Visuale

Yesterday in a meeting with our industrial partners I received yet another lesson. Simply put: though fancy and well-crafted visualization is useless if it doesn't help people take actions.

Ok I must admit it, this is maybe only true in business sectors (is it?) but what I come to realize is that we infovis enthusiasts are too much focused on the never ending refrain that visualization is useful to explore data and that we need it to make sense of things.

This is certainly true but this is only part of the story. Take the million managers out there. Not trained to cope with complex stats or charting tools but desperately in need to take decisions based on data. What do they need? To explore and make sense of thing? Sure, to some extent ... but ultimately to take complex decisions in a very constrained setting and tight time limits.

I am sorry guys, I feel a strong need to share my frustration with you today. I have discovered yet another infovis library to create the most beautiful visualizations in the world and instead of being excited I am depressed. That's great I really champion the effort of these good guys but a tough question keep hammering in my head: why so many libraries and so few tools? Libraries are great and really needed to speed up the development process but here I perceive a dangerous trend: there are a lot more libraries than real tools written with them!

Hi there! I'm writing from Berlin where I came to attend the EuroVis 2009 conference. EuroVis is the premier conference on visualization in Europe and every year it hosts a mix of very interesting SciVis and InfoVis works.

The program is out and you can give it a look here. The program comprises also a keynote from Pat Hanrahan, which I'm really looking forward to see. It has the promising title: "Systems of Thought: When to Use Visual Representations in Problem Solving".

This is just a short notice to tell you that I intend to post at least one post a day to wrap up on the things I see and to share my thoughts with you. I'll also try to showcase the most interesting works.

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P.S. If any of you is also attending EuroVis'09 drop me a line, we might end up drinking a good German beer in one of the many wonderful places this city has ;-)

Shame on me, I didn't keep my word on reporting from EuroVis. Anyway here is a very small selection of the remarkable things I have seen during the conference.

Pat Hanrahan's talk was really deep and thoughtful. A lot of new basic material to think about visualization under a new lens.

Then I forced myself to select only 3 paper out of the long program. They are engaging and new in some sense. Obviously this is totally personal. And there were many other good ones worth reading.