“Think of all the popular data visualization pieces out there – the ones that you always hear in lectures, read about in blogs, and the ones that popped into your head as you were reading this sentence. What do they all have in common? They probably all told a great story. Maybe the story was to convince us of something, compel us to action, enlighten us with new information, or force us to question our own preconceptions. Whatever it is, truly great data visualization reaches us at a very human level and that is why we remember them.”

What I love about Flowing Data is that they cover so many wonderful ways of visually expressing ideas as well as what works and what doesn’t work when trying to express an idea.

I find for myself that a visual representation works mostly when it can be intuitively understood as to what it represents. Now, of course, it might not always be the case that what you intuit from a visual representation is accurate. In some cases what you intuit is downright the opposite of what the graphical representation is supposed to visualize.

I kept this in mind as I looked at this triangle thing. Frankly, I really didn’t intuitively pick up that it represented anything about intelligence. It might be meaningful to the author and he may provide an explanation of how it all fits together, but I really don’t see why the points of the triangle and the edges could not be represented by any number of things that are important to a particular individual that would lead to “intelligence” being the centerpiece.