Designing Graphic Presentations from First Principles é a dissertação de mestrado de Michael Schiff, da Universidade da Califórnia, EUA. Esta dissertação descreve uma abordagem dos princípios de projetar automaticamente apresentações gráficas de informação. Os componentes desta abordagem incluem um quadro conceitual para discutir como codificar informações, algoritmos para determinar se um método de apresentação será capaz de apresentar um determinado tipo de informação, design e princípios para garantir a interpretação e perceptiva eficácia de um método de apresentação.
Eis o abstract e a conclusão da pesquisa:
Abstract:
“Compared with previous approaches to automatically designing presentations, the approach outlined in this dissertation is more fine-grained and more general. It begins with an extremely general notion of how graphic presentations can encode information, then develops this into a useful framework by making a number of explicit assumptions about the types of presentations that people can use. This framework serves as a basis for analyzing the space of possible graphical languages-i.e., the space of systematic methods of presenting data. The logical adequacy of different graphical languages for different types of information, and criteria and methods for composing graphical languages for different data are also explored”
Conclusions:
“This dissertation presents a new approach to the problem of automatically designing graphic presentations. Based on the evidence presented in chapter 7, I think this approach can be considered a qualified success. As the examples of that chapter demonstrate, a system operating from first principles can be capable of designing a wide range of graphic presentations, including standard ones such as bar and network graphs, variations on these standards, and even rather complicated and unusual ones such as the graph of Napoleon’s Russian campaign. While a system making use of predefined languages can certainly be capable of designing standard presentations and some variations of these presentations, getting it to design unusual variations or new types of presentations will be difficult unless the techniques are known in advance and pre-programmed”.