Design and Redesign

The essay Design and Redesign by Viegas and Wattenberg is an important bridge between the design culture (of design and redesign) and data visualization. It has a great discussion of how designers use critique and redesign, and how this can be used (and abused) in visualization. At the time (2015) it was trying to bring design culture to visualization, and the importance of visualization to designers.

• Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg, “Design and Redesign” (Medium/“in Data Visualization”, 2015; Medium Blog Posting. (It was originally written as an essay for a Spanish news design awards anthology)

I recommend that you (a student, or VisSnack reader) read this “essay” because it is one of the best descriptions of how critique can be used to drive re-design. And how re-designing can be a useful tool for critique (learning from examples). If you haven’t seen my thoughts on critique, you might want to start with {{link 4-critique}}.

In the decade plus since this was published, the importance of visualization and the value of design in it have been well established. We have become much better at online discussions. The authors, and the others they refer to, have become key figures in the field.

Reading the essay is worthwhile - the examples and the writing are worth it. The historical context is a bit dated, but that might make this even more important. As a community, visualization research has learned from design practice. We all need to do this.

Claude’s Summary

• Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg, “Design and Redesign” (Medium/“in Data Visualization”, 2015; first published in Malofiej 22, Annual Book)

What it is: An essay by two Google Brain researchers (co-leaders of the PAIR initiative) examining “critique by redesign” — the practice, unique to data visualization, of criticizing a chart by remaking it from the same underlying data — and proposing rules of engagement for doing it well. Prompted by an online critique Alberto Cairo posted of their work, plus the Twitter/blog fallout that followed.

AI summary: The essay opens by naming a genre: visualization has become “a mass medium,” and with mass popularity comes public criticism, but criticism-by-redesign is a move no other medium’s critics can make — “A movie critic can’t remake a movie. An art critic can’t ask the subject of a portrait to sit for a second time… But with data visualization, if there’s access to the underlying data set… it’s feasible to create at least a rough redesign.” They walk through three examples with escalating stakes: Tufte’s famous Visual Explanations redesign of the Challenger O-ring charts (the standalone-outlier scatterplot that “proves” cold weather doomed the launch); the 2004 US election “red/blue map” saga, where an initially misleading choropleth spawned a collaborative, non-adversarial public sequence of purple maps and population cartograms; and Cairo’s redesign of Giorgia Lupi’s “small multiples” author-lifespan chart as a plain linear timeline. From there they pivot to a case that went badly — Cairo’s February 2015 “unrolling” of a radial Arab Spring timeline (by Alexander Katin and Kir Khachaturov) into linear coordinates, which triggered a heated, personal Twitter pile-on (“I’m siding with @blprnt rather than @albertocairo in the great circular timeline debate of 2015,” plus “some more heated Tweets… all caps and expletives”).

The essay’s analytical core is that redesigns look objective (“the data seems to speak for itself”) but smuggle in exactly the same judgment calls a designer makes — which variables to include, how much to simplify, how much weight an outlier gets — while appearing to remove the critic’s fingerprints. Their read of Tufte’s own redesign is the sharpest example: it “makes an open-and-shut case at first glance. Stare a little longer, and you realize that the bulk of the visual effect rests on just one data point, the dramatic outlier” — and his scatterplot quietly omits variables (O-ring location/type) that “in hindsight… was irrelevant… but of course there was no way to know that at the time.” Removing context is called “perhaps the biggest problem with redesigns”: “Design is compromise… To redesign without knowing these constraints… is, in some sense, unfair.” A second thread contrasts two intellectual cultures vis sits between — art/design criticism (private studio crits, shared context, professional norms) and science (falsifiability, double-blind experiment, “human judgment… removed from the process”) — arguing public online redesign inherits neither culture’s safeguards: it’s exposed and personal like a crit, but claims the disinterested authority of an experiment.

Their proposed “rules of engagement” split into three: maintain rigor (state the redesign’s goal explicitly since visualizations serve many goals — communicate, persuade, create an aesthetic experience — and a critic optimizing a different goal than the designer should say so; disclose any data reduction; when professional judgments genuinely disagree, that disagreement is itself useful information, and sometimes the honest move is to hand the question to an actual experiment rather than keep arguing); respect the designer (redesign the highest-prestige source available rather than punching down at a student; call out what’s already good, not only what’s wrong; consider a “backwards” redesign — take something excellent and degrade it — as a gentler way to make the same pedagogical point without a real designer’s work being publicly torn apart); and respect the critic (a redesign needn’t be polished to be valid — “it’s not a competition between critic and designer, but instead a proof point for ideas about design”). They close by wanting the field’s criticism to grow up: today’s redesign debates are almost all about technique (radial vs. linear, this color vs. that), and they want to see vis criticism eventually spend as much energy on content — the visualization equivalent of a book review discussing plot and character, not just prose style — as literary and film criticism already do.

What a student/VisSnacks reader should get out of it:

• Redesign-as-critique isn’t neutral just because it “shows the data” — every redesign encodes a goal and a set of simplifying choices, exactly like the original did; state yours.
• The Challenger scatterplot is worth re-examining specifically because it’s presented in class (via Tufte) as the gold-standard redesign — this essay is the counter-read that shows its persuasive power leans on one dramatic point and an unstated choice of which variables to drop.
• The distinction between design-studio critique culture (private, shared context, collegial) and scientific culture (falsifiable, judgment-free) explains why public online redesigns can feel uniquely brutal — they borrow the exposure of the internet without the social contract of either home culture.
• “Backwards redesign” (degrade a good example to illustrate a principle) is a usable classroom/self-critique technique distinct from “redesign a bad example,” with a real advantage: nobody’s actual work gets torn down in public.
• The three rules (state your goal, disclose simplifications, respect both designer and critic) are directly reusable as ground rules for in-class critique sessions and peer redesign exercises, not just internet arguments.

Skim/skip guidance: Read closely: “Redesign as criticism” (the Tufte/Challenger walkthrough and its hidden-judgment-call point), “Redesign in public” (the election-map case as the good outcome, the Arab-Spring-timeline case as the bad one), and “Rules of engagement” in full — it’s the essay’s payload. The “Redesign: bridging the two cultures” section (art/design vs. science norms) is good context but can be skimmed if short on time; the Conclusion’s forward-looking wish for content-focused criticism is a nice closer but adds no new mechanism.

Memorable specifics:

• “A movie critic can’t remake a movie. An art critic can’t ask the subject of a portrait to sit for a second time… But with data visualization… it’s feasible to create at least a rough redesign.”
• On Tufte’s Challenger scatterplot: “the bulk of the visual effect rests on just one data point, the dramatic outlier.” And: “Had the correct scatterplot or data table been constructed… no one would have dared to risk the Challenger in such cold weather” (Tufte’s own quote, which the essay then quietly complicates).
• Sample Twitter reaction to the Cairo/Arab-Spring redesign clash: “I’m with the straight line version, if the purpose is clarity. To read the circles I need to perform, like, a zillion eye movements as I move along the scale.”
• The definition of criticism they borrow from Bardzell: “an expert of a given domain’s informed exercise of judgment; familiar examples include film and literary critics, architectural criticism, and even a qualified Master of Wine’s ability to judge wine.”
• Closing thesis: “We’ll know that visualization has matured as a medium when we see as much criticism about content as we do today about technique.”

Caveats: It’s a reflective essay by practitioners, not an empirical study — the “rules of engagement” are proposed norms, not tested ones, and the essay says so implicitly by framing them as suggestions. It’s explicitly occasioned by, and partly a response to, a specific dispute Cairo was involved in (both the Lupi timeline and the Arab Spring timeline cases feature his redesigns), so it’s worth reading as participants in a live disagreement working out principles in real time, not as disinterested observers. The essay predates (2015) the now-standard “roast/redesign” culture in the dataviz community, so some of its anxieties about public redesign as a novel, disorienting phenomenon read as more urgent than they might today — the field has since developed more of the social norms it was calling for.