Those are questions Ed Schlossberg, founder of ESI Design, and Mark Wigley, architect, author, and Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), ponder every day. Watch Schlossberg, adjunct professor at GSAPP, and Wigley discuss complexity and clarity in ideas and design, below:

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“The idea is always to try to take the very complex narrative … and figure out ways in which someone coming to it can really discover some of the questions – which is the way clarity arises,” said Schlossberg, who is very involved in the design of museums and similar establishments. “Designing for that always is the challenge. Clarity always arises out of questions … that’s the thing that gets everything going.”

“Complexity does not end in data itself but is in your ability to see it,” added Wigley, who said architects don’t necessarily make buildings – they communicate ideas of buildings. “An idea is really a kind of visualization of something.”

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Wigley added: “What constitutes a building? What constitutes an idea? What constitutes information? What constitutes visualization? All of these things are undergoing a revolution.”

Columbia University and Thomson Reuters this past summer launched the Advanced Data Visualization Project (ADVP) based at Columbia’s GSAPP to facilitate research into data visualization and its implications for academia and industry in a world increasingly awash with data. Advances in digital archives and new data collected from embedded devices in common items such as clothing, cell phones, vehicles, roads, buildings, and anything else one can think of will fundamentally change the way societies plan, finance, monitor, maintain, modify, move within, interact with, and think about our cities. The project will explore data visualization applications in various fields including journalism, science, medicine and public health, law, architecture, planning and political science and utilize experts from Columbia University, Thomson Reuters and outside researchers.

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