This document discusses the experience of data and materiality through indexical design. It explores how images and visualizations can help build knowledge by not just representing data symbolically, but also showing causal relationships and physical evidence through indexical traces. Examples are given of data visualizations that function indexically by framing phenomena, ambient displays that can be read like traces, and citizen science projects that establish physical evidence. The document examines how traces connect representational practices to the physical world and are discovered through the act of reading them, sitting at the intersection of meaning and materiality.

1. 25 JUN
the experience
of information
and materiality
of data
Indexical Design
Fenway Center
Northeastern University
77 St. Stephen Street
Boston, MA
Organized by the
MFA program in
Information Design
and Visualization
Department of Art + Design

2. Peircean Semiology revisited
iconic
symbolic
indexical
Peirce, Charles Sanders. "What is a sign." (1894).

3. symbolic
indexical
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iconic
?

4. Information design and visual analytics
How can images, visualizations, visual languages, diagrams … help us
build knowledge?
What makes a good research question?
Ursus Wehrli – Tidying up Art - http://www.kunstaufraeumen.ch/en
is data visualization really all about symbolic operations?
three reasons why we do not think so.

5. #1. The kinship between indexical phenomena and
languages of visualization

6. we can read certain traces like data visualizations

8. http://imgur.com/Fz3TKfE
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9. The seismograph shows the dual role of the trace as symbol (linechart) and index

10. Kamel Makhloufi, “function”, 2010
indexical relationship in the digital domain -
1 pixel = 1 casualty (chart with defined resolution)

11. #2. Implicit causality: traces and visual evidence

12. “Seven” (1995), Dir. David Fincher

13. • Public Lab, Brooklyn NY. Balloon Mapping of
the Gowanus Canal. Photo Josh Weinstein
establishing physical evidence as a central concern also in citizen science

14. Galton, Francis. 1892. Finger Prints. Macmillan and Company.
traces are the result of the method of measurement.
they may be (literally) objective but are not necessarily neutral

15. to see tree rings, we have to cut a tree

16. #3 Experience: traces do not explain, they show

17. Adrian Pratt
Router
we can read symbolic representations like traces
(router LEDs as ambient display)

18. Subvisual Subway, Craig Ward, 2016
problems of representation across scales - Biology / micro biome projects

19. Design principles of indexical design:
framing, not mapping a phenomenon
Offenhuber, Dietmar, and Orkan Telhan. 2015. “Indexical Visualization – the Data-Less Information Display.” In Ubiquitous
Computing, Complexity and Culture, edited by Ulrik Ekman, Jay David Bolter, and Lily Diaz. New York: Crc Press.

20. Wilks, Kiesl, Moser, 2007, Garden of Eden, air quality display, Ars Electronica 2007

21. Lorenzo Scarpelli, Xiaxin Chen, Sound Identity 2015

22. "Is reading traces an ancient relic of “wild knowledge,” or is it present
in all developed symbolic, epistemic, and interpretative practices?
How can we differentiate reading traces from reading text, and from
interpreting linguistic and visual signs?
Are traces the seam where the meaningless becomes meaningful?
Do they connect our representational practices with the tangibility,
physicality, and materiality of the world?
Are traces discovered or are they constructed in the act of reading?"
translated from: Krämer, Sybille, Gernot Grube, and Werner Kogge. 2007. Spur: Spurenlesen Als
Orientierungstechnik Und Wissenskunst. 1st ed. Suhrkamp.

23. Pedro Cruz & Tom Starr - conference program
Cyanometer - Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Alexander von Humboldt, 1789