Same Rules, Different Readings
A rule-based drawing exercise revealed how history, culture, ideology, and personal identity shape interpretation in data visualization.
I began this project with a simple question: if everyone receives the same visual rules, why do the results still look so different? Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s rule-based drawing approach, I asked a group of participants to recreate an image using only a fixed set of instructions, then compared the coded marks that emerged from each version.
What I found was not a uniform dataset, but a collection of interpretations.
At first, the exercise seemed almost objective. The instructions were identical, the materials were the same, and the content appeared to be controlled. But once the drawings started to appear, the illusion of neutrality broke down. Each person translated the same rules through their own hand, attention, habits, and assumptions. The coded marks were consistent only in theory; in practice, they became something else entirely.
This is where the project became more interesting to me. I was not only looking at what was drawn, but at how meaning enters a visual system. The exercise showed that data is never simply “there,” waiting to be read. It is selected, encoded, filtered, and interpreted by people. That interpretation is shaped by history, culture, ideology, and personal identity, even when the format appears strict and controlled.
The image source also mattered. I used the innocent visuals of my three-year-old daughter as the content for the research, and that choice opened a second layer of interpretation. What one person reads as playful mark-making, another may read as composition, while someone else may see pattern, rhythm, or even chaos. The same image can hold multiple readings at once, depending on who is looking and what they bring with them.
