Informative art: Information visualization in everyday environments

Thanks to advances in display technologies, it will soon be possible to have electronic information displays virtually everywhere. We have developed the concept of Informative Art as a way to integrate information visualization in the everyday human environment. Informative Art combines a dynamically updated information display with the decorative role of visual art, such as posters and paintings. We present four examples of Informative Art, where we borrowed the styles of various modern artists to show different kinds of information. For instance, a composition similar to the style of an abstract painter, Piet Mondriaan, showed the current weather in six different cities, while a piece of "landscape art" in the style of Richard Long gave a view of the last 30 days of global earthquake activity. We discuss how designing information visualizations for everyday environment introduces requirement that are different from those of graphical user interfaces for desktop computers.