Thinking visually puts a world of numbers into perspective

19 November 2009

As infographics, or data visualisation, becomes a content genre in itself, it sometimes lends itself to glorifying aesthetics and gratuitous visualisations rather than serving its primary function of empowering us with an immediate and sophisticated understanding of increasingly complex data. But the question remains: what is the cognitive added value of images that numbers and words can’t convey?

Our ability to identify patterns and correlations among numbers is much poorer than our ability to recognise and compare shapes. Visual representations organise information in a spatial way and we like them because our perception and cognition of the world is inherently informed by space.

Space is a projection of the body. The ‘six sides of the world’, as the Persian expression goes (up, down, left, right, front and back), are exactly the six polarities of the three-axis system our body is built on. This is why data visualisation makes it easier to digest information: organising the data with a spatial structure allows us to think with our eyes and hands.

There are four basic types of infographics: 2D, 3D, interactive and animated. They’re often hybridised but they all share a similar set of features. To start with, infographics objectify abstract information in shapes, surfaces, volumes and colours. This makes it easier to classify and compare it, to identify patterns and correlations between multiple variables, such as education spending and graduation rates, and to play with a wider range of hypotheses to solve a problem.

Visuals act as an external memory, as the Soviet psychologist Vygotsky would say, an ‘external scaffolding’ of the mind, allowing us to take into account a greater number of variables and hypotheses and to move seamlessly between focused reasoning and free associations. And interactive infographics takes this element a step further, allowing us to use a direct-object-manipulation type of interaction with the data.

They represent process not just structure. ‘Condensed dynamic images’ picture time in spatial terms, making any transformative process visible and tangible. And infographics use aesthetics to make information fun, turning it into compelling visual experiences.

So infographics produces cognitive artefacts that make problem-solving easier by supporting our mnemonic, comparison, classification and interpretation skills. And, most of all, they help us stay afloat in a stormy sea of data that’s getting deeper everyday.

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