"What are you trying to tell me?"

Back in junior high, on the Science Olympiad team, I competed in an event called "What are you trying to tell me?"  In it, you were given a bunch of visual and written representations of information: graphs, plots, nutrition facts, to name a few.

Then you were asked questions about the information.  I really liked that event, because it was easy for me.  (I think I got 3rd in State one year for that event.)  I could take the information, dissect it, and give back answers about what you would really want to learn from the graphics.  (What is this image telling me, you may ask?  It says that a structure with this cross section, attached to a wall at the left and with a load applied at the right, will fail at the dark red and dark blue points.)

Last week, I went to a conference, and one of the speakers reminded me of this event.  He is an electrical engineering / computer science professor, and his entire research is coming up with new ways to visualize information.  Working with one sponsor, he and his grad students took data that the sponsoring agency already collected, and reorganized it.  Suddenly, the decisions the sponsor tried to make from that data were so much clearer!  It was funny for me to listen to this speaker and just kind of think: come on, anyone can do that.

But you know what?  Not anyone can.  Just look at instruction manuals.  Just read an email with a slew of things you're being asked to do.  It really is a skill to organize information, or to interpret disorganized information.