The September issue of Science (the online version) features a slideshow of the winners of the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, a contest sponsored by Science magazine and the National Science Foundation. As beautiful as these photographs, illustrations and multimedia depictions are, they’re especially important because they help us see abstraction and make better sense how things work. From the intro:
As Felice Frankel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the challenge judges, put it, "The science community needs to discuss the enormous contribution good visual translations can bring to both communication and advancing the thinking behind the science. Critically thinking about what makes an honest and successful representation and raising our standards can only be beneficial for the science community as a whole."
Wouldn’t it be cool to see the same sort of thing applied to business processes or complex integration issues like enterprise architecture. I’ve heard about sonification -- data being converted to music to detect patterns and anomalies -- at Berkeley, where they convert data coming from space to music and at Canada's Sheridan Institute of Technology, where they use it to monitor network traffic.
I think we’ve gone just about as far as flowcharts and Excel graphs are going to take us. Do you know of anyone who’s doing innovative work in this area?
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