One category of blip that seems to be frequenting my radar lately has to do with a certain kind of information design. This subcategory seems like it deserves a better name than “information design,” in that it serves to take great heaps of shapeless data and make something beautiful and interesting out of it. On second thought, maybe that’s what all of information design is meant to do. Maybe it all deserves a less boring name.

In any case, in this sub genre I’m talking about, the purpose is not to, say, take weather data and make cool charts out of it, or creatively show people how they could be saving more on their taxes with a color-coded deductions table — it’s to take a whole category of information that you never would have thought to look at, and creatively squeeze it through a series of algorithms, filters, and visualization subroutines until it becomes something really thought-provoking.

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