Alberto Cairo was recently generous enough to share an in-progress manuscript of his upcoming book, The Art of Insight, with me. The book consists primarily of a series of conversations between Alberto and designers who tend to create visualizations that are unconventional, artistic, impressionistic, or otherwise distinct from the “utilitarian” charts that are my bread and butter.
As Alberto readily admits, there’s no central thesis or “system of thought” at the core of the book. Normally, I’d consider that to be a real problem, but, in this case, it’s entirely appropriate and works well. It allows the reader to relax and just consider the ideas and examples as they arrive and then depart, without having to worry about assembling those ideas into a cohesive mental model to be consolidated into long-term memory. That’s not to say that the book doesn’t leave lasting impressions or provide useful takeaways, however. It does.
There are a few more reasons why I loved this book and look forward to reading the final version when it’s published:
First, it serves as a visceral reminder of the sheer breadth of purposes that data visualization can serve. Alberto (and many others, including myself) considers data visualization to be, in many ways, a language, and just like any other language, it can be used for an almost unimaginable variety of purposes. I’m probably guiltier than most of forgetting about the purposes of data visualization that fall outside of the small corner of the field in which I operate, and the book was a necessary reminder of how important, varied and valuable those other purposes can be. Indeed, several of the visualizations in the book have only vaguely defined purposes—if the designer had a purpose in mind at all—and yet they’re still excellent visuals in their own right.
Second, the book really brought home the point for me that we all bring different fundamental assumptions to chart design that are formed by our training and work/life experiences. While I did all sorts of jobs before focusing on data visualization, most of those jobs involved designing, developing, marketing or selling enterprise software products. The book made me realize just how much of a bias that brings to my data visualization work, since I tend to think of charts as “products” for fulfilling a specific need (to answer a question, to persuade the reader to do something, etc.). While I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thinking about charts in that way, someone with a visual arts, scientific, or activism background will think about them differently, and the book contains many excellent examples of charts for artistic expression, idea exploration, brainstorming, emotional engagement, etc.
When I ask for feedback from participants in my training workshops, I remind them that positive feedback is nice, but negative feedback is useful. When providing feedback to others, then, I try to follow my own advice and include at least one criticism. The only criticism I could come up with regarding The Art of Insight, however, was that this passage wasn’t featured earlier and more prominently in the book (it’s on page 114 of the draft that I have):
Because all of the designers that Alberto interviews have years of experience learning data visualization fundamentals, they know when to “break the rules” because they know what “the rules” are, and have good reasons for breaking them. Unfortunately, many of the “creative” charts that I see in the wild are also pointlessly confusing or they fundamentally misrepresent the underlying data because the designer hadn’t learned the basic “spelling and vocabulary” of data visualization beforehand. I think it would be important, then, to highlight early on in the book that, before getting too creative, chart designers should master the basics first.
This is, of course, a self-serving criticism because I teach data visualization fundamentals in my workshops (although I do try to avoid making it “grueling and thankless” <grin>).
Ultimately, this is a tiny qualm and it doesn’t diminish my overall appreciation for this important and well-written book. Highly recommended.
By the way...
If you’re interested in attending my Practical Charts or Practical Dashboards course, here’s a list of my upcoming open-registration workshops.