The Art of Insight

Chapter 6Living Visualization

with Pedro Cruz

Figure 6.1: “Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration”

https://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

—Richard Powers

I connected the last words of my conversation with Sonja Kuijpers to a passage from The Best of Two Worlds (1953) by the naturalist and pantheist Joseph Wood Krutch:

Order and obedience are the primary characteristics of that which is not alive. The snowflake eternally obeys its one and only law: “Be thou six pointed”; the planets their one and only: “Travel thou in an ellipse.” The astronomer can tell where the North Star will be then thousand years hence; the botanist cannot tell where the dandelion will bloom tomorrow. Life is rebellious and anarchical, always testing the supposed immutability of the rules which the nonliving changelessly accepts.

Traditional visualizations are often an attempt to reveal characteristics of the living, but they do it by forcing such phenomena to conform to the lifeless perfection of geometric shapes. There are designers who rebel against such tyranny of the straight, the smooth, the sterile. Nadieh and Sonja are among them, and so are Federica Fragapane (Chapter 7) and Pedro Cruz, a designer and professor at Northeastern University whose most famous visualization is titled “Simulated Dendrochronology ...