Guide A4 Independent notes
Data art and information design: when a chart becomes art
Information design arranges facts so that people can understand them. Data art starts from the same material and asks what else a chart can do, from beauty to doubt.
What is information design?
Information design is the practice of presenting information so that it can be found, understood and used. Typical examples include transport maps, instruction leaflets, signage, infographics and well made charts. Its success is measured by whether the reader gets the point, not by whether the page looks artistic.
The field overlaps with graphic design, cartography and statistics. Standard references in print include Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983), which argued for clarity and honest scales.
Early landmarks in charts and maps
William Playfair published line and bar charts in the 1780s, among the first uses of these forms to show economic data. In 1869 Charles Joseph Minard drew a flow map of Napoleon's Russian campaign, with the width of a band showing the size of the army. In the 1850s Florence Nightingale used polar-area diagrams to show causes of death in military hospitals. In 1920s Vienna Otto and Marie Neurath developed Isotype, a system of pictograms for statistics.
These are information design landmarks, yet they are often hung in exhibitions, which hints at how thin the line between a diagram and an artwork can be.
What is data art?
Data art uses data as its material, but the goal moves from efficient communication to experience, emotion or critique. A piece might turn a year of personal records into hand drawn postcards, a flight record into a drifting sculpture or a weather archive into sound. Some data art invites you to read the numbers. Other works make you feel their scale.
A well known example of the personal approach is Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, in which two designers sent each other hand-drawn postcards about their weeks over a year. Museums have also shown data visualization as design and art, for instance in the exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA in 2008.
Data visualization as art: examples to look for
When you browse examples, notice what each work does with the data. Some stay close to the source and are more like beautiful charts. Some translate data into another medium, such as light, sound or physical objects. Others question the data itself, showing who collected it, what is missing and who decided the categories.
Look for a short statement or caption that names the data source and the date. Reliable data art will tell you what the data is.
How to read a data artwork
Ask five plain questions: what is the data, who collected it, what is mapped to what (size, colour, position, sound), what has been left out and what do I feel before I know the answer. The pattern or surprise that you notice first is often what the artist wanted you to notice.
Beware of two traps. A beautiful graphic can hide a weak dataset. And a technically accurate chart can still mislead by choosing a convenient scale.
Where data art meets new media art
Data art belongs with net art, software art and generative work in the wider field described in our guide to new media art. Many works are born digital, which brings the preservation questions explained in how to collect new media art.