Competition: What is the most Ugly and Useless Visualization Online?

Information Aesthetics has decided to, at least temporarily, embrace the dark side of visualization and learn to love the ugly and useless of the visualization world.

While we keep discussing the necessity of theoretical frameworks, start dozens of vizblogs with endless “best-of” lists, and criticize the best practice of data visualizations, we seem to have lost the attention to a parallel universe, which no-one really recognizes the need to write a manifesto for. A field that is potentially more prevalent than all visualization “tools” and “artwork” put together. I mean those data visualizations that are neither “eye candy” nor “useful”, neither “beautiful” nor “functional”, neither “art” nor a “tool”, neither “user-satisfactory” nor “effective”, and neither stimulating the “heart” nor the “brain”. The challenge of this competition is thus for you to find the most “ugly”, “useless” and “disfunctional” data visualization online. It sounds easy, but can be more difficult than you might think.

If you think you have a contender, drop a line to ugly@infosthetics.com and you could win one of 2 copies of the FusionCharts Developer Bundle, worth $499.

via Competition: What is the most Ugly and Useless Visualization Online? – information aesthetics.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Science bad, contest, infographics