engaging experience

Magnetic Fields Visualization

This short film, recorded at the Space Sciences Laboratory UC Berkeley, offers a striking visualization of magnetic fields.

Hat tip: cboone

Site Bones Laid Bare

Mark Callahan of Mazamedia has produced a creative series, Internet Soul Portraits, in which he strips Google, MSN, and a handful of other popular sites of their content, revealing only their structure. Callahan calls it art, though they arguably read more like reverse-engineered site wireframes. But it's interesting to notice how easy it is to recognize some of these sites simply by their bone structure; the bones are part of the brand.

Junk Food For Thought

Kaiser Fung offers Junk Charts, a blog deconstructing confusing, obfuscating, or just plain ugly information graphics. It's amazing how many good looking charts are just plain bad information design. See, e.g., this post on a stock market performance graphic from the New York Times.

Airport As Organism

Interesting thread happening now at edwardtufte.com about whether improving airport taxiway maps might reduce runway incursions.

Maps are notoriously difficult to design well. Tufte writes:

Good maps layer and separate their information, partly in terms of a hierarchy of relevance but, more importantly, in a pluralism of differences. In good maps, active viewers can read several separate layers of information. These runway maps are extremely flat. These maps were probably put together piecemeal over the years, as each newly added piece of data competes with what was already there. For example, some type is added but it doesn't get enough emphasis compared with what is already on the map - and so the type goes into a bureaucratic box with a clunky arrow. Everything is saying "look at me now." This masks the relevant data sought by the user. It is like a bad cocktail party; someone is talking louder because someone else is talking loud . . . and the result is cacophony.

I'm less interested in the discussion of optimizing map design, and more interested in optimizing the design of the system of map-controller-pilot. The tower controller sees the whole landscape moving and shifting in real time - a three-dimensional, active matrix of planes, tarmac, and air. The controller doesn't need a map, because she works there every day, and she has memorized the map, memorized the airport, and so has a mental model of the system. But more important, I think, is that for her, the territory is the map.

Meanwhile, the pilot sees only what's on the other side of the windscreen, only what's in front of him. The pilot might be familiar with the airport, and so, like the controller, also might be working with a mental model. But the pilot's task on the ground is to move forward only at the command of the controller, to move to a point and stop, awaiting the next command. His operational information space is not three-dimensional - it is at most two-dimensional, and arguably even one-dimensional.

A map is, to use Andy Clark's word, scaffolding - an external prop that assists with cognitive processing and alleviates cognitive load. But, in this case - does it? The map is not the territory, and humans, when presented with both, have a doubled mental task. A two-dimensional map, even one that's well-designed and offers multiple layers of information, forces the pilot to switch between information spaces, adding both load and risk to the system. So, could we collapse the pilot's tasks to a single dimensional paradigm?

The key here is that no single element in this system has enough information to make a good decision. So the goal should be to help the system, not just the pilot, do a good job. We need to treat the system as the cognitive organism embodied in the landscape, and optimize based on the needs of the organism for communication, vision, and action.