Visualization and life

Nadieh Brehmer’s upcoming book, CHART Designing Creative Data Visualizations from Charts to Art, will be published in 2025 in the series that Tamara Munzner and I co-edit. Here’s the first draft of the preface (the final version will likely be different):

Back in the 1970’s Václav Havel wrote that “life, in its essence, moves towards plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution and self-organization” and “towards the fulfillment of its own freedom.” On the other hand, authoritarian systems of power demand “conformity, uniformity, and discipline,” and, contrary to life, which “strives to create new and improbable structures”, they “force life into its most probable states.”

Havel was referring to how autocracy in his own country, Czechoslovakia, diluted dissidence through enforced civil mediocrity, silence, and comfortable acquiescence, but it’s possible to infer much broader themes from his words: the constant tension in human existence between the drive to think and act independently, as autonomous individuals, and the pressure and constraints imposed by the structures, legitimate or not, we all operate into.

To Havel, life itself, if lived well and in truth, is an act of dissidence. So is work done ethically, with care and attention to detail.

What does this have to do with the book that you have in your hands? Nadieh Bremer’s work is an act of creative dissidence within a world—the world of data visualization—where inherited heuristics and conventions were enforced by community pressure and went barely challenged for too many years. All visualizations, typical thinking went, have to be efficient, effective, simple, and ought to stick to a bare and sanitized modernist aesthetic.

Times have changed for the better. Nadieh belongs to a new generation of visualization designers who explore boundaries and cross them. This book doesn’t dismiss conventional graphic forms—the bar graph, the line graph, the pie chart, the choropleth map will fortunately always be with us,—but it reminds us that the language of visualization doesn’t need to remain static, and that expanding it can be thrilling.

Like Havel’s “life”, this language, if unshackled, can evolve instead towards plurality and diversity and, as Nadieh’s book exemplifies, it can create new and improbable structures, most mysterious and wondrous ones.

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This newsletter has been silent in the past few weeks; the reason is that I’m looking into bringing it to a different platform, and making it part of the Open Visualization Academy.

I was already wary of Substack when I launched the newsletter, but recent developments have finally persuaded me to make the move; I don’t want to be associated with individuals and entities that are detrimental to civil discourse and that are active threats to marginalized minorities. I’ll keep you all posted when the move happens.