The Aesthetics of the Underworld
Nadia Boukhelifa, David John Duke · Eurographics · 2008
Although the development of computational aesthetics has largely concentrated on 3D geometry and illustrative rendering, aesthetics are equally an important principle underlying 2D graphics and information visualization. A canonical example is Beck's design of the London underground map, which not only produced an informative and practical artefact, but also established a design aesthetic that has been widely adopted in other applications. This paper contributes a novel hybrid view to the debate on aesthetics. It arises from a practical industrial problem, that of mapping the vast network of underground assets, and producing outputs that can be readily comprehended by a range of users, from back-office planning staff through to on-site excavation teams. This work describes the link between asset drawing aesthetics and tasks, and discusses methods developed to support the presentation of integrated asset data. It distinguishes a holistic approach to visual complexity, taking clutter as one component of aesthetics, from the graph-theoretic reductionist model needed to measure and remove clutter. We argue that ?de-cluttering' does not mean loss of information, but rather repackaging details to make them more accessible. In this respect, aesthetics have a fundamental role in implementing Schneiderman's mantra of 'overview, zoom & filter, details-on-demand' for information visualization.