At the beginning of the book, actually the first page of the
introduction section, there is a quote of Rudolf Arnheim from Visual Thinking
book. His quote make me curious that why infographics and visualization are
concerning to psychology of thinking.
We are the human, the
most crowd species living all around the world. We are using different
languages for communication every day. And
also our brain does not work well on a huge bit of data with complex details. In psychology as I learned before, visual is
what we mention first on a particular article or magazine page. That helps creating visual memory in our
brain, and then our brain can encode that visualization into small pieces of
information. So graphics, charts, map and diagrams are tools that people use to
encode the huge stream of data to visualization and infographics to let people
pay more attention on the report with huge data without reading all of them. The
audiences just simply observe the visual graphics.
There are two different kinds of infographic: infographic and visualization graphics. With infographics,
it’s not necessary to show off the exact value of data, what we need to do is
make the problem we are going to show to be figurative, such as a manual
diagram of how to making table from IKEA. On the other hands, visualization
will show us the approximated data collected from the trusted sources which are
going with charts, map and other tools on a same report. With the
visual graphics applied widely, people on the world with different languages
could easily understand what the article author designed on the infographic
photos.
In the diagram showing the gap between what we understand
and what we should understand on a certain problem, I also notice on the DIKW hierarchies’
diagram. This infographic diagram helps me easily understand in ten seconds
with brief and ordered events which our brain would work on. There are two
encoding levels. Our brain sorts out the unsorted events into data, then it
will continue to sort out the fresh data into structured data which are
well-organized. Then, if possible, our brain will use what knowledge and wisdom
which called experience to continue to encode the structured data which our
brain organized before. An interesting thing is our brain work in order without
conscious effort. It means our brain automatically sort out the natural
information into structured data in hierarchy orderly.
Visualization is the term which I mention before that it
includes data with it infographics. We use data to turn out our project into a
brief story without losing any small pieces of data. We have data already; our
left mission is just reaching our goal to understand the data we already got. The
data we got first is called technologies-singular, and then those will be
emerged into a particular technologies-plural data. Finally, similar to
technologies-singular, technologies plural will emerge into the technologies-general
data. So, the infographic could be considered as technologies to help the
audience to understand the general data, then they will tear apart that general
data into smaller pieces with tools of software, devices. So with the support
of software, smart devices, the visualization would be seen as a technology.
The National Geographic designers work in a team with
singular mission of each person. Their
team includes a photo editor, a copy editor, an infographics or art editor, a
cartographer, and a researcher. They spent their research probably more than a
year for a project or multiple projects. They need to have the proposal or
draft of the project to let the editor-in-chief give them more ideas to cover
the project more successful. Like in school, we will research our project on
internet and reference book for our project, then we will turn out what we
research into a draft document of report after one or two weeks so that we can
get more ideas for the final after several teacher and classmates comments. But
the NG designers have to spent more times than we did in school in order to get
accreted data from nature. What we did in school is collect the general data
from their data resources and make our project worked in limited knowledge.
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