Making Data

Materializing Digital Information

Ian Gwilt, Ian Gwilt

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350133242
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Design
• Sous-sujet: Design generale

For many outside of the scientific community, big data and the forms it takes, such as statistical lists, spreadsheets and graphs, often seem abstract and unintelligible. This book investigates how digital fabrication and traditional making approaches are being used to present data in newly engaging and interesting ways. The first part of the book introduces the basic premise of the data object and the concept of making digital data into a physical form. Contributors cover topics such as biometrics, new technology, the economics of data and open and community uses of data. The second part presents a selection of exemplar forms and contexts for the application of data-objects, such as smart surfaces, smart cities, augmented reality techniques and next generation technical interfaces that blend physical and digital elements. Making Data delivers the importance and likely future prevalence of physical representations of data. It explores the creative methods, processes, theories and cultural histories of making physical representations of information and proposes that the making of data into physical objects is the next important development in the data visualisation phenomenon.

SECTION ONE

MAKING DATA: THEORIES

Chapters in this section introduce the general concept and application of the data-object, as well as exploring theory associated with the physical data artefact as a means of recording, reading and valuing information. It begins a conversation around the social, cultural, political, economic and philosophical significance of data-objects and draws out the relationship between digital data and data which are physically materialized through these lenses. Recognizing that digital and physicalized data are not necessarily in binary opposition and that there are many examples wherein hybrid forms of data can invoke nuanced understanding and insight through the interplay between these two paradigms.

Ontological and epistemological relationships between digital and material data cultures, and hybrid combinations of data and meaning are explored. Ideas around the politics of data ownership, data physicalization as a pathway to behaviour change and data as movement within a creative practice are also discussed.

1

DATA-OBJECTS: THINKING WITH YOUR HANDS

Adrien Segal

The path is revealed by walking along it.

– SPANISH PROVERB

Introduction

There is nothing inherently digital about data. Some of the earliest representations of data were physical objects and artefacts used to record and track quantified data (Dragicevic & Jansen 2012). These representations were forms and constructions made from raw materials. Incan civilizations used a complex system of knotted cotton or wool ropes, called quipu or khipu, that represented information through colour, knot patterns and cord twist directions as devices for data storage and communication (Salomon 2013). The Marshall Islands stick charts abstractly represented the interaction of the ocean’s currents, swells and islands, and were physically constructed from sticks and seashells (National Geographic Society 2013). Mesopotamian clay tokens were created by preliterate cultures to count, store and communicate economic data dating as far back as 7500 BC, around the time that agriculture began. These tokens were made from clay shaped into geometric symbols including cones, spheres, cylinders and tetrahedrons, representing commodities such as barley, oil and units of work, and in different sizes, denoting quantity (Schmandt-Besserat 2009).

Data is an abstract representation, a reduction of the rich reality that is the world around us, divided into elemental parts, captured as quantifiable measurements. No matter how much data one can amass, without form, organization and context, data itself has no meaning. The immensity of data we find ourselves swimming in today is a direct result of the digitization of life through the expanded daily use of technology, computers and devices that are constantly tracking, measuring and quantifying. This is perhaps why data today is often perceived to exist primarily in digital form.

However, the roots of the word ‘digital’ stem from the analogue world. Up until the mid-twentieth century, the common conception of ‘digital’ (in print form) was almost exclusively found in books about human and animal anatomy, in reference to the movement of hands and feet (Quain 1828). Digital, from its Latin root digitalis or digitus, simply means finger or toe, pertaining to numbers below ten, or exactly that which can be counted on your hands. It was not until circa 1945 that the connotation to computation and digital computers, which run on data in the form of numerical digits, established the modern meaning of digital (Harper 2017a).

From a very early age, we are admonished from counting with our fingers, and encouraged to ‘count in your head’. As students advance through Western educational systems, their level of intelligence is constantly evaluated through standardized testing, pop quizzes and multiple answer exams that require the retrieval of information purely committed to memory. This institutional emphasis on explicit, propositional statements, also known as ‘a priori’ knowledge, or knowledge that can be derived from the world without needing to experience it, does not account for all kinds of knowledge that fall outside this mental boundary. Embodied, tacit or ‘a posteriori’ knowledge is everything that cannot easily be expressed through language, such as learning how to ride a bike or play a musical instrument. It is acquired through first-hand experience and ‘hands-on’ actions, and is equally, if not more valuable to human existence.

The current accepted principles of data visualization reinforce the common convention that all thinking and reasoning happens through the eye and only in the mind. This limited view of disembodied thought leaves out the potential that lies in representing information physically, that is, communicating ideas through objects and artefacts whose form and materials are driven by data in physical space. In fact, much of the data that has been collected about the natural world is inherently physical – tree rings, ice cores, layers of sedimentation – information is embedded in the physical structure of these material formations. Even wind, clouds and the jet stream, seemingly ephemeral natural phenomena, are in effect physical processes involving masses of air and water vapour shifting due to pressure and temperature flux. From these natural formations, we decode records of changes in the environment over time as we seek to understand the world in which we live, to learn how it came to be this way and to predict how it might change in the future.

As an artist, designer and specifically a sculptor, I know through first-hand experience that representing ideas in physical forms and materials can be an effective and powerful medium for expressing and communicating ideas. There is strong scientific evidence supporting the idea that the way humans perceive physical space is an integral aspect of thinking processes. In her book Mind in Motion (2019), cognitive psychologist Barbara Tversky describes how spatial thinking and physical expression are developed in humans long before spoken language. Tversky proposes the theory that spatial cognition isn’t just a peripheral aspect of thought, but that it is the foundation of thinking processes.

Thinking that engages the body in movement, interaction and physical space can increase understanding, reasoning and problem-solving. For instance, the abacus had been in use centuries before the adoption of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, much like the Mesopotamian clay tokens were a tactile data processing tool – the counters were meant to be grasped, rearranged and manipulated with the fingers (Schmandt-Besserat 2009). Imagine how challenging it would be to play a word game such as Scrabble without having letter tiles that can be spatially reconfigured to find new combinations of words. In contrast to the traditional concept of cognition, which only analyses internal processes of the mind, ‘distributed cognition’ calls for a shift towards a manner of thinking that examines the relationship between the mind, the body and its environment (Hutchins 2001, pp. 2068–72). Using this approach, researchers at Kingston University tasked test subjects with a series of statistical reasoning problems and found increased success in solving the problems when participants were given a pack of cards with information that they could spread out and rearrange, as opposed to solving the problems with just a pen and paper (Vallée-Tourangeau, Abadie & Vallée-Tourangeau 2015). The researchers concluded that ‘people are more creative and more efficient when solving problems with their hands: thinking is an embodied activity embedded in a physical environment’ (Vallée-Tourangeau & Vallée-Tourangeau 2016).

Our senses are the instruments by which our body takes in information from the surrounding environment and transmits those sensations to the brain where they are interpreted – it is an interdependent system. There is no internal hierarchy that defines information read from a book through the eye as more important or useful than information which you smell, hear, touch or otherwise experience somatically.¹ Some kinds of information simply cannot be learned from a book or a visual graphic – it must be lived and experienced directly by a thinking, feeling person. To ignore the potential that lies within representing data and communicating information to people physically is a missed opportunity for the field of data representation as a whole.

This proposition raise’s questions around, what, specifically, can spatial, tactile and physicalized data express and communicate that tabular or purely visual data cannot? How does one begin to translate data into physical forms and materials? And what can we learn from designers and artists about effectively representing ideas in three-dimensional space?

On representation in three dimensions

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe’, I’d have been lying!

— RENÉ MAGRITTE (Torczyner 1977, p. 71) on the Treachery of Images

To lay the foundation of how to communicate data concepts visually (or physically) we should first touch on the concept of representation. In this case to represent data is to give it shape and substance. Given structure, organization and context, raw data becomes ‘information’ through its representation in a new form. This is the point at which we step away from pure objectivity and enter the realm of a subjective human, in terms of both who decides what shape to give the data, and also how the audience interprets, decodes or reads what the representation is communicating. The relationship between these two actions, the act of representation and the act of perception, is immensely important for artists and designers.

Although there are a number of important early examples of visualized data in the graphic forms of diagrams and maps (Friendly 2006), many of the conventional and generally recognized data visualizations we see commonly in use today were a relatively recent invention from the eighteenth century.² It was in the twentieth century that the first comprehensive theoretical foundation of information visualization, Semiologie Graphique (Semiology of Graphics) by Jacques Bertin (1918–2010), was published.³ In his book, Bertin (1967) outlines six visual variables that can be employed by the designer to create information graphics in two planar dimensions: size, value, texture, colour, orientation and shape. When data is represented in three-dimensional space, we gain access to at least three additional variables: space, form and material. These additional design elements appeal to our spatial and tactile nature as humans living in the world, and when utilized to represent data, they make information accessible to our perceptual senses, including but not limited to the visual.

In Bertin’s Semiology of Graphics, a Cartesian coordinate system with two axes (x, y) define the two planar dimensions on which numerical data can be visually mapped. This system positions the location of points in space in relation to an origin (0, 0). In basic terms, adding a third axis (x, y, z) creates an additional channel through which data can be mapped. For example, the three axes represented in the artwork series Tidal Datum has one dimension representing water level, and two additional dimensions that capture time (Figure 1.1). The additional dimension (z) allows the representation of data in volumetric form which a human can move around in three-dimensional space. In terms of human experience, as the body moves around a physical artefact, new perspectives and understandings are gained, which is not possible when viewing a flat, two-dimensional graphic. Additionally, physical forms are spatially enhanced with light and the shadows that are cast from their volume, allowing for a rich interactive experience and a physical, sensory and intellectual engagement with an audience.

Material as metaphor

Objects can be seen as the blank slates upon which we project our needs, desires, ideas and values. As such, material culture contains a wealth of information about who we are, who we want to be.

(Hirst 2018)

The root of the word material emerged from Latin materia meaning ‘substance from which something is made’, ‘matter’, and the ‘hard inner wood of a tree’ (Harper 2017b). In fact, the earliest known human wood worked artefact, the Clacton Spear, dates to around 400,000 years ago, long before it is believed that spoken language existed (Allington-Jones 2015). Influences of material culture and the ways we work with raw materials can be found in language used today. Describing someone as a ‘chip off the old block’, meaning a person whose character or personality closely resemble their parents, is a reference to stone work and its use dates back to the third century BC (Ammer 2013). Working ‘against the grain’ references the craft of woodworking, referring to a situation when one cuts against the direction of fibres in a piece of wood. Used figuratively, ‘against the grain’ means in opposition or contrary to what is commonly practised or accepted.

Figure 1.1 Tidal Datum, San Francisco, 2007, by Adrien Segal. Wood and Steel, 26″ x 32″ x 72″. Photo courtesy of the artist. The tide data represented in three-dimensions (x, y, z) are: (x) observed water level height; (y) 24-hour daily tide chart; and (z) 29 days or the duration of a full-tide cycle.

Let’s look specifically at wood as a material to understand the practical, aesthetic, functional and symbolic meanings materials can carry. The physical characteristics of wood vary greatly depending on which species you are working with. Easily misleading, the designation of a species as hardwood or softwood is not related to the degree of its physical hardness, but dependent upon whether the tree is coniferous (cone ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributing authors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• SECTION ONE MAKING DATA: THEORIES
• SECTION TWO MAKING DATA: PRACTICES
• SECTION THREE MAKING DATA: TECHNIQUES
• SECTION FOUR MAKING DATA: TRAJECTORIES
• Index
• Imprint