Chapter 2 : Forms and Functions: Visualization as a
Technology.
At the end of chapter 1, I have seen a discussion about
“Visualization as a Technology”.
Technology in this case has various meanings; it could be made from a
singular trait, or emerged singular traits. It’s considered as a tool to help
the audience understand the meaning of the infographic. Followed by this
opinion, in chapter 2, the author explained the correlation and relationship
between forms and functions and how they affect the audience’s visualization. He quoted the idea of Louis Sullivan that “form
follows function”. This means that the form which are shapes made by nature
have to follow its essential function. By this idea, we could probably
understand that feather wings help bird could fly. But Sullivan’s idea is just
seen as on aspect, because a form could have various functions that we didn’t
notice. Continue on feather wings examples, there are some birds of their
species don’t use their feather wings to fly, on the other hands, feather wings
are what keep the bird’s bodies warm in cold climate. Therefore, we can figure
out that there are more functions of a form in nature.
“Form doesn’t always follow function; in many cases, the
function follows a form that previously followed another unrelated function.”
So what we should do on the infographic is concentrate on
the defined goal which help leading the audience to the story we are going to
tell.
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Chapter 5: The Eye and Visual Brain
To designers, understanding the human visual system is very
important. Because the our human has a same visual system that help seeing
things in a same eyes’ structure. Our eyes can see things when those things
reflect the spectrums to our retina which those spectrums weren’t absorb. Human
eyes have 7 million of cones and 100 million of rods on retina surface. Cones
help us be able to see color spectrums while rods receive black and white
spectrums. At this, a function of visual is called photoreceptor help sending
what we see to nerves and our brain. Actually, our eyes couldn’t see things in
area of 180-degree angle. They could only see things in vision field of
2-degree angle which called fovea, and vision field of 10-degree angle which
called parafovea. Next, one of important functions of our eyes is saccades. It
helps us to fix the different points after a period of time of a scene. It
tries to pay attention on a static thing; if that thing moving, that eyes
function will be activated to follow that thing in a vision field of 2-degree
which has the highest resolution vision.
What we are seeing is not what our brain perceiving. It’s a
true story. Our brain perceives illusions to help us fix things missing
although the missing details are not displayed or hidden. So, at the bottom line, designers should know how human visual system structure and work so that they can predict their audience reaction when they watch on designers' design works.
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