IAT 814 - Toward in Informative Art Ideal

art styles, like abstract representation in information visualization, will “more readily afford multiple interpretations” (40, p. 257) which may be advantageous in the context of specific artistic or informational agendas. Metadata is another type of data which must be carefully designed for to avoid the potential for breakdown in comprehension in IA. While it may be advantageous to explore the representation of metadata in IA given the limits on informational capacity, there must be an effort to avoid distorting raw data in an arbitrary or randomized manner. Redstrom et al. found that in their Chatterbox application, users found “recombination of material as more of a degradation of information” (1) than as legitimate metadata. Their application randomized the recombination of strings of email text, and semantically there is a breakdown that will inevitably occur when treating linguistic structures in this way. IA may be best suited for representing metadata that is either pre-generated, perhaps using traditional information visualization techniques, or at the very least generated by the IA application in a way that preserves representational relationships and fidelity to the data. Metadata has the benefit of being able to directly convey relationships within raw data, but it is important to ensure that the structural rules used to generate metadata reflect the true relationships within the raw data set. Lastly, within the literature, there is generally a consensus that IA applications have inherent constraints on informational capacity given the fact that they reside in the periphery and are meant to convey information quickly, without explicit cues. Despite these limitations, it may be possible to enhance the informational capacity in specific contexts by exploiting the concept of chunking. Since IA largely relies upon visual memory, there are prescribed limits on the number of effective usages of color, object, and spatial coding. For this reason, enhancing informational capacity of these systems is not as straight forward as simply increasing display size or the dimension of time, although large displays appear to have some benefit on performance for spatial tasks (38). A possible way to increase the informational capacity of IA is to take advantage of chunking by exploring representation of “contextual sets of information [which] may be useful for ambient systems in specialized environments” (14). Although we are capable of relatively few elemental visual queries at a time, it may be possible to query patterns of “greater complexity as we become expert in a particular set of graphical conventions” (40, p. 376). In these contexts, it becomes possible to enhance informational capacity by referencing high level concepts in visual query construction for “rapid evocation of the semantic network” (40, p. 369). The Aesthetics As the underlying visual framework of IA, an appropriate aesthetic style when used effectively, has the capacity to enhance information conveyance as well as gracefully mediate attention from the periphery. Despite the fact that “aesthetics is considered a primary property, both in design and during use” (10), IA applications have generally expressed a limited range of artistic styles and aesthetics. This may be partly due to the lack of research on the specific tradeoffs between aesthetics and visualization within this field, but is also a result of a lack of involvement by practicing artists in designing these applications (2, 39). Many IA applications have explored abstract aesthetics, often mimicking the styles of previous artists (1-4), while others have explored collage and textual designs (7-11). Pousman and Stasko predict “radical change” in aesthetic approaches to data representation, as designers explore the affordances of different mappings (14). Art is Information First, it is instructive to note that one of the consequences of a design approach that prescribes strict adherence to an aesthetic template without consideration of the information represented is that the potential exists for the resulting display to be informationally compromised. An example is seen in an application designed by Redstrom et al. to display notions of objective and subjective time. Mimicking the monochrome artwork of Yves Klein, the application aesthetic appears as a rectangle in the middle of an outer field. The “darkness of the [outer] field will show what time of day it is, and the nuance (i.e., slightly red, blue or green) of the field will show how much of the hour has passed” (1). Although Redstrom et al. insist that IA is not intended to convey quantitative information, there is still a fundamental problem in the aesthetic basis. The color of the inner rectangle changes in the exact same way as the outer field, except that it responds to email events as opposed to the passage of time. The same shade of gray in one field may appear darker or lighter on a given day depending on the brightness of the adjacent field due to simultaneous brightness contrast effects. This is a kind of built-in mechanism which results in misreading of information and illustrates some of the pitfalls of arbitrarily selecting aesthetic styles and pairing data sets to those styles. It is clear that there is a need for more investigation of diverse artistic styles of representation and a description of benefits associated with specific aesthetic approaches. Toward a New Aesthetic By exploring visualization science, it may be possible to uncover synergies that exist between aesthetics and information conveyance, which may lead to new design directions. At a crude level, there are implicit tradeoffs in visualization potential when considering abstract versus non-abstract forms of art. Namely, abstract images are harder to recall since “it is important that visual information be meaningful and capable of incorporation into a cognitive framework for the visual advantage to be realized” (40, p. 304) For this reason, abstract aesthetics in Informative Art must effectively code pre-attentive visual features in order to be capable of conveying information in the periphery. Strangely, a non-abstract art aesthetic has been under-represented in IA applications; nevertheless, this aesthetic can take better advantage of visual memory and the mechanisms which underwrite object perception. In order to open up the design space of Informative Art, it may be useful to suggest some examples of non-abstract artistic styles and their perceptual and informational affordances. One artistic style which formed the basis for much of the exploration throughout the history of art is realism. For millennia, faithfully representing reality through art was considered the height of artistic expression presumably because of the emotive and reflective connection that all people have to the world. Today, there are a wealth of aesthetic approaches which have realism at their core. From an a informational standpoint, depicting people, places, and objects from the real-world can take advantage of object processing and the fact that although we can only process a few objects at a time “all features of that object are processed together” (40, p. 257). The ability for objects to be processed in this way makes them “the most powerful way of grouping disparate data elements together” and this can enhance the informational capacity of IA displays. This suggests that by mapping various object attributes to data in IA, it may be possible to explore non-abstract, object based artistic styles such as photorealism, caricature, vector art, pointillism, and line drawings. It has been shown that simplified images such as line drawings are recognized more rapidly than photographs (40, p. 237) which may help users to quickly obtain information from the display peripherally. One of the “consequences of structural theories of perception is that certain simplified views should be easier to read” (40, p. 233) and there seems to be some confirmation of this within the field (19). Alternatively, since Informative Art is unlike some other peripheral awareness systems in that it may become the explicit focus of attention at times, more complex visual depictions may also be acceptable and could potentially contain more detail, both visually and informationally. Artistic styles that make use of faces (as in portraiture), animate motion, and silhouettes may also be particularly interesting. Silhouettes are “especially important in determining how we perceive the structure of objects” (40, p. 233) and so may be used to selectively draw attention or to dynamically represent information in artistic ways. A slowly animating display based on contour generation could morphologically fluctuate between different silhouette representations in ambient ways, depicting different data events or attributes. An added benefit of silhouettes is that since contour generation can be animated and morphological, this could potentially amplify the dimensionality of the data since one can imagine a scenario in which multiple silhouettes become additive or merge to reveal new data dimensions. City skyline art, which is also a popular artistic aesthetic, shares this capacity and a ʻmorphological skylineʼ application could also take advantage of our perceptual ability to recognize canonical silhouettes. Similarly, IA applications which pursue a portraiture aesthetic could take advantage of the “obvious importance in communication” (40, p. 238) that faces have. It may be possible to map data qualitatively to a range of facial expressions since “certain human expressions are universal communication signals, correctly interpreted across cultures and social groups. ” (40, p. 238) Given the fact that “faces are special objects in human perception” (40, p. 237) it may also be possible to use faces to selectively draw attention from the periphery, perhaps to signal some data event or change. Also, since people are als