Five Senses, Three Questions, and One Trivia Factoid
By: Claire Santoro
Tags: Data Physicalization, Communication, Dataviz, Data Visualization, Newsletter

Five Senses, Three Questions, and One Trivia Factoid

Why we’re talking about data sensification—and a behind-the-scenes chat with Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu!

Have you s̶e̶e̶n̶ sensed what’s going on at Nightingale lately? It’s Data Sensification Week 1 of 2! That’s right — we had so much great content about all the ways we can smellify, sonify, tastify, and physicalize data that we expanded our theme week to a theme fortnight.

Why are we talking about data sensification? We think that pushing ourselves to experience data differently — outside of our usual visual mediums — can be enlightening. (We were going to write ‘eye-opening,’ but, you know.) Sometimes sensifying data helps us communicate information that would otherwise be invisible (Amy on data smellification) or inaccessible (Stina on data sonification); sometimes it helps cultivate wonder or empathy; and sometimes it’s just plain fun — or delicious, as the case may be (Vanitha on data tastification).

We’ve got five senses, after all — might as well use them.

Three Questions with… Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu

In other exciting, tactile news, dataviz designers and long-time collaborators Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu announced the publication of their ‘Data Sketches’ book! Ahead of the announcement, we had the opportunity to sit down and ask them our Three Questions… but to keep things interesting and to see how well they really know each other, we asked Nadieh and Shirley to answer for each other, Newlywed Game-style.

1. If you could be any type of chart, what would you be?

Nadieh answering for Shirley: I know Shirley wouldn’t be a standard chart that you could make with any old library that lets you do dataviz. She would be some sort of beeswarm, but one that uses natural shapes with many complex components.

Shirley answering for Nadieh: There are two parts to this question. First, what’s Nadieh’s favorite chart form? I keep thinking hex maps. Hexagons are Nadieh’s favorite shape. She’s never really used a hexagon in her projects, but her logo is like a hexagon map. Then the second part of this question is, what is Nadieh in chart form? She’d be a remixed chord diagram. Her very first Data Sketches on the Lord of the Rings reminds me of a remixed version of a chord diagram. It’s beautifully curved and has beautiful colors, but it’s a remix. It’s not standard.

2. If you were stuck on a desert island, what viz would you want to create and what would you use to make it?

Nadieh for Shirley: Shirley would want to create something that exists in the physical space. A data art installation. Maybe she’d use the coconuts laying around with the palm leaves. But, she would want to be able to use her laptop to do part of it because she loves coding. It’s part of her flow. She would need a powerful battery! She’s always creative. She’s doing stuff with resin right now, making these very cute earrings. Hers would not be a visualization as much as an experimentation with the materials available to her.

Shirley for Nadieh: Neither of us starts by thinking about a chart and then making it. We start with the data and the message we want to convey visually. I think that Nadieh would do something about the animals on the desert island, or maybe the stars.

3. What is one visualization that has inspired you?

Nadieh for Shirley: Shirley’s inspired by things that are not dataviz, like the cherry blossoms in Japan and art.

Shirley: Yeah, Nadieh did a good job answering that. What’s on my wall is a lot of art. There’s Harry Potter Fantastic Beasts. I love the color usage. Then, there’s Ghibli. My inspirations are always changing, depending on what I’m trying to do. Currently, I’m really inspired by Mona Chalabi and the way that she tells such short, bite-sized stories on Instagram. She’s really figured out how to present a story and capture people’s attention — not just from an aesthetic perspective, but she’s figured out Instagram as a storytelling tool; the way that she does pacing is very good. And there’s a TED Talk from Aaron Koblin. That was my first dataviz inspiration, where I thought, “Oh, I didn’t know you could do that with code and data.”

Shirley for Nadieh: Nadieh takes inspiration from astronomy, like her Figures in the Sky sky map. She gets a lot of inspiration from the sky.

Nadieh: For me, there’s not one chart that really stands out. There are several that I admire, that I turn back to for different projects. There’s one that’s a little more special because it was the first one where I saw that dataviz could be more than bar charts and line charts. It was done by Jan Willem Tulp, who coincidentally happens to be another Dutch data visualization designer — he had a visualization called “Ghost Counties” that he made for a competition co-hosted with the Eyeo Festival. He won that competition and, I don’t know how, but I stumbled upon his visualization. It was so eerily beautiful and well done. It was so different from other visualizations that I’d seen before. It really stuck with me. It was an eye-opener for me.

“Ghost Counties” by Jan Willem Tulp, winner of the 2011 Eyeo Festival Data Visualization Challenge, source: http://tulpinteractive.com/

Write All About It!

Thank you for answering our call for Data Sensification submissions! Now, we’re asking for your help developing content for upcoming theme weeks. Do you use a platform like TikTok or Twitch to workshop or share your dataviz? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Or, what about the intersection of data visualization and culture? Riffing off of Giorgia Lupi’s MOMA Fashion Landscape, we’d love for you to write about other ways that dataviz and culture intersect.

In the Wild

Fun visualizations from around the interweb:

“Scented candles, an unexpected victim of the COVID-19 pandemic”, source: https://twitter.com/kate_ptrv/status/1332398737604431874?s=20

Giorgia Lupi, “My 2020 in Data (So Far),” in The New York Times, source: https://www.printmag.com/post/giorgia-lupi-s-2020-in-the-nyt

Mala Deep Upadhaya’s response to our Viz This! call, interactive link: https://public.tableau.com/profile/maladeep#!/vizhome/mass-mobilization/MassMobilization

Trivia

Data is our jam (the sensification puns just keep coming!), so we thought we’d wrap up this newsletter with a trivia question. We’ll share the answer in the next issue.

What everyday activity uses all five senses?

In Case You Missed It

What to Expect from Visualizing Expectations

What if persistence isn’t some innate superpower? Our resolve depends on our expectations. And, our expectations depend on the available information. Eli Holder demonstrates how expectation-setting is a powerful use case for information design.

One of Eli’s examples of tracking progress toward a financial goal.

Drawing Cultural Position: Transmission of Power Among Ancestors and Descendants

We connect to the past through the concept of lineage. Ancestry plays a role in our present social position, as individuals, members of a group, or subjects of a nation. Paul Kahn explores the forms and themes of lineage diagrams in his latest post.

Lineage diagram examples

More from Nightingale

Reactions to Using Tableau for the First Time

Information Design Round-Up: COVID-19 Edition

Complements that Diverge

Drawing Out ‘Data Sketches’