore; all maps have a frame whether a concept or a cosmography." (Winifred E Newman, "Data Visualization for Design Thinking: Applied Mapping", 2017)
"The presence of structure distinguishes maps from diagrams. They are similar in kind but not degree. Diagrams share some of the structure but don’t quantify or qualify spatio-temporal relationships in the same way as maps. They are ‘simplified figures to convey essential meaning,’ whereas maps tend toward robust meaning relative to the subject. Symbols in diagrams have multiple possible significations until we specify or point to their meaning through context using an index. Diagrams are indexical, i.e. they point to something, but they aren’t indexed: they don’t order or organize within a larger context nor do they have a spatio-temporal dimension like maps." (Winifred E Newman, "Data Visualization for Design Thinking: Applied Mapping", 2017)
"The utility of mapping as a form of data visualization isn’t in accuracy or precision, but rather the map’s capacity to help us make and organize hypothesis about the world of ideas and things. hypothesis-making through the map isn’t strictly inductive or deductive, although it can use the thought process of either, but it is often based on general observations." (Winifred E Newman, "Data Visualization for Design Thinking: Applied Mapping", 2017)
"Using maps as communication tools masks their complexity as a mode of thinking. Maps act like language: we attribute the signs or marks in the map to a natural extension of thought. But post-structuralism exposed maps (like language) as artificial signs whose meaning is tethered to time, place, culture, gesture, smell - in short, a plethora of cognitive and phenomenal attributes of our communication ecology." (Winifred E Newman, "Data Visualization for Design Thinking: Applied Mapping", 2017)
"Visual representations of data engage our cognitive perceptions, graphic skills, and rational capacity to synthesize complex ideas. For designers, maps represent observations about places, ideas or relationships. Being able to frame, represent, and order data through maps empowers the process of thinking, including thinking visually. In the twenty-first century, synthesis of complex data is a hallmark of critical thinking in all areas of knowledge. organizing information means creating links between chains of data, links between quantitative and qualitative data, and links between ideas through data. Visually organizing data means managing these links at the intersection of visual perception, representation, and the imagination." (Winifred E Newman, "Data Visualization for Design Thinking: Applied Mapping", 2017)
No comments:
Post a Comment