The Art of Science
Science is our profession here. Every day we navigate the fields of economics, mathematics, finance, statistics, physics…it is easy for us to get wrapped up in all of the high minded work that we do. Indeed, many of the brightest minds in research today are laser-focused in their fields, collaborating with very few peers in thin vertical slices of study.

Too bad we aren’t more like the ancient intellectuals. Up until the Industrial Age, it was popular for great scientists to traverse a variety of subjects, each time carrying over the tools of reasoned, systematic thinking.

The contrast between science then and science now got me thinking…what is science, really? Is it pure discovery, or is it something else? Discovery is fundamental, of course – every serious researcher has some guiding hypothesis that he or she hopes to answer through the hard work of experimentation and analysis. But I’ve got to believe that a scientist’s mission is more than that – it is also the sharing of that discovery to an audience well outside of the field, even perhaps to the public at large. The subtle presentation of a complex subject – “telling the story” of the process, the result, and its meaning – now that is what separates the good from the great. It is the “art” of science that I think is both necessary and yet slowly disappearing from common practice today.

Just recently I attended a seminar by Edward Tufte, Yale University professor and author of the acclaimed “Visual Display of Quantitative Information” (first in a series of three works). Dr. Tufte’s insights on how to present data accurately and in highly compressed visual form are noteworthy. He uses modern day and centuries-old examples of good and bad practice to show us what is in essence a whole other science of telling complex stories using properly structured graphics.

So my reference to “art” in the title is literal: telling the story of a great piece of research is often just that: a picture, a graph – lines and forms on a page using just the right blend of colors and shapes and scale.

Visualization of complexity is one of the most profound yet under-applied tools in business and science. Here at Industrial Science, we often put as much time into the visual display of a simulation than in the underlying logic, and that is as it should be. For all the work that goes into making a great piece of analysis is useless if it is cloaked in a language that cannot be expressed to all.
- posted by Industrial Science @ 8:38 AM 1 comments