Week 2 Day 1 Reading Response

Week Two: Day One Reading Assignment   This weeks readings, “Escaping Flatland” and  “Things That Make Us Smart: Chapter Three – The Power of Representation” both provide an excellent critique on both exemplary and poorly crafted methods of conveying information. While both articles give examples and context for the preferred methods of conveying information visually, I believe that they have some minor contradictory aspects.  “Escaping Flatland” begins with giving the reader inspiration for making information not only more palatable for the target audience, but making it more functionally useful by creating more dynamic, engaging visualizations. Flatland as a concept represents metaphorically, and sometimes even literal, two-dimensional expression of information. When media (both paper and electronic) is presented in a fashion that does not take advantage of multi-dimensional expression It removes an element of relation to the audience. As a side note, one thing that struck me about the Flatland based article was an arbitrary comment about Aristotle and religion. According to the article a major impedance upon the design of mapping Sun Spots was the idea that Aristotle perpetuated that celestial bodies are works of perfection with no blemish. This issue has always been a very interesting subject to me, not necessarily in the context of these two articles, but in social design. How easily innovation and creativity can be stifled by social or emotional information. At the same time, chapter three of, “Things That Make Us smart” approaches the problem of information conveyance from a more technical and almost methodical approach. In the example of the question of 15 versus the game of Tic Tac Toe, we see dramatic extremes of how we rationalize and internalize information. When shown overlapping the game structure of Tic Tac Toe, the logic behind the game of mathematically reaching 15 through a 9 digit 3 by 3 matrix it takes on an almost Sudoku like dispersal of information. I believe that where these two articles differ is in the fact that the “Smart” chapter perpetuates the idea (via the example of airline scheduling visualization) that the least user friendly visualization actually is the best design solution for the airport because of the need to convey as much information as possible. While acknowledging the other methods which would convey more important information to passengers, it provides a more direct link to the problem solving process, most directly which problem is more important to solve.