The Most Effective Way to Visualize Complexity
You’ve heard it before: “We’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge“. Of course this isn’t an entirely new thought. There have been lots of elaborate methods proposed to combat this predicament we’re increasingly finding ourselves in. Google seems to do a good job of helping us out with sorting our data.
But I think the onus of meeting this challenge also lies somewhere else…
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes online mid-2008 and already has the science press buzzing.
There are projections that this endeavor, throughout it’s 15+ years of operation, will generate more data than every word spoken so far since humanity’s beginning.
Of course, more data isn’t always a good thing. In 1989, Russell Ackoff, an American systems scientist, posited the oft-cited ”Wisdom Hierarchy”–a framework that breaks down the content of the human mind into 5 classifications:
- Data,
- Information,
- Knowledge,
- Understanding,
- Wisdom.
In a sense, each progressive level of this hierarchy filters, ferments, distils and repositions the content of the lower tier. Data, as symbols in themselves, are meaningless without the relational connection information provides. And wisdom evaluates and extrapolates the content of understanding.
As human existence becomes more and more flooded with data, I think the need for intelligent filters of this data will grow exponentially. Yet the solution will come from more than semantic processing and elaborate visualization algorithms. These are all great and super-geeky-cool, but I’m talking about something much more readily accessible: people. Well, smart people. People that can apply and, more importantly, communicate, understanding and wisdom. (Dare I suggest, designers?!)
I’m a big fan of massive data sets and mining for hidden relationships using software, but I know that the cheapest and most efficient way to visualize complexity is to have someone smart figure it out, process it, and then explain it to everyone else in a way that makes sense. It also happens to be the most creative way, in my view. Find an automated process that can do that!
Speaking of visualizing complexity, this blog posting has the most succinct and understandable visualization of the subprime mortgage fiasco I’ve yet seen. Baris shows us you don’t need to be a fancy pants designer to get the point across.
Here’s a great post for the visualization junkie in you, WIl. Thought-provoking piece. I’m not sure which thread to pick at… You need to post more of this kind of thing!