Project Title

Speak to the Eyes
Client Services
Exhibition

Client Name

Studio-X Istanbul

Delivery Date

18 May 2017

Visualizing Information from the Ottoman Era to the Republic

“The best way to capture imagination is to speak to the eyes.”
William Playfair*

The information highways brought into our lives by a rapidly developing technology, transformed information into a web that is commonly known as “bigdata”**. Systems designed to store and process large volumes of data also changed the methods to get access to and present information. This enormous momentum gave prominence to academic fields, which document and archive information as well as enabling it to read past data. One of these is a multidisciplinary academic field, namely “informational design”. Although informational design which visualizes information effectively was greeted with enthusiasm as an emerging field of expertise, the background of the subjects that constitute this field has deep roots in history. We now know that, long before the bigdata came into our lives, the power of visualization that rapidly captures the eye and makes the content easily comprehensible was utilized for systematic approaches to information.

The research exhibition “Speak to the Eyes” studies information visualization with a specific focus on the Late Ottoman and the Early Turkish Republic periods while also taking into account the history of informational design in the West. The research documents that as a method “graphics” were used deliberately and long before than commonly assumed for circulating and relaying quantitative information. The research also evaluates the consequences of these findings for the history of design.