Int Seminar 2: Notes

Observing Physical Trace

Summary : The author Zeisel was teaching readers how to observe and recording the surrounding in detail, and how could they plan out things that they wanted to be observe.

The main points in Observing Physical Trace was explaining the importances of collecting informations and people reaction react to physical surrounding and it could help for the future design. Zeisel used a lot of experiences and examples to claim how the little technique could help us get even more observation.

The new things that I learned after reading this was “to look what is missing”, I usually online look the surface and the appearance of my surrounding, I never, think about to look the left over or what is missing.

The Do and Dont’s I wrote after reading this are

    DO                                                          DON’T 

______________________________________________________________________________

Look for small details .                     Don’t trust everything you see on the surface

Look for people’s activity                 Don’t over look somthing

and relationship with each other    Don’t think too much

Think about what is visually missing  Don’t put personal feeling while observing

in the space

Peter Hall’s Bubble, Line and String

The article states there are three categories of practice for data visualisation.

There are scientistic, journalistic and artistic, for scientistic they want huge among of datas, they do not care about prettiness of the visualization for them visualization is a functional tool.

For journalistic, they want to explore and simplify data to make it visible and accessible for everyone.

Artist is focus on visual instead of function, also they bring criticism to the visualization.

He also talked about the absence of critique, he thought there are too much visualization in the present blogs nowadays, he said ” most online visuals today can be more described as cheerleaders with richly diverse array of visuals.” This also is one of my favorite quote, because the way he described the situation was funny, also I have experience to see that many visualization online, they are not really helpful because the lack of critical discussion.

For the final part, Hall talked about Critical Cartography. He claimed that how to place your information in visualization and the design of it are actually key for the a better visualization. Because it should be easier for people to connect with other sources.

The author’s main points are the data visualization has become popular nowadays because lots of people looking for ways to understand datas easily.

The way how he get his points was through different examples of the three practices.

There was one more quote that I like about was “the key to decoding a map was to look for its silence”  I like this quote because it reminds me the Africa map that Peter Hall mentioned in the TED Talk, we see the map has a blank space, but the actual map doesn’t look like that, in order to understanding a map or visualization we should see what is missing in the there. Also could be connected with the reaching Observing Physical Trace.

Finally, one more quote that I would include as my favorite was “each steps of this process involves decisions about what to omit and what to prioritize” the reason that I like this quote is I think it could be one of the most important things for doing a lot of things. Not only for data visualization, mapping. It could be using in photography, making art or writing as well. Most of time we need to decide what to keep what to get away. So this is why I like this quote.

 

 

 

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