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Episode #47: Isabel Meirelles
137 Plays9 years ago
Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast. Thanks for tuning in each week to hear about people doing great work in data, open data, data visualization, and other related fields. In this week’s show, I’m happy to have Isabel Meirelles join...
The post Episode #47: Isabel Meirelles appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Professional Development Courses
00:00:00
Speaker
This week's episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by the Summer Executive Institute at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. The McCourt Executive Institute offers short courses that are specifically designed to enhance key skills.
00:00:15
Speaker
Small classes and hands-on projects allow you to engage with expert faculty at Georgetown in a format that is convenient for busy professionals. To learn more and to register, please visit mccourt.georgetown.edu slash exec-ed slash shortcourses. Enhance, energize, and expand your professional skills this summer at the McCourt Executive Institute.
Guest Introduction: Isabel Morales
00:00:49
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I'm excited to be joined by Professor Isabel Morales. Isabel, welcome to the show. Thank you, John. It's really a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on the show. As many of you probably know, Isabel has a great book on data visualization, Design for Information, and is a professor at OCAD University and is the host of an upcoming conference in June, right?
00:01:16
Speaker
Yes, in June. Yeah, in June. Information Plus, that will be held in Vancouver. So why don't we start by having Isabel, if you don't mind, if you would introduce yourself for folks who may not be familiar with your work, and then why don't you just start talking about this conference that it looks great.
00:01:30
Speaker
Okay. So my name is Isabel Merales, as you said, and I am a designer and educator. And I'm currently teaching at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada, as you said. And basically my biggest interest is actually in the relationships between visual thinking and visual representation. So I bring that both to my classroom in the class that I teach in information design and visualization, as well as into the research that I do.
00:01:57
Speaker
So one thing that I was always kind of bugged is that my own community of graphic designers don't talk much about visualization funny enough. And so basically that was more or less the impulse for thinking about organizing this conference, the Information Plus.
Overview of Information Plus Conference
00:02:13
Speaker
So, Information Plus actually encompasses three events. So, one is the conference itself, which is a single-track, two-day conference on June 16th and 17th, a one-day hands-on workshop on Saturday, June 18th, and an exhibition of information design and visualization projects
00:02:34
Speaker
running for a longer period from June 6th to July 3rd. So it's kind of a mix of academic conference, if you will, because we actually opened for contributions, both from academia and industry. We didn't want it to be a solely industry. And I keep saying we, because I have a collaborator, Catherine Gilson, from Emily Carr. So pretty much, we opened up for two types of contributions.
00:03:02
Speaker
for 20 minute paper presentations and for five minute lightning talks. And we had an incredible phenomenal response. So volume and quality and diversity of the submissions were incredible. And it ended up that we had like roughly 22% acceptance rate, which is quite incredible.
00:03:24
Speaker
And so with that, it's like, as you hear from anyone who organized conference, there were many credible papers that actually were not accepted for presentation. And for us, it was a very important issue that we kept it a single track. So we're really trying to attract a very diverse group of people to discuss visualization in general, but more specifically issues concerning the design aspect of it.
00:03:48
Speaker
It's not only designers dealing with the design aspect of visualizations, but we have a lot of people in computer science, in journalism, and many other areas that actually always have to think about these issues of design. And we can even discuss what those are. So just to give a sense of the diversity, so we have people from diverse areas, from journalism, from computer science, from design, from
00:04:17
Speaker
biological data from working science labs and many working industry with nonprofits and so on so I can walk you through if you want. But also we had incredible diverse group of people coming from different countries and so we have actually...
00:04:39
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Seven countries, we actually have researchers from Canada, from the US, from Germany, from England, from Mexico, Italy, New Zealand, and Chile. Wow. It's very balanced, I should say. Yeah, yeah. It's very balanced gender-wise, which is interesting. So how have you ended up organizing the conference? You have the 20-minute talks and then the five-minute talks. Are they sort of all mixed together or you have different tracks within the single track?
00:05:05
Speaker
Yeah, so it's actually all mixed together. So it's actually because it was actually we've contributed talks. So we have two incredible keynotes.
Keynote Speakers and Talks
00:05:15
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So the first keynote in the first day is Tamara Munzner. And so who has a fantastic and I think she was in one of your shows on education. And so she has a fantastic book, visualization, analysis and design.
00:05:30
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And she's actually local to Vancouver so she's a professor at University of British Columbia in Vancouver. So she is opening the conference the first day, and so she will be discussing a very structured way in which she actually think about visualization and design.
00:05:49
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that actually follows what I believe is a fantastic book. And that is followed by one of our invited speakers, who is Scott Murray. So he will be discussing issues on online learning experiences. So there's interesting enough, there is a lot about literacy and education, even though, you know, and from diverse areas, right?
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah. So following that we have some contributed talks. So the first one after that is actually Andy Kirk. He's coming from the UK. I believe a well known person in the community because he's done a lot in terms of providing a lot of resources, especially in his website, which I believe is fantastic.
00:06:27
Speaker
But he's actually discussing the experiences from his several years of visualization literacy workshops. And then we have two other contributed talks, one from the Ohio State University, actually discussing how to bring visualization literacy
00:06:45
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in the large research university. And these are people in design department actually, but discussing these larger issues of research universities in the US. And presentation by the group of Paolo Ciocarelli, the density design lab in Milano, actually presented by Michele Maori. And they're discussing a project that they did that connects with Wikipedia of inviting students to design for the pages of Wikipedia.
00:07:14
Speaker
which is a very interesting proposal. That is followed by lightning talks that actually talk about that. So among them are, you know, people teaching undergraduate students in Canada, Angela Norwood, also in Canada, but in a computational environment, Margin Eggerman from University of Calgary, and someone you know quite well, Heather Bradbury, talking about MICA.
00:07:39
Speaker
Right, right. Well, I'm feeling pretty good because this is a great lineup and many of these people have been on the show or will be on the show. So yeah, it sounds great. It sounds like a great mix of the academic side and then the practitioner side. And of course, the education side. I'm curious about a comment you made earlier about maybe designers not thinking so much about the data and then the data people maybe not thinking so much about the design.
00:08:02
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So do you think, obviously this conference is a step to try to bring those groups together a little bit. When you are teaching and when you're talking with people, do you see a common theme in trying to get those two groups over their respective humps of the things that they don't know? Are there things that pop up that you see time and time again that designers aren't thinking about or data folks aren't thinking about that maybe this conference and other work will help them overcome?
Bridging Designers and Data Professionals
00:08:28
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Yeah, I think that with the boom of visualization, when now everyone is doing visualization, so it's no longer an area of computer scientists where a lot of the initial efforts resided, right? Given the NSF initiative, right? Yeah. In the end of the, the middle of the eighties, I should say, right? Or the designers on one side, right? Who actually have traditionally worked with journey in journalists. That's my entry point when I start, I,
00:08:56
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I didn't study graph design. When I started working with designing, I entered into the story room, which is a lot of entry points to many graphic designers. But now that we're all doing it, whether you are in biology, in economy,
00:09:12
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everywhere everyone has to do, not only as a means of communicating their findings, but also of understanding given the amount of data that we all have access to. But I think that a lot that we need to do is not only talk to each other so that we can shortcut a lot of problems that we have already overcome in our own disciplines. So there are lots of things in design that I know that doesn't work,
00:09:37
Speaker
that eventually I can shortcut for other people who don't have that experience and likewise. And I believe that it's not only by putting people in the same room, but also by collaborating, by creating more ways of collaborating.
00:09:52
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as an educator, I think a lot has to do with education. So there are things that my students, my design students would need to know more about statistics or computational methods of mining data or cleaning data or whatever that is, right? That eventually, statisticians, statistics students might learn from our side, right? Or how we go about presenting data or
00:10:20
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creating visual hierarchies and so on and so forth. And the same, yeah, I think we need one of those one-on-one platforms. Yeah, for everybody. Yes. Yeah, right. So I'm curious about the research that you're doing. You've done a lot of great work in the past, especially sort of on the mobile side and a lot of sort of data art projects. But I'm curious about some of the projects that you're working on now at OCAD.
00:10:44
Speaker
Okay, so right now, I'm actually working on three larger projects, right? So the conference, of course, right, which is like taking way more time than I thought. But it's a real pleasure because I think it's going to be a fantastic event. And there's two tickets available if people are interested. And so
00:11:01
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It's informationplusconference.com. Basically, the other two projects, one is an AAGA, the American Institute for Graphic Arts, which is the main association of graphic designers in the US. And I received a grant that I'm working on interactive visualizations. So I'm actually analyzing some interactive visualizations in a similar fashion that I did for the book.
00:11:26
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So I've been looking a lot in terms of trying to create a framework for discussion. There is a lot that exists out there in terms of interaction and a lot of work done, especially in the computer science community. But what I'm trying to do is actually narrow down creating a simpler framework for designers to better understand. And for that, what I'm doing is I'm separating
00:11:51
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issues of presentation from issues of representation, right? So the ways in which we represent the data and the ways in which we present, including the presentation in how we interact with this data, right? Which is actually
00:12:08
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normally part of the presentations, the way we teach like, okay, you have a data set, so how do you communicate that? Should it be static? Should it be interactive? To what extent interactive? And so there are issues that concern presentation that actually can be thought or sometimes it's effective, it's good to be thought.
00:12:28
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separately from the representation? What is the structure of the representation that data representation? Does it make sense? Yeah, yeah. I'm curious. How do you how do you do that test? How do you split those two pieces apart?
00:12:44
Speaker
Yeah, and so in the past, about a few years ago, there were several presentations if we think about visualizations at the New York Times to give an example, or other news media organizations that had the slide sections. So you click on one, two, three, four.
00:13:02
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It was kind of sequential in a way, but also it would allow you people to jump from one to three. So there was a presentation. There was a definition, okay, we need to parse out this information into small chunks so people can very slowly understand so that it can go either from simple to complex or kind of hold someone in their hand, right? That is a presentation issue.
00:13:27
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Right? Because that same information could be presented like in a long scroll, right? More recently, we're seeing a lot of long scrolls, right? Which I particularly have a problem because I often see myself going up and down and up and down.
00:13:44
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It goes back to some issues that Herbert Simon actually was against, writing his seminal paper on why a diagram is worth 10,000 words. I have to remember the correct name for that. I can send you the link, but pretty much explaining the difference between sentential and visual indexing of information. So it's basically the sentential or
00:14:08
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anything that is in text or in a list, you have to keep going up and down in that list. Whereas when you have something that is visual, you have it simultaneously in front of you. So most of the time, the information that you need to be together, they are especially together because that's part of the principle why they should be put together.
00:14:31
Speaker
So a lot of times the problem I have with this very long scrolling is exactly the problem that Herbert Simon had raised about sentential information, right? Anyway, but I don't know if it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So the scrolly telling versus the steppers is really interesting topic I think in general. I think it's perhaps even more interesting when it comes to thinking about
00:14:55
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desktop or traditional viewing versus mobile, for example.
Challenges in Mobile-First Design
00:15:00
Speaker
And I know you've done some work on mobile technologies, and so I'm curious whether you feel that the mobile technology, a tablet or a phone, changes the way that we interact with that, where maybe a scrolly telling approach, a vertical scroll, might work better on a phone but doesn't really work on a desktop.
00:15:18
Speaker
Or if it's just that's not the best way to communicate, it's not the best way to read and it doesn't matter if you're using your mouse wheel or if you're using your finger to swipe, that's just not a way that you think people can interact and learn the best from.
00:15:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a complex answer. I don't know if I have one single answer. And I think it also would depend on the content. So it's interesting that I think in my more anecdotal view is the whole idea of the scroll came back after we saw the mobile, the smartphone. It was something that was
00:15:56
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really not welcomed in the past, right? And then suddenly became standard and we're seeing it everywhere without critical thinking, I think, right? So now, to go back to your question, right? So with larger and larger number of people reading the news, for example,
00:16:16
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on their smartphones or their tablets and most of the time tablets not so much but really on mobile phones and I do that oftentimes is like the news organizations have to think how to design those right and so there's a lot of conversation about whether actually the design should be mobile first so a lot that is being discussed is what comes first if there should be first
00:16:41
Speaker
In my view, I think it should be device specific. And so I think there are certain things that work better for a device than other. And so there are some examples of that. I recently gave a talk in that regard. And so I've seen some trends as people are doing for specific devices, most of the time it's too expensive to do that.
00:17:03
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So people are doing for mobile first or actually even worse are actually removing the complexity and the refinement, the level of refinement that we've seen in interactive visualizations online to actually presenting things in a static mode in the mobile.
00:17:21
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the light version of how it works, and I'm more familiar with, pardon your listeners, I'm more familiar with iOS system than I am with Android. But given the light system of Safari, for example, in the iOS system, that doesn't allow you for certain interaction modes. And so one has to remove them. It's not simply a question of, OK, you just open it in a browser, right? Right.
00:17:48
Speaker
So it's a complex issue but I think the immediate response that I've seen from the news media is actually simplifying rather than finding specific solutions, which I think is a pity. There's a beautiful example where the Guardian did last year of the Mekong River.
00:18:08
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that actually they designed differently for the online and the mobile app. And so the navigation, which is long scroll in the online is actually goes down and sideways in the mobile. So there are interesting solutions that I'm seeing and I think I welcome those. Yeah.
00:18:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I saw a piece from I think the BBC a few days ago on the Ganges River and the pollution of the Ganges and I was reading on my phone and it was a vertical scroll and the text sort of went, you know, there were images interspersed with the text sort of went on top and then you'd read through and you come to another image. And I thought the mobile experience was great and I really appreciate it. And then I got to my office and looked at it online and it was the exact same experience.
00:18:51
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So, you know, I don't know what that means that maybe, I don't know if that meant they thought mobile first and it just worked well on the desktop as well, but that difference is interesting. It's also interesting that you mentioned the sort of stripping away some of the complexity. I just had a conversation with someone about the idea that we should put interactives on top of sort of a static graph so that people can, you know, get the numbers off
Interactive Features in Visualization
00:19:16
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the line. And I sort of, I'm sort of evolving to think that, I don't know if people actually do that.
00:19:21
Speaker
I don't think you tap on the line and that really gives you any more information, but the response was, well, we want to target a particular user who wants to be able to see this graph and get a certain value for their boss or for their day. They want to know that this thing is 12%. So I'm curious whether you think that level of complexity is worthwhile or whether we should be going back to statics or whether that simple line graph should be made more interactive or more complex.
00:19:45
Speaker
I mean, I'm not saying that there's a solution to this, but I'm wondering where you sort of see both where we are now and where we're headed as the field evolves. Yeah. Well, I think that even a simple interactivity of pointing to a line and seeing a number or to a point and seeing what that number is in detail, just not getting just the overall kind of feeling of it, right? From what that we get is it's there if people, I kind of welcome it because it's there if someone wants. So, okay.
00:20:15
Speaker
other people don't want and they just want to read, get the overall sense, fine. But if someone is more curious and wants to start digging deeper, so it's more on demand, I actually think it's possible and it's easy to do it, so why not? So I actually welcome that and I don't think, I think even at very simple levels of interactivity,
00:20:36
Speaker
So we're not pretending that people are exploring data any further, it's not filtering, it's just okay if you want to learn a little bit more, here it is in case you want. And so why not, right? And that would be my answer. So I think we have a gain from that in terms of interactivity.
00:20:54
Speaker
There are certain models that I've seen like for example I often read the economies and so it's interesting I read the economies in my mobile right and so pretty much what is interesting some of the things that they've done in the recent past that sometimes they put a little caption there there's a little fine line.
00:21:13
Speaker
that says if you want to look at this in more detail, go online. And so when you go online, you find some different visualizations that are actually more complex that you can actually interact with. So that is a different model. It's presenting different types of visualization depending on the platform where you are.
00:21:31
Speaker
And the other trend that I'm seeing is also a lot of use of motion, right? And so there are some very short movies that are sort of explanatory movies that I find very interesting, even if you think of small animated gifs that we now see in social media.
00:21:51
Speaker
So Malofies, right, the competition, you know, long time competition for visualization, which was in 24th edition this year, actually this year started a new category on social media. So it's actually looking at this very little animated graph, you know, that people are tweeting. And so it's just this kind of teaser, if you will, that actually tells a little, okay, this is a little understanding about how
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah, this line. That's interesting. That is really interesting. Well, I guess we'll just see. And I'm looking forward to hearing, unfortunately, I won't be able to make it, but I'm interested in hearing how your conference pans out. It sounds like it's a great lineup. And I will post, of course, the link to the conference on the show page. So Isabel, thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been really super interesting.
00:22:40
Speaker
Thank you, John. It's a pleasure and I really love policy. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thanks to everyone for listening and for tuning in. Please let me know if you have any questions about the show or suggestions for guests. So until next time, this has been the Policy Viz Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:23:10
Speaker
This week's episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by the Summer Executive Institute at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. The McCourt Executive Institute offers short courses that are specifically designed to enhance key skills. Small classes and hands-on projects allow you to engage with expert faculty at Georgetown in a format that is convenient for busy professionals.
00:23:33
Speaker
To learn more and to register, please visit mccourt.georgetown.edu slash exec-ed slash shortcourses. Enhance, energize, and expand your professional skills this summer at the McCourt Executive Institute.