#chart junk

My words, they have failed me... When #dataviz and metaphors go horribly awry: https://t.co/9t6mVxb6lK

There are bad visualizations, and then there's the 'bicycle of education'. pic.twitter.com/seigDh715h

Extreme Embellishment: Artful or Artless?

From December 1st of 2007 to July 30th of 2011 the basement of the New Museum was wallpapered with the largest visually embellished amalgamation of pie charts I have ever experienced. Most visitors to the museum raced by the immersive installation, entitled Donor Hall, on their way to the bathroom. However, it was always a highlight of my visits because my brother had made it while he worked at C-Lab with Jeffrey Inaba. Although executed in an audacious manner, the concept behind Donor Hall is rather simple: a playful display of pie charts showing how much major corporations or organizations, grouped by sector of society, have donated philanthropically to culture. The following is a long excerpt from the New Museum's description of the installation that I believe is enriching to quote at length:

“The presentation is based on research on dozens of organizations—from sports, media, politics, education, religion, finance, paramilitary, and non-governmental organizations—and tracks the amounts of money various organizations donate to culture. INABA and C-Lab have culled publicly available information about contributions to arts and culture around the world from the past three years, drawn from sources such as tax filings, corporate annual reports, newspapers, and research papers, indicating the contours of global generosity. Donor Hall covers the walls along the path leading to the Museum’s theater. The graphics convey information via traditional pie charts, in addition to images of actual pies, as well as pie-shaped foodstuffs, including hamburgers, sushi rolls, cheese wheels, and pizza. Superimposed on the charts are international pictograph-style depictions of animals associated with prosperity. Also imbedded in the imagery is hypertext drawn from classical American literature. By organizing allusive, disparate, and incongruous bits of data into legible interfaces, Inaba makes a world driven by such data and sustenance more open to understanding and change.”

Filled with non-essential imagery Donor Hall is he opposite of Tufte-ian minimalism. The background images onto which the pie charts are projected are not simply redundant, but entirely irrelevant to the data. In the image above, you can see the Time Warner portion is lost in the doughnut. Its data-ink ratio would have had Tufte in fits. The background images of egg, winky cat, pizza and the rest have absolutely nothing to do with the information presented.

But the concept behind Donor Hall doesn't care about the principles of chart design. It had entirely different intentions. It wants to be chartjunk. The design and presentation of the data distract the viewer from "the sense and substance of the data." (Tufte, 2001, p. 91) It wants to "[provoke] an uncomfortable sensation." (p. 112) The New Museum commissioned C-Lab's designers fully knowing their style, rather than the other way around: "a graphic worthy of the Museum of Modern Art." (p.112)

I would like to posit a subset of junked up charts that was not addressed in the Bateman et al. article: creation of embellished charts not particularly concerned with effective communication or direct presentation of information. The central doubts regarding visual embellishment of charts concern aesthetics/style and clarity of interpretability and comprehension. (Bateman et al., 2010, p. 2574). But what if the designers of the charts either do not share those concerns or think this critical design tangential or unrelated? I believe that Donor Hall falls in this category.

One could argue that this subset was addressed in the article. For example: "graphs were more likely to be designed with chart junk when designers had persuasion or impressiveness as an objective, particularly when the data in the graph reflected poorly on the graph designer" or "these charts were designed to attract the eye, engage the reader, and sometimes provide a particular value message over and above the presentation of the data itself." (p. 2575) Although the designers of the installation were most likely trying to be impressive (as it is an "artwork"), I do not think they were being persuasive in any one way or another. It presented information about financial donations. Their pie filled pie charts were meant to be a playful representation of a serious topic. As is detailed on page 2580, usually the background imagery is connected to the “overall message (which includes the topic) and some of the structural elements of the chart (such as the trend) are encoded in the image.” The duck-ish inclusion of what amounts to good-luck-token animal clip-art has nothing to do with philanthropy.

Donor Hall was in direct contrast to the concerns and potentialities of the article. This work was designed for a hallway in the basement of a museum. The jesting nature contributes to the theory that they may not have even cared about the articulation of a message, verging on being dismissive of these anxieties. Engaging in word play, they used round foodstuffs to mirror the roundness of the pie chart. Pun intended.

Articles Referenced:

Bateman, S., Mandryk, R.L., Gutwin, C., Genest, A.M., McDine, D., Brooks, C. (2010). Useful Junk? The Effects of Visual Embellishment on Comprehension and Memorability of Charts. In ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010), Atlanta, GA, USA. 2573-2582.

Tufte, E.R. (2001). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 2nd ed. Chs. 4–5. Cheshire, Conn: Graphics Press.

Images from:

http://c-lab.columbia.edu/nmimages.html