It's been a fair while since I read peterme, and now I'm darned if I know why I've been so slack. For example, in this interview with Marti Hearst is the following succinct and, to my mind pithy, quote:

"Marti forecasts a significant change in how visualizations are approached. In the past, they've been treated as standalone applications, "Look at this thing! And how beautiful it is!" Where as the key for the future will be incorporating it as a small part in a larger system, integrating it with the rest of the interface. In doing so, this will require visualizations to seriously take the problem that users want to solve into account, a motivation currently lacking from many visualizations."

This comes back to Eric and my various discussions about visualisation of varying and realtime data (chat, for example, although the Map of the Market example oft cited is a nice one also). It's about moving beyond the visualisation, the perception of the container, into the meaning, the discernable content.

aside: Moveable Type just pulled the selected text in from its bookmarklet. Neat stuff

Posted by esinclai at June 27, 2002 09:56 PM |