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IDEA Magazine no. 340—2010
+81 Magazine vol.49—2010
De:Bug Magazine 142—2010
Design Exercise—ROTOVISION—2010
Computer Arts Magazine #167—2009
1000 Ideas—ROCKPORT—2009
Computer Arts Magazine #158—2009
IdN v.15n4—2008
Promo Art—ROTOVISION—2008



DE:BUG MAGAZINE 2010 INTERVIEW

Q. How does a background in quantitative genetics shape your ethos, that protest is a luxury? Why do you do, what you do?

A. The Luxury of Protest is a question as much as it is a statement. Do western liberal democracies tolerate political and social dissent? Do citizens of these democracies with the supposed luxury of free speech have a social responsibility to promote ideas of freedom and equality? If the answer to these question is yes, why do so few people expressly exhibit such behaviour? My intention with the design practice The Luxury of Protest, was to create a platform where these issues are raised and presented within a forum of critical design.

I saw with the proliferation of the web in general and design blogs in particular, an opportunity to disseminate design that was socially-relevant and conceptually provocative. In the not so distant past, creatives had to struggle in order to find a captive audience to whom they could present their work. Today it is so easy to connect with a mass audience – one simply needs to have something to say.

My science background lends a certain objectivity and observational quality to the issues I raise in my work. I’m much more interested in showing than convincing. But naturally, the subject matter I choose for my data visualisation projects lends a certain advocacy quality that results in a non-neutral and persuasive tone. This is the inherent statement quality of my work – the data is neutral and benign, but the conclusions that can be drawn from data are rarely neutral and often politically dangerous.

Q. A lot of your projects arise from your own impulse and motivation. Where and how do you find your topics and themes? What inspires you?

A. Outside of focussed visual design work, a significant amount of my day is spent reading the news. On an average day I read 15-20 different news sources. When I first became interested in world politics as a teenager, the focus was to understand the specific issues themselves – which can be exceedingly complex. But as time went on and I felt I had a decent grasp on what was being reported, I became more and more interested on how those issues were reported. I became conscious of journalism – the design of the news. Today most of my time is spent just skimming news stories and on certain days, just reading headlines to gauge differences in reporting style and most importantly, differences in nationalist perspective. Online news sites allow one to understand variations in journalistic reporting of a single news event – you quickly get “feel” for the mechanism of reporting in addition to the content of the affair itself.

World affairs influence my data visualisation projects directly, but the real motivation that feeds my projects is this nuanced issue of how “facts” are presented to the public. The present moves toward emotional punditry reporting in the US and it’s polar-opposite “facts-focussed” approach in Europe is very fascinating and marks a critical change in the manner in which the public is exposed to current affairs. It is this same dichotomy of approach that is imbued in my data visualisations – but in the case of my work, the balance of approach is much more delicate and carefully manicured so as to avoid tipping in any one direction.

Q. You say "I’m much more interested in showing than convincing." Does this mean your approach to information design requires decoding by the audience to understand? Is this the user experience in critical design?

A. Exactly – this is the user experience component to my design. I don’t think I’ve ever produced a piece that can be understood in a matter of moments. Instead, I have been conscious of the manner in which a viewer takes in information to direct their interaction with the work to provide them with a carefully orchestrated discovery experience. Part of this comes form my science background where exposure to information and it’s interpretation is something that requires effort, as the issues being dealt with are too complex to encapsulate in a simple to interpret graph. This is the norm in the sciences, but is frequently anathema in visual culture. The predominance of advertising culture and advertising philosophy in western society has created a situation of instantaneous connection as a means of communication. This is fine, and often necessary for most types of communication, but does not work for the more complex and nuanced issues of social- and geo-politics. Simplistic and directed communication is also a dangerous approach in this realm as it means that the data is often used in a forceful, advocacy-like manner that compromises complexity and presents only one side of an issue.

The balance between letting the data speak for itself from a objective science point of view and directing the user experience from a designer’s point of view is a very delicate line to follow. Presenting raw data under the auspices that data should speak for itself is lazy and philosophically flawed as even in the sciences all data is processed to understand the nuances of relationships between things. Similarly, the condition-dependent nature of all data makes dogmatic statements derived from analyses, untruthful. This is the battle that constantly plays out in my mind.

It’s often said that if one is crafty, data can be made to say anything. This is fundamentally untrue. If one is truly honest and transparent in the analysis of data sets, and if the data shows a significant relationship, there is rarely leeway with regard to the nature of the conclusions that can be derived. An apple is still an apple no matter how many times it is partitioned.

Q. How would you define critical design?

A. That which makes one question the nature of accepted norms. So much of the perception of our lives is based on collective understanding of life. A great deal of this understanding can be characterized as true, but a significant portion of it is simply a general agreement of truth – which is often belief based on what we as a society deem to be most psychologically comfortable. Critical design presents a new way of seeing : both that which is futuristic and not yet experienced, but most powerfully that which is so familiar of an experience as to be accepted as truth. This is the service that critical design plays in society – it is the agent provocateur of the design world.

Q. Do you believe design thinking needs a redesign? Do you see the need for a new role of the designer as somebody who is asking and defining questions instead giving answers and solutions?

A. Absolutely! There has been a growing momentum in the last 10-15 years within communication design for a more prominent role for designer as author. A number of astute designers have seen the potential that the field presents with regard to disseminating “self-initiated” work – a term that I loath as it indicates the immaturity of the approach, but one that accurately describes the work as a counter-point to commercial endeavors. This approach often encapsulates critical design, but is certainly not always the case as you see a lot of design ephemera being produced and sold by designers.

From my own perspective, and perhaps this is a reflection of the politically oriented work that I do, I’m most interested in designers who produce design that asks poignant questions but one that still occupies a certain traditional social grounding. A significant portion of critical design projects are designed for the museum – this is particularly true of objects. No criticism here, but I find the venue of a museum much too finite for projects that are designed to resonate with the public at large. Isn’t it much more interesting to see those design pieces in a home? – where conversations can more freely occur that illicit difficult answers? The most effective change occurs when operating within traditional societal structures.

Critical design is a relatively young field and one by virtue of existing during this time of economic upheaval, operating at a time when many people are questioning norms of social being. This is a very exciting conflagration of events that presents the designer with an enormously fortuitous circumstance within which to express challenging concepts. Coupled with the limit-less potential of a captive audience afforded to us with the electronic interconnectivity of contemporary society, creatives can position themselves in the eye of the proverbial storm.

Q. What kind of project you would love to do – what's the challenge you are dreaming of as a designer? What role you would like to play there?

A. I’ve often thought it would be exciting to lead a design team in an academic setting that is akin to a commercial design practice but one that produces a series of public engagement projects that challenge people to confront and respond to taboo subjects. I’ve had in my mind a large scale visualisation project to challenge the public to question whether common sense really only means communal sense – that “reality” or what we believe to be “true” is really only that which we have collectively decided to agree is true. There is quite a lot of data on this subject as history is littered with the corpses of disused common sense artifacts (ie. the earth is flat). So too, the history of science is littered with theories that have been proven false when new knowledge has come to light. There is something highly appealing to me to know that the world is mutable and ever changing – some people find it frightening, I find it a counterbalance to feeling alone in the universe.

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+81 MAGAZINE 2010 INTERVIEW

Q. What do you stress most when creating a design?

A. Content is critical. My approach to design has always been functional – graphic design is primarily a tool to be used as a vehicle to express a concept. That is not to say that the visual details with regard to choices made between forms, types and colours are secondary or trivial compared to a concept, but rather it’s that design choices are all made with regard to creating visual semiotic codes to effectively express a concept. My forte is the use and orchestration of semiotic elements to develop complex stories that are socially and culturally referential.

Q. You also had a career in scientific research. Has this background had any sort of effect on your current creative endeavors?

A. My scientific background has definitely influenced my design work, but less in terms of aesthetics and more in terms of contextual understanding. In the sciences it is not adequate to simply state 1+2=3. Instead one must prove 1+2=3. In design, students learn from respected professionals and more often than not accept design knowledge as truth. This tacit knowledge plays a critical role in the training of the designer, but the methodology of acquiring the knowledge and the opaque nature of the values imparted are not conducive to progress. In my work, I always ask why : rarely is there an easy answer, but more often than not, rational reasons do exist that explain one choice versus another.

Q. How do you come up with ideas for your data visualization projects?

A. Content is always the starting point for any of my data visualisation projects. The focus is always an interesting observation derived from data that stands in contrast to prevailing norms of belief. This is the type of data that most interests me – data that makes you realise that what is common sense is little more than communal sense, and what is natural is actually against nature. My aim in this project is to speak to a broad public engaged in political issues on a global scale. The last decade has seen a huge swell in the public’s interest in geopolitics – there has been a global political awakening on an unprecedented scale. I’m one of those individuals, but I have taken the initiative to bring pertinent information to light that is not commonly discussed in popular media.

Q. What was your goal in changing ink and paper to create several different patterns for certain projects?

A. These types of choices are always in the service of the concept. For example, in “A_B_ peace & terror etc.” the choice of a double-sided print was to graphically express the concept of “two sides to every story”. The translucent quality of the paper not only allows the two data sets to be compared with visual ease, but also creates the thinnest possible barrier between the two planes, symbolising the concept that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. In reality, the two are not so simply distinguished. This is the artistic choice as a designer that I make for every visualisation project – to question collective norms of belief and bring new perspective.

Q. What kind of design would you like to try next?

A. Lately I’ve found myself gravitating toward interactive digital design and less towards print. I’m much more interested in interactive scenarios than the near static worlds I’ve been inhabiting. I’ve always tried to instill a quality of interaction in my print work, but there is only so much a designer can engineer in this context.