[pabloarteel]

No, it's not an Art.

I get that people use the word art as "difficult", "obscure" or "intangible" but...

Art is about self-expression, evoking emotions, and open interpretation. Design is about problem-solving, functionality, and clear communication.

Clearly DataViz is Design.

[shriracha]

I don't see art and design as mutually exclusive. I also don't think that data viz is exclusively about functionality.

Take a project like this: https://www.dear-data.com/theproject... this is clearly data visualization and, to me, quite evocative. These visualizations aren't designed for clarity and they don't need to be, that wasn't the goal.

[haswell]

> Art is about self-expression, evoking emotions, and open interpretation

Art is about these things, but is also about many other things. And art can be clear in its intentions, leaving little to interpret.

What is the purpose of data visualization? Often to evoke emotions and to help someone not familiar with the data understand how to interpret it.

The people who accomplish this most effectively understand that the point isn't just to force data points into a visual form. If it were so simple, more people would be good at it (they aren't).

> Clearly DataViz is Design

I don't understand this sentence. I'm not trying to be difficult, but if DataViz is Design, what is Design?

[patrick451]

Evoking emotions is the role of art, not data visualization.

[haswell]

Data visualizations are absolutely used to evoke emotions. Many visualizations are built with the primary goal of driving behavioral change. These by definition will be playing on our hopes, fears, greed, to drive urgency, etc.

Beyond the potential emotional power of a well-chosen and executed visualization, there's also a decent bit of research about the ability to influence mood via color choice. Color choice when visualizing data can make a huge difference in its effectiveness due to this emotional effect.

[patrick451]

I agree data visualization be used for emotional manipulation. But that is unethical. Dressing up rhetoric in the trappings of science is one of the many reasons science has lost tons of credibility in the last 20 years.

Charts should be about hard data, not rhetoric.

[shriracha]

If you really don't see any difference between "evoking emotion" and "emotional manipulation" then nobody will change your mind on this.

And like I wrote about, you can have very precise charts that can be extraordinarily manipulative.

The whole "charts should be about hard data" thing always sounds nice, until you realize that every visualization is an abstraction and brings in some human bias. You are always picking the scales, whether or not to use color, how to aggregate the data, etc. There is no such thing as a neutral chart.

Also... there are data visualizations outside of science. Of course science should be more precise than something like data art.

[ysofunny]

just because we can have an emotional reaction to data visualization does not mean data visualization should be about evoking emotions

[datadrivenangel]

Art as in craft/field! "State of the Art" is a phrase that refers to what is possible within a domain. There is also the implication that it takes judgement, maybe even an artistic sensibility. This is in opposition to a strain of thought within data viz from the Business Intelligence/Analytics side of the field that has succumbed to the MBA/Process gospel that preaches Repeatable Process and the siren song of good data visualization without using your brain!

Is Design an Art?

[ysofunny]

there seems to be two competing visions of what is art:

art as a the top degree in any discipline; like in "state of the art"

but there's also art as that little part of science that escapes rationality, the self-expression drive of a human and so on

> "It can be a science, an art, and a craft all at once."

suggests the article leans for the art as the top level of some discipline definition of art

[wodenokoto]

It's "art" as in the phrase "More of an art than science"

[exe34]

data Viz for it's own sake might be design - in real applications, you always have a story you're trying to tell - and it doesn't go away just because you're not consciously aware of it.