Applied Visual Complexity

As stated in visualcomplexity.com :

"Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans."

Matt Woolman

Digital Information Graphics

We got in love with Manuel Lima’s term: Visual Complexity, so we decided to simply Apply the concept to real needs of different industries, and, to add life, we created artifacs to visualize in real-time.

Looking for applicable visual models, we found that models presenting 100% of the data became magical and magically transformed our hungry for numbers and percentages into a whole different mental state, a contemplating state.

We call “ALL-DATA” or NO-FILTERED models to those models presenting all the underlying data. These models can be filtered of course, or transformed to a better understanding of the represented information.

Using colors, shapes, shades, transformations and 3d among others, these models have found to be very useful to our goal: Comprehension, Understanding, sense, trends identification and finally: meaning.

We created the term Applied Visual Complexity to cover in a single term all of the above concepts.

Important caracteristics to add are:

- Importance of Aesthetics

- Understanding facilitator

- Actionability

- Provoking Questioning

- Provoking Reactions

- Experimental

It is suposed to be an underlying system or database already there, as a data source. It is supposed that a business intelligence framework already exists to help grouping and analizing the data. Could be there a Big-Data model somewhere. An AVC Model (Applied Visual Complexisty Model) looks for other purposes.

In our own point of view, firstable: Beauty. Data must be beautiful, then, captive.

Once captive, the visual model must make sense to the viewer, and transform the viewer into a questioning entity inmediately.

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.”

― Claude Lévi-Strauss