Archive for May, 2014

Design vs. Art

Monday, May 12th, 2014

I am writing these words in Amsterdam. Yesterday, when I arrived here, I visited the Stedelijk Museum of contemporary art and design. The featured exhibition was the work of the Dutch industrial designer Marcel Wanders. This exhibit was timely, for I’m currently reading a book titled Design This Day by Walter Dorwin Teague, one of […]

The Three Vs and the Big O

Tuesday, May 6th, 2014

It’s often useful to take a fresh look at things through the eyes of an outsider. My friend Leanne recently provided me with an outsider’s perspective after reading a blog article of mine regarding Big Data. In it I referred to the three Vs—volume, velocity, and variety—as a common theme of Big Data definitions, which […]

VisualCue: A Zombie, Reanimated

Friday, May 2nd, 2014

On two occasions several years ago I was asked by business intelligence publications to review a software product named FYI Visual. On both occasions I gladly accepted because people needed to be warned about it. FYI Visual was a zombie in the sense that, when it was born from the imagination of its creator, a […]

Why Do We Visualize Quantitative Data?

Thursday, May 1st, 2014

We visualize quantitative data to perform three fundamental tasks in an effort to achieve three essential goals: These three tasks are so fundamental to data visualization, I’ve long used them to define the term, as follows: Data visualization is the use of visual representations to explore, make sense of, and communicate data. But why is […]