Via the Freakonomics Blog I ran upon the departure announcement from Doug Bowman, the head of the Google visual design team. What is one of the driving forces behind his leaving Google? Too much reliance on data to make decisions.
Here at Aventine we naturally highly value data. But we also often talk about the limits of analytics as a science, which is to say experience and even instinct bring much to the process. Typically experience makes the difference not so much between right and wrong or more or less accurate, but between more and less useful.
However, the Bowman post prompted some new questions, though he doesn't frame them this way much less answer them. Is the problem with too much data and analysis:
- It doesn't always lead to the "right" answer?
- It is dehumanizing?
- It is a nuisance?
My instinct (if that's allowed) is that it's a bit of all three, but especially one and two. There is much that can't be measured and reduced to formulae, and part of our dignity as human beings lies in the fact that we do not mechanistically respond to events or stimuli like inert matter or mere animials.
This is very relevant in the realm of predicting behavior, as we often do at Aventine, but even more so when dealing aesthtic questions and some the cognitive processes that good information visualization strives to enable. In a funny way the power of our models keeps us employed, and the magnitude of the error terms keeps us human.
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