Judy Dai

The introductory chapter shows how Kierann Healy thinks about elements that make a figure bad. Healy describes that several diagrams and charts have unnecessary “junks” that makes the whole thing complicated. I do agree that the “life expectancy: 2007” diagram shown in section 1.2 is definitely a bad designed diagram with unnecessary design elements. The drop shadow of the bars and the text is just making the whole graph hard to read. A good diagram is usually both aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand. But the “chartjunk” is not always a bad thing because it can also make the chart memorable and appealing to the audience.

However, even though the diagram has good taste and good data, it cannot represent everything - it can be potentially misleading or biased. Human perception is playing an interesting role here because we always try to interpret and perceive something out of a diagram. Maybe the original data do not suggest certain ideas or patterns, but the brain makes them after it sees the data’s diagram. This is why Healy suggests that a diagram can mislead the audience and even the creator unintendedly. I agreed on this part a lot, because it is possible that a designer uses this quality of data visualization to mislead and persuade the audience to accept the designer’s thoughts and opinions.

I’m not sure how I feel about this chapter because I was trained as a graphic designer to create aesthetically pleasing works. So when it comes to data visualization, it is interesting that several good designed charts listed by Healy seem somehow boring and unappealing to me. According to this chapter, maybe many other data visualizations can be considered as “bad” (for example, some of Giorgia Lupi’s works may be “bad” under this circumstance. )