Design workshop ended

Last half day for the Visualization Design Workshop at the Gordon Research Conference. The good things always finish...

The final exercise of the workshop presented four ideas on how to redesign a visualization. Here are some comments on mine. But the best visualization was the animation of a protein docking made for illustration, not exploration. Amazing!

Then Barbara Tversky spoke on External Representations and especially on Animation usage.

Interesting:

• Animation is hard to perceive
• Animations are conceived as discrete steps
• It is showing, not explaining

That means, that I should reconsider how molecular animations are made. Currently they are simply the translation into images of the data received. Why I'm not able to extract important points? Why the sequence is never segmented into "worth note" and "transition" parts.

As usual the available time is the main constrain together with the difficulty to understand what the user want to demonstrate with the movie.

After dinner, the real Gordon Research Conference begins. Nice for the ones of us that are still not synchronized with the time zone...