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National Geographic’s 50 years of Space Exploration
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National Geographic created this infographic that presents
the distances traveled over the past 50 years of space exploration. I believe
that, in a similar manner to transit system maps, infographics are the ultimate
in goal directed eye motion. They summarize data and tell a story with it. It
seems that well designed infographics take advantage of the quick saccades by
carefully placing touchstones where the eye can fixate.
For example, when a person is first confronted
with an infographic like the one above, the eye roves over the design allowing
the mind to determine what it is looking at and what information is presented.
Once the mind has an idea, it begins to from specific starting points to their
conclusion, this motion is facilitated with pre-made pathways for the eye to
naturally follow, supplanting haphazard scan paths. By building in pathways for the eye to follow
you supporting natural just-in-time processing.
For example looking at the image above, how many missions to
Mars have there been from Earth? You start at Earth and as you follow the flow
of the lines, your mind is able anticipate the path and jump ahead to the final
point, Mars, where you see there have been forty missions to the red planet.
And with each successive review of the map, the brain should get faster,
because it doesn’t need to store the information of the map as a whole, as the
map itself is the external memory. The brain simply needs to remember the
fastest way from start point to finish point, which it optimizes with each
review.
