Art and Design: Cures for Society's Growing Data Perceptual Blindness?

Until the early 20th century, scientific and engineering decision making depended on direct human observation of empirical phenomena. Although instruments extending the range of human perception and action had been developed and were used, a firsthand human involvement in the observation, collection and classification of information was unavoidable. During the past century the development of technology hand-in-hand with the new needs of scientific inquiry made our instruments so powerful and sophisticated that they now largely mediate our relationship with reality. Paradoxically, these very instruments have now evolved to such an extent that they themselves have become too complex, large, small, faraway and/or fast to allow for unassisted human operation. We need instruments to run our other instruments! As a result, today's ordinary scientific and engineering work requires an almost-total removal of direct human engagement from reality, lest it lead to imprecise, inefficient, biased or even dangerous outcomes—think of genetic research, astronomy, quantum physics, medical probing, nuclear power plant management, etc.

As I write this, engineers and scientists across the planet are conducting millions of operations that depend on accessing, analyzing and generating terabits of data by means of highly removed and abstract representational instruments. Likewise, the actions of individuals in the developed world are continuously being converted into data, then sent to and stored in servers to be accessed through various information instruments in order to be studied and used in business transactions, security checks, military operations, health care decisions, air travel planning and more. Given that the production of data and technology is accelerating so rapidly that it has begun to outpace our capacity to manage it, our total dependency on instruments and data representations is more than worrisome [1]. The stakes get quite high when the monitored system/behaviors involve high risks and decisions that must be made in real time. Growing rates of human error in decision making point to yet another, and maybe even more troublesome, fact: Existing data instruments displaying received sensor information often hinder rather than facilitate understanding [2].

The new information display models advanced so far have only partially alleviated the growing data perceptual blindness afflicting society. The reason is simple: Most of the work in this area has been done by those who develop the data or devise the instruments themselves—scientists and engineers, generally trained in quantitative, not qualitative, methods; in analytical, not integrative, processes; in obtaining or using, not in communicating, knowledge. Clearly, the field of data visualization needs the help of professionals familiar with representation, design and communication.

Art and design have an especially important role to play in lending perceptual power to the unclear and overwhelming sensorial output coming out of our instruments. Conceiving new representational conventions and tools that transform raw data into meaningful information is something that comes naturally to artists and designers. The act of turning automatic sensation into conscious perception has been one of the great contributions of art and design throughout history.

This by no means suggests a solitary effort. Undertaking this project requires addressing many intertwined and difficult issues and dimensions. Not only must one have some cognitive model of the users' data-driven decision making processes, but one must also determine the nature and behavior of the data (structure, process), the type of problem, needs and requirements, the technology to deliver such depictions, necessary evaluation systems, etc. This cannot be done by any one domain alone. Nothing less than a well-organized interdisciplinary approach will do.

Art and design, as disciplines of qualitative, interpretive, creative, intuitive, critical and multimodal inquiry dependent on depiction and communication, offer unmatched, millennia-old expertise in the weakest areas of present-day data discernment systems. By taking a lead role in restoring society's perceptual ability to process data collected by its ever more ubiquitous and powerful instruments, art and design would become society's prime cognitive faculty in making sense out of information chaos. This project is full of intellectual and practical opportunities for artists and designers, and while its full impact is hard to grasp, it is safe to forecast that such a project...