40 – Art and Science in Visualization

The process of creating an effective visual representation of a set of data is both an art and a science, requiring extensive efforts in visualization design, implementation, and evaluation. For visualization design, there are significant potential benefits in seeking inspiration from previous graphical work in art, illustration, visual communication, and design, and in seeking insights from research in vision and visual perception. This chapter discusses the art and science of visualization design and evaluation, illustrated with case study examples from the research. For each application, the chapter describes how inspiration from art and insight from visual perception can provide guidance for the development of promising approaches to the targeted visualization problems. As appropriate, relevant details of the algorithms developed are included to achieve the referenced implementations, and where studies have been done, the chapter discusses their findings and the implications for future directions of work.