Practical use of computational tools requires that people be able to understand the results the tools produce. This is a particular problem for real world power systems because of their massive amount of data, and because existing representational methods do not provide quick and efficient communication of the qualitative information contained in that data. Instead they require users to create internal, mental representations of the data and then analyze them to extract desired information. Physical realization of these internal representations - a visualization of the data - should provide a breakthrough in ease of comprehension. Full graphics user interfaces now have the hardware to make this possible, but adequate representations have not yet been developed. This paper discusses the characteristics of good representations, and provides an example of a possible graphical representation of power system operating state.
