Weekly Reading: The functional Art - Chapter 4


This week I read Chapter 4 of The Functional Art. This chapter continues with the visualization wheel, which gives a more detailed mention for the graphic arrangement. 

The idea that “tons of special effects cannot rescue the visualization which lacks good information” run through the whole chapter, and it is buried deeply in my mind right now. This reminds me a Chinese idiom "embroidered pillow ", which boasts a beautiful cover, but with only worthless dried straw stuffed inside. The critique might be harsh, but it is definitely a truth. Too much decoration will distract people’s attention – even the tough-cookie man would fall for a beauty –and leads to poor decisions.

To draw a conclusion for this part, we could say there is no significant relation between the cool additions and level of explorations; novel form could mesmerize audience, but if too much, it will influence audience’s cognitive ability or decline the reliability of visualization. Whereas, it is not to say that we should abandon “wacky graphic form” totally. It is an open mind for the novel graphic form, as long as it fits the criteria which is propitious to exploration. What’s more, if applying a novel form, we should pay attention to redundancy, that is, make it understandable for our readers.

Boom effect could be a great tool especially in the process of basic learning (“no pretense of depth”). Like the “sex change surgery” graphics, which give me an impressive explanation. While it might be funny to relay the graphic to my friends using words like “shrink” or “swell”, for people who want to get a scientific explanation, it is obviously not enough. So, the audience orientation is also very important. Not all readers are equal. Fragmented reading or shallow reading is prevalent nowadays – whether it is born this way or by cultivated – people think this way could gain amounts of knowledge and entertainment in a short time so that they “give up” go depth to explore. However, we should believe there are still some people who are patient enough to slow down their pace, to find something worthful. 

P.s. There is a theory called Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), which is a dual process theory describing the change of attitudes. The ELM proposes two major routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route. It said, under the central route, persuasion will result from a person's careful and thoughtful consideration of the true merits of the information presented in support of an advocacy. The central route involves a high level of message elaboration in which a great amount of cognition about the arguments are generated by the individual receiving the message. The results of attitude change will be relatively enduring, resistant, and predictive of behavior. So, explorations which may involve much work of brain cells, is quite suitable for audience who are willing to apply central route when they read.

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