Digital Roam

Key lime pie chart

Experts hate pie charts. They hate them for different reasons, but the underlying distaste remains constant.

Personally, I kind of like pie charts for certain representational tasks. Maybe it's fond memories of the cognitive challenge of selecting which slice of pizza I wanted vs. which one I was going to leave for my brother. I get suspicious of all these quotes about "differences in angles are not easy to judge for the human eye" whenever I'm at a kindergartner's birthday party. Those kiddos don't seem to have a huge problem identifying the biggest piece. Maybe if we called them "cake charts" the experts would relax.

Anyway, I say that in defense of the humble pie chart, because now I'm about to eviscerate one.

I came across this in an annual report for Xcel Energy that I was thumbing through. This lovely little key lime pie chart struck me as so unreadable that I had to cut it out to keep forever.

The unreadability has nothing to do with it being a pie, but it has everything to do with the overly subtle variations in color and the decoupling of the visual from the legend.

I defy anyone to discern the percent of renewable resources. But then again, maybe that's the point.

Hint: look for a tiny (1%) slice headed southwest.

pie chart, bad charts, alternative energy

Chips & salsa charts

An article I wrote on why business graphics are just like food appeared today in the AIGA's design & business journal Gain.

Bon appetit!

chips and salsa, AIGA

Seeing with all cylinders

I was explaining the visual thinking process (as I see it) to a publisher the other day, and I dawned on me that the whole process is just like a four-cycle engine.

Right.

But check it out...

LOOK. First, you suck in everything there is to look at.
SEE. Next, you compress it all down to just the few things you really need to focus on.
IMAGINE. Third, you fire off the spark of creativity and let the visual ideas explode.
SHOW. Finally, you compress your final inspirations and share them with the world.

Well, it seems to work.

Then again, Hybrid Synergy Drives may eventually make the old four-stroke head the way of the dinosaur.

I better get this book done fast.

4 cycle engine, visual thinking, hybrid synergy drive

An eyefull of tunes

Call it Herbed cream.

A week ago I was contemplating some further buzzwords and slogans for the book, and I came up with one that clicked: visual thinking is like listening with your eyes. Ooh. Nice.

But before I could start tossing this clever phrase around, the New Yorker did a little diddy on the new remix of Herb Alpert's classic Whipped Cream album. This new album not only updates "A Taste of Honey" musically (with contributions by John King, Ozomatli, and the Thievery Corporation) it also updates the famous creamed cover.

Herb Alpert himself wasn't initially too hot on the remix idea. It took some convincing by the folks at Shout Factory to get him onboard. Now he loves both the remixed sound and the remixed cover.

Point being though, Mr. Alpert partly blames visual thinking for the poor state of the music industry: "A lot of it is so corny. It looks like professional wrestling to me." He blames television: "People started listening with their eyes."

Ouch. The master has spoken. I guess I won't be using that phrase after all.

Herb Alpert, a taste of honey,

Moon dust in your eyes

July 20, 1969, Mission Time: 102:45:40. One hundred and twenty feet above the surface of the moon and with less than thirty seconds of fuel remaining in the tanks, Neil Armstrong sees a sea of boulders covering the Lunar Module Eagle’s landing spot. He does what any wide-awake driver does when a pot-hole appears in the freeway just ahead: stomping on the gas, he swerves hard to the side and drives that puppy full-bore towards the nearest open spot. After finally – softly – touching down on the moon’s surface, Apollo 11 mission control can only say, “You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot”

Next time we land on the moon, Mary “Missy” Cummings is going to make sure it won’t be anywhere near that hairy. Not that Missy isn’t used to hairy landings: as one of the first women Naval aviators to be cleared for combat flight, Missy landed her A-4 Skyhawk countless times on heaving carrier decks. Now that she runs MIT’s Humans and Automation Lab, she gets the chance to put her academic career (Ph.D in Systems Engineering with a focus on Cognitive Engineering) and first-hand piloting experience into practice. Her most recent area of focus: designing the visual displays that the next lunar astronauts will use when they land on the moon.

As Missy told me: “As instrumentation designers, one of our big challenges is deciding how much information not to show, and how to best trick people into perceiving what we most want them to see. We do this through multivariate instrument optimization, which is a fancy way of describing the process of layering many visual inputs together to create a single, rapidly-perceived display. In a time-critical task like a moon landing, the key is combining precise information about height and vertical speed in such a way that the pilot senses their position and speed before they even know that they’ve thought about it.”

1960’s era Apollo astronauts’ eyes had to jump repeatedly across many instruments to get this sense of situational awareness. They had to burn several “cognitive cycles” merging these multiple visual inputs and mentally making the calculations they needed to land. Eliminating such time-consuming cognition tasks (even if the time is counted in tenths-of-seconds) is one of the main goals of new cockpit instrumentation designs.

The new VAVI (Vertical Altitude and Velocity Indicator) Missy’s team designed is a perfect example. By combining “ecological perception” (seeing both the environment and its embedded clues that show what actions to take) with “emergent features” (features produced by the interaction of individual graphical elements), this instrument’s “waving arms” make the astronaut visually feel how quickly they are going up or down. Her team has tested their VAVI in a Harrier jump-jet with great success, and looks forward to pushing it out into the commercial aviation market.

Missy knows the VAVI design works: “In academia, many tools are invented purely based on theoretical research, which can be great. But in this case, I can literally say that with all my flying that I’ve ‘been there, done that’… and wished I’d had something like this instrument when I did.”

moon landing, ecological perception, dashboard design

Anti-social network analysis

When the Men in Black came calling, Dan Haught was ready. He knew that they didn’t know what they needed to know about who knows who in the global network of terror, so he wasn’t surprised by the knock on his company’s door. Ever since 9-11, Dan and his colleagues at FMS Advanced Systems Group had been testing their advanced social networking analysis software by mapping contacts among members of Al Qaeda. Their website trackingthethreat.com had already become popular with the media and he knew the intelligence services couldn’t be far behind.

Back while still watching the Pentagon burn, Dan had began to search for clues to who these terrorists were by looking at every news and information source he could find, and was appalled at the lack of connected knowledge he could find. Names would come up associated with other names, but not connected to other names that showed up in other connections. It was classic network analysis paralysis, and Dan knew he could do better.

As a self-professed data jockey (going back to his first 1K Timex Sinclair), Dan had been working for years on a stealth project designed to highlight the connections that exist in standard data tables but that are usually obscured by the endless rows and columns. His tool – which eventually became the Sentinel TMS Threat Management System – uses proprietary algorithms to parse the data and draw it up in charts where the connections visibly rise to the surface.

While this is standard social network analysis stuff in many ways, the real breakthrough came in applying this academic domain to the analysis of what Dan refers to as Anti-social networks: groups who intentionally keep a low profile, who generally eschew publicity and who absolutely positively don’t want to be found out. Using the SNA basics of “closeness”, “between-ness” and “recursivity”, he and his colleagues have only just begun to explore the murky world of the who’s-whos who don’t want you-know-who to know.

Although he can’t openly cite either most of his TMS sources or clients, Dan says it’s not really all that hard to construct insightful social network diagrams from commonly available information. “Give me a copy of your Outlook pst’s and I can give you a map of your network in no time. Sure, knowing who you send e-mails to tells me a lot, but who you BCC’d is where the real juicy stuff appears.”

Hmm... I think I’d better pass. Any takers?

social network analysis, men in black, threat management

Taking visualization to an entirely new level

There was something about how SFPD forensic artist Sgt. Stansberry was able to help crime witnesses calm their minds that reminded me of the Buddhist meditation I had studied many years ago. To check on some ideas, I yesterday visited with Lama Lodu Rinpoche of the San Francisco Tibetan Buddhist Center.

In particular, I was curious about the role of visualization in Tibetan (or Vajrayana) Buddhist practice. Lama Lodu patiently described for me some of the ways in which Tibetan monks use visualization as a meditative practice, in particular the mental and physical creation of mandalas (circle-based images of palaces and deities).

According to Lama Lodu, meditation is practiced in all types of Buddhism for many reasons, primarily as a way of gaining wisdom through the calming of the mind. Much of this wisdom leads the practitioner to the enlightening realization that the ego is an illusion, as impermanent as grains of sand in the wind. For this reason, the practice of creating intricate sand mandalas and then destroying them is a core teaching in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in India and around the world.

Lama Lodu explained that while an advanced student of meditation can achieve remarkable levels of clarity -- including clairvoyance and the ability to heal physical wounds -- visualization serves as both a training and practice ground. "Once the mind is calm", he said, "it is possible to focus the mind's eye in infinite detail. We practice the visualization of the celestial palace of deities as a way to locate ourselves within the framework of the universe and to understand many religious concepts."

I recall that when I studied Buddhism and meditation in Thailand twenty-five years ago, I was able after much practice to calm my mind enough to mentally see details of my family home that I had no idea I even knew. When I explained this to Lama Lodu, he was nonplussed. "I am not impressed with that as you are", he said with a smile, "of course you could see such detail -- with a little practice you can easily visualize anything that you cling to." He paused. "The better goal, you know, is to stop the clinging."

(Mandala images from http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/george/mandala.html)

meditation, mandala, tibetan buddhism