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Perceptual Edge Creative Visualization: Best in Show Page 1
Creative Visualization: Best in Show
Stephen Few
October 2005
This is the final column in a series that features the winners of DM Review's 2005 data
visualization competition. In the fourth and final event of the competition, participants were
given the opportunity to showcase their data visualization skills and imaginations without
restriction to a prescribed set of instructions. Here are the only instructions they were given:
This scenario is not prescribed. You may present any real-world data and
message that can be addressed through a data visualization. It may be a graph,
a dashboard, or any other visual presentation of quantitative data. This is your
opportunity to showcase a data visualization of which you are particularly proud.
I was especially excited about this part of the competition because it would invite innovative
approaches to the visual presentation of data. I wasn't disappointed. In fact, a few of the
submissions expressed imagination that ventured well beyond the bounds of effectiveness.
The winning solution was submitted by Jock Mackinlay of Tableau Software, who also took
the prize for scenario number one and for the competition overall. Given his pedigree, it's no
surprise that Jock's entries did well. Jock has a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford,
where he began his research in the field of information visualization many years ago, before
joining the user interface research group team at Xerox PARC. He worked there from 1986
until recently when he became the director of interface design at Tableau Software. Jock was
also one of the three authors, along with Stuart Card and Ben Shneiderman, who wrote the
best overview to date of research in the field of information visualization, entitled Readings in
Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999).
The data visualization that Jock created using Tableau's software was designed to help a
video game company analyze its competitors' advertising strategies. Before reading the
following description, take a minute to examine the solution in Figure 1.