Week 08 - The Form of Data

1)      “Worldlike sparklines should often be embedded in text and tables, which provide a helpful context for interpreting otherwise free- floating sparklines” (49). Do sparklines need to be accompanied with text for understanding to be attained?

For instance, if one’s heartrate were to be monitored and captured graphically from before one’s beginning of life to after death, could that be understood visually without text?

2)      In the same instance of heart rate monitoring, can sparklines be understood auditorily? Can music be described as auditory sparklines?

3)      Moving away from visual and auditory perceptions, can sparklines be understood tactilely?

4)      Christopher Wilmarth’s “Gift of the Bridge” (84) describes the degradation of his birthday card. In architecture, we can see not only the effects of erosion and the changing climate but also material degradation as an indexing of environmental change through time. How/Should can design be done to capture this effectively?

5)      In the cyclogram narrative of the Salyut 6 space flight, we see various amounts of information captured as once. Does presenting this vast amount of information at once mitigate the understanding of critical events as opposed to seeing more detailed day or week by week events shown separately? (See World Map)