Visible Language

Reliance on diagrams as quick, cut to the bone communications has become a commonplace in our most public of media, the newspaper and television. In the former we have diagram “bites” enhanced (or trivialized depending on one’s viewpoint) with some icon or presented conventionally as a line, bar or pie chart. In the latter, we have Ross Perot with his ubiquitous flip-chart, abstracting the details of economic life and projecting trends. Today, computer software makes comparison, chronology or trend easy to accomplish. It is from this context that we seek to question the diagram as a tool. The purpose of this article is to step aside from conventional ideas about diagrams and to examine how they work, to look beneath the surface of these admittedly powerful tools which bring to its audience the possibility of a common understanding on some issue or relationship. Ideas from a perceptual psychologist, J.J. Gibson, a communication theorist, W. Barnett Pearce and a philosopher, Nelson Goodman, are brought to bear, like can-openers, to smoothly cut or more forcefully crunch open the closed surface of the diagram. The papers are introduced in the three divisions of this issue: Examining the Past, Questioning the Present and Working Toward the Future.

The development of diagrammatic presentation during the sixteenth centuries is briefly examined with particular emphasis on the work of Simon Stevin and Johann Amos Comenius. Stevin juxtaposed abstract mathematical notation with concrete example from life. Comenius joined languages including Latin, a vernacular language, numbering systems and diagrammatic representation into experiential chunks for effective teaching. The authors believe study of these early visual pedagogical constructs offer renewed insight into diagrammatic possibilities for contemporary education.

The life and times of Otto Neurath are briefly outlined. The principles of his Isotype Picture Language are reviewed and are critically examined in the light of descriptive statistics. The pre-history and origins of Isotype are traced to the United States, ultimately to the pragmatist philosopher and pioneer semiotician, Charles Sanders Peirce, but more directly to the statistician, Willard Brinton and to Neurath’s friend and associate, Charles W. Morris. Neurath’s views of analytical philosophy and the social sciences are summarized and contrasted with ideas put forward by Popper and Wittgenstein. Finally, Neurath’s personal credibility and scientific integrity are tested by looking at his contributions to Soviet propaganda in the early 1930s.

This paper proposes that to create visual designs that effectively communicate their information it is necessary to supplement the intuitions of the designer with empirical research. The first part of the paper gives the reasons why institutions – of designers or anyone else – are inadequate. It describes the habits of human reasoning that distort designers’ ability to intuit how users will understand and respond to graphics. The second part of the paper gives two alternative solutions to these problems, both of which are based on observing how people actually behave in response to visuals. One solution is to investigate scientifically whether and how visuals communcate to viewers. From such investigations general principles can be developed and examples of research-based principles for educational visual representation are given. When such general principles are not available or appear to be inappropriate for the given situation, designers can use a second solution, that of user-based iterative design. This strategy provides procedured by which designers can explore users’ reactions at the same time they are developing prototypes of their designs. In this way user-based errors can be corrected while designs are still being developed.

A view long venerated in philosophy and science separates image and word into separate worlds. Images resemble their references or ideas of their referents. They present themselves all at once and lack clear linguistic procedures like syntax for ordering and decoding. Words, on the other hand, describe rather than resemble and are read linearly in time. Images are rich but diffuse in meanings, while words have less dense meaning and are more precise. The two do not translate directly into each other. The dichotomics reflect an ideological split between literal and metaphorical, true and fictional, scientific and artistic. Word and image often operate as unwitting stand-ins in this struggle. But the differences between word and image are smaller than they might seem. One area where the function of image is most like a word is in graphs. The graph is a culturally given way of reading – a visual organization as language. It provides a means of systematically thinking about how we use such language without realizing it. Is there an understanding of how graphing as a technology functions? Investigation of this leads to considering ways of looking at and of understanding visual organization in order to put forward some alternative goals.