Was pondering the other day after seeing ‘The Difference Between Art and Design‘, which listed five points:

1. Good Art Inspires. Good Design Motivates.
2. Good Art Is Interpreted. Good Design Is Understood.
3. Good Art Is a Taste. Good Design Is an Opinion.
4. Good Art Is a Talent. Good Design Is a Skill.
5. Good Art Sends a Different Message to Everyone. Good Design Sends the Same Message to Everyone.

I wonder: where would you insert information aesthetics? Would it replace art or design? (First disregarding the whole issue of what a ‘good information aesthetic visualisation’ is to begin with!)

1. Motivates: the point about effectively communicating a message is key here.
2. Interpreted or Understood? Information aesthetic visualisations should be firstly understood (through familiarity, intuitive interaction, etc) with an overall meaning, but be open to interpretation through interaction. This one is contentious because in many ways design can be interpreted, too. Heck, anything can!
3. Opinion: this one is dicey, too, but largely, it’s about opinion. I would say that subjective taste does play a part when you get into the less-familiar modes of representation, and people would still have taste-based judgements about colour choice and style.
4. Talent & Skill: definitely! You need to have an emotional connection to the data – an intrinsic ability to bring out meaning and insights – and what the visualisation is trying to communicate, but you need the know-how to effectively do this.
5. Different & Same: this is the same as point 2.

The most salient message here is that, if information aesthetics can replace ‘design’ in most of these instances, then it in fact becomes a part of the design and HCI fields. Ie: not the computer science or software engineering field which information visualisation comes from, and where a lot of people argue that it shouldn’t be anyway!