Unit 3 Reading

This chapter of The Functional Art, "The Beauty Paradox: Art and Communication," is packed with information and analyses of concepts related to the particular subject of how information is dressed up in infographics.

He begins with analyzing a rather dense, complex infographic of his that stirred up some controversy in a review at his workplace regarding its intricacy, with criticisms insisting that it would be too impenetrable for people. But Cairo insists that we shouldn't condescend to people too much - while taking into account one's audience, one should not assume that they have the understanding of children.

In response, though, he goes into his personal metric for how he analyzes where infographics are on the scale between various forms of complexity and simplicity. There are all kinds of different sets of poles to determine this that take several pages to explain, and they are all very interesting. But, his conclusion is that different contexts call for different methods.

The second half of the chapter dives into Tufte's criticism of "chartjunk," which is basically unnecessary decoration in graphs and charts. But Tufte goes all the way to turning bars into lines in bar graphs, and minimalizing to the point of complete abstract simplicity. This may be helpful for his way of compiling dense information, but it is not necessarily the only way to go, Cario argues. He then mentions studies which suggest that there may not be a significant difference between the two ways of displaying information, and that in fact it's possible that employing more fun artistry or decoration may help retain memory of the data in the mind of the reader.

Of course, one can go too far in the other direction and decorate to the extent of distorting perception of the data. But a medium balance was pioneered by Otto Neurath, who emphasized incorporating enough of an element of entertainment to encourage people to read something that educates them in the process. His process was one of simplifying graphics and humanizing them at the same time. In summary, there are many ways to approach visualizing information, and they should be explored in-depth.