Can art education impact data storytelling and visualization skills?

We know how important visualizations such as charts and graphs are when it comes to illustrating the relationships and trends within data. Yet putting together an intuitive visualization is easier said than done, and few people go beyond rudimentary line graphs or pie charts.

What if we could teach children from a young age about the relationship between numbers and visual storytelling? As institutes increasingly embrace a STEAM paradigm by integrating "Art" into the traditional STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) approach, would the early stimulation of our creativity help in that regard? And would this also enhance our overall data literacy and our ability to derive value from data?

Indeed, we can see plenty of linkages as we consider art in relation to science – as amply evidenced by the scientific illustrations found in biology and engineering textbooks. In fact, visual and graphic arts have the potential to reveal new perspectives on science and technology that are highly relevant to our traditional understanding of these disciplines.

A picture paints a thousand words

Within data analytics, art has the potential to create more intuitive insights and narratives from our analysis. We know from studies at MIT that up to 90% of the information our brains store is visual, and we can process an image in around 13 milliseconds. It’s no surprise to hear that the use of visualizations in presentations can shorten business meetings by almost a quarter, according to the Wharton School of Business.

However, the real power of art and visualizations is in their ability to help us tell a story. Anyone who has read Yuval Noah Harari’s wildly popular book Sapiens will be aware of his assertion that “Storytelling is our speciality. It's the basis for everything we do as a species”.  

In that vein, an analysis of the most popular 500 TED Talk presentations found that stories made up 65% of their content. When we consider the many billions of dollars spent each year on the creation of movies, books, and television series, it’s clear how much we love a good story.

Few people understand how valuable storytelling is than art educators. At every level of art education, from kindergartens to the fine arts programs at colleges, teachers and lecturers encourage their students to find narratives for the art they are creating. As students start to tell stories through art, they are learning and practicing an invaluable skill set that they can use when it comes to data storytelling.

At the same time, we also see skilled artists turning data visualizations into their own art by deconstructing their meaning and representing them to us. One such artist, David McCandless, turns complex data sets such as worldwide military spending and Facebook status updates into beautiful new diagrams that tease out unseen connections. 

There is certainly potential for building links between art education and data literacy at every age. As businesses and individuals around us become increasingly fixated and driven by data, we will instinctively turn to our best storytellers to help us make sense of the world.

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About the author

As the Global Head of Data Literacy at Qlik, I help individuals and organizations realize their data and analytical potential by strengthening their data literacy. If you’d like to learn more about creating a data-driven culture in your organization please feel free to contact me at [email protected].