George Orwell, in his book 1984, predicted that the solution to an overload of information would be the daily consolidation of all the information in the world into a five letter word. Once you knew the word for the day you knew everything that there was to know. While this has the benefit of extreme simplicity, with the technology of today we can do much better.
As the volume of daily information with which we deal continues to increase at an exponential rate, it is a fair question to ask at what point do we become overwhelmed? Many of us probably feel that we are already very close to the point where we will no longer be able to deal with the words and numbers that are poured over us everyday.
A possible way out of this situation is a return to our primeval senses. We are genetically designed to sense colors, forms, movement and sound as well as tastes and smells. These additional senses — keys to survival for our ancestors — may hold the key to our survival soon. Words and numbers — creations of only a few thousand years ago — have served us well until now, but perhaps we are now approaching a point of returning to our innate senses.
Our ability to distinguish nuances in colors, forms, movement as well as sounds, demonstrate highly developed abilities that, when associated with information, offer the possibility of entirely new ways of displaying and understanding information and gaining knowledge. An excellent example of this approach is the AlloSphere at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The AlloSphere represents “an entirely new way to see and interpret scientific data, in full color and surround sound inside a massive metal sphere. Dive into the brain, feel electron spin, hear the music of the elements” as presented by JoAnn Kuchera-Morin in her TED presentation (embedded below).
Since the early 1990s, we have moved from Heat Maps to the SmartBoards that slice and dice data in a multitude of colors. We are well on our way down the path of returning to an increasing use of our natural senses for a larger share of the information that we must process every day. Now part of our focus should turn toward improving the acuity of our senses.
One of the leading places we interact with visualization is on the news. Hopefully they will help take us to new places so we can comprehend all the new data and information at our disposal.
This is the point at which technology needs to take a hard turn toward a renewed appreciation of the Fine Arts. With a deeper understanding of color, texture, shapes, and movement in the visual and melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, pitch and timbre of audio, it is possible to create a multidimensional and infinitely nuanced presentation of information that is orders of magnitude beyond our current system.
Imagine that instead of starting your day with the most shocking events of the day spread before you in a newspaper, that instead you see a glowing map of the world with some blinking spots, some dark, some dazzling white. You start with a perspective that while there are problems, there is also a lot going well. You zoom in on one of the dark spots and by the colors and sounds you know from experience the surrounding context of the event. As you get down to the finest level of detail there are the familiar words and pictures with an interview or two, but now they are seen in a much larger perspective. You are no longer led daily from one shocking event to another, but rather you control how you navigate your world of information as a flowing stream of understanding that has the nuances of color and sound to enrich the experience.
As in a previous post, I argued for the industrial principles of moving from Just in Case Knowledge to Just in Time Knowledge, I am now making the case for an equal and renewed emphasis on the Fine Arts to improve our ability to understand the world with our senses.
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