Conclusion: Another geography - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 284

impossible. 5 Much of the practical side of this work was only feasible due to the
use of what were then very recent advances in computer hardware and software,
but also the arduous collection of large amounts of digital information, which
remains a very boring task today (Figures 10.5 and 10.6).
Here the abandonment of many past practices is suggested, accepting that
all methods, the ones advocated here included, are tied to the times and places
in which they were created, and can never be universally appropriate. You have
to have an open mind to be able to accept viewing space and time warped in
unfamiliar ways. We need to see more flair in research.
Visualization, it must be stressed, is much more than pretty pictures. 6 It is a
methodology for visually modelling aspects of our world to gain a new, useful
and different understanding. In hindsight this is not so true of the 1990s, but is
truer today, as we are rapidly moving into an age that will manufacture artificial
realities from new kinds of liquid crystal screen kaleidoscopes to computer games
unimaginable three decades ago, to fictional fractal lands, worlds and galaxies.
The imaginative escape from reality is accelerating. We must be careful that
we do not ignore the real world while creating so many artificial universes, careful
not to live too much in artificial social spaces, living in Facebook space rather
than meeting face-to-face. Be careful not to talk too much by email, rather than
in person. In person our eyes allow us to gauge reaction as we both speak and
listen; vision has always been a part of talking, so that when the telephone was
invented in the 1870s, we had to make a step change in our ability to visualize
who we were talking to.
Different goals lay beneath the surface of the 1980s visualization revolution.
At a superficial level, there was the aim to extract more money from the academic
funding agencies of America. 7 This was carried out with the threat that the
Japanese would win the new economic war, and a country already sliding down
the world scale must counter-attack. In hindsight we know that the Japanese
5 We are still learning to use some visual interfaces twenty years after they were designed: 'Think
of these computer models and the windows provided to the models by the graphics systems as the
basic primary representation of information. Not many people have such systems. They are light
years away, not because we don't know how to build them, but because we don't know how to
use them' (Evans, 1973, p. 7). Today these windows are here - on every desktop - but what are we
using them for?
6 Visualization provides a very different paradigm to graphic design: 'These examples reveal an
unconventional design strategy: “To clarify, add detail.” This strategy works because humans are
well-equipped to deal with masses of data. Massive structures fill our world (we see the tree rather
than count the leaves), and the presence of micro information allows viewers to select their own
level of detail, picking out the data important to them. This contradicts a commonly held view that
data display should be reduced to poster-like simplicity, which imposes the designer's view on the
data and limits the usefulness of the graphic. Ultimately, we need complex displays of data because
of the complexity of the world being modelled' (Freeman, 1991, pp. 113 - 114).
7 The threat of Japanese supremacy is well worn: 'Laurin Herr, an analyst with Pacific Interface,
New York, cautions, “In '83 we saw the first wave of Japanese vendors, but they were second tier
vendors.” Although they did not penetrate the U.S. market then, they are a threat and Japanese
devices are already inside our workstations, he says' (Frenkel, 1988, p. 113).