Visualising the Process of Transformation

This paper investigates the process of transformation that is part of the ISOTYPE (International System Of TYpographic Picture Education) system, using the correspondence between Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath /his wife Marie Neurath and Town Clerk A. V. Williams of the town of Bilston in the UK. The letters were written around 1946 and are part of the preparations for creating an exhibition—containing 12 charts—on a possible housing development project in Bilston, a poor neighbourhood in Staffordshire, England. According to the ISOTYPE system, the transformer, the link between expert and artist (M. Neurath, 1960: 113-115), works across disciplines on organizing, analysing and configuring data into visual form (Kinross, 2009:6). It is my intention to use the correspondence from this transformation process to build on earlier identification and visualisation of the essential principles of transformation, completed through the sketches made for the above-mentioned exhibition. The correspondence adds to the understanding of transformation situations which are not obvious from the sketches alone. It is my aim to go one step further than previous revisions of the idea of transformation (Macdonald-Ross & Waller, 1974; Kinross, 1979, 2009) and study the sketches, the correspondence, and the design process, and complement these with Otto and Marie Neurath’s reports. I have investigated the material through design, using methodological approaches from data visualisation as a supplementary research method to prevent the danger of standardising a complex process. I will also demonstrate the role of the correspondence in relation to the transformation process, and it will be evident that ISOTYPE goes further than oversimplifying and replacing numbers with symbols (Tufte, 1997:37, Macdonald-Ross & Waller 1974), since charts, which might look simple, have been through a very complex and thorough process.