Information Design Watch
December 20, 2011, 10:22 am
HTML Sunrise
By Henry Woodbury
Paul Irish AND Divya Manian have teamed up to create a superb visual explanation that shows browser support for HTML5 and CSS3. Rolling over each spoke of the sunrise (to mix a metaphor) reveals the name of the component; clicking takes you to the W3C page that defines it.
While 2011 support for current common browsers is the most useful view, Irish and Manian have provided data for 2008, 2009, and 2010 as well. In the slideshow below I show a screenshot of each of the four views. It makes a nice animation.
The visual is created with HTML5 and CSS3, so it is best viewed with an current browser. Don’t even bother with MSIE 7.
(via the LinkedIn Web Standards Group)
December 12, 2011, 10:05 pm
Earthquake Watch
By Henry Woodbury
Earthquakes, too, are measured by a non-linear scale.
Here, the increasing energy of powerful quakes is shown as an animation (the color coding refers to tsunami potential, based on NOAA’s data and key):
Compare the animation to this graph from Matlab Geeks:
The animation tells a story at the expense of comparison and data density. Even with the zoom out, the animation maps magnitudes to areas, which are notoriously hard for the human mind to compare. Each point on the Richter scale indicates an increase of magnitude of 32 times. Using a screenshot from the animation, I’ve confirmed this ratio:
Another visualization that uses areas to show magnitudes is The Hive Group’s interactive Earthquake treemap:
This application is a rich data-mining tool, but it doesn’t necessarily negate the animation. The animation tells a story. It is focused on making a dramatic point. The application allows multiple stories to be discovered, in non-dramatic fashion.
December 2, 2011, 5:20 pm
Electrotyping Animation Now Online
By Henry Woodbury
The Electrotyping Animation we created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art has now been posted online. It is currently the featured video on the Met’s MetMedia page.
Here it is on Information Design Watch:
November 25, 2011, 11:41 pm
Orientation Ratio
By Henry Woodbury
Folks well into Apple mobile development may have already run across Adam Lisagor’s take on the iPad’s aspect ratio.
To elaborate a little, the visualization points to more than just dimensions:
But it was clear in the device’s orientation when Steve first pulled it out, and in the orientation of the Apple logo on the back, that the iPad (…) is meant primarily to be used in portrait mode, that its function as a video device is really secondary to its function as a reading device. And 9:16 is now, and will probably always be too damn skinny for a screen.
November 22, 2011, 3:44 pm
Electrotyping Animation at the Met
By Henry Woodbury
Opening today is a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Victorian Electrotypes: Old Treasures, New Technology. The show presents a selection from the museum’s archive of electrotypes — Victorian-era copies of European decorative artifacts.
One of the main pieces of the show is the Bryant Vase, designed by Tiffany and Company. The vase itself was copied by electrotyping and the exhibit accompanies the original with its copper molds. Using the Bryant Vase as the main character, Dynamic Diagrams created a short animation explaining how the electrotyping process works.
Bryant Vase with electrotyping animation in background
The video starts with slow zoom of a photo of the original vase. We then transition to a 3D model which we animate to show the steps in which a mold is created and immersed in a copper-sulfate bath. A “microscopic” view explains how copper ions transmit in the the bath from a positively charged copper bar to the negatively charged mold. Finally, we show how individual pieces are reassembled into a near-identical copy of the original and plated in silver.
By using 3D modeling software we are able to give exhibition visitors a greater understanding of the technology behind the works they are viewing.
Update: The Museum has posted an exhibition page.
November 21, 2011, 3:08 pm
A Thousand Thousand Thousand Thousand Thousand
By Henry Woodbury
I’m not really sure what to make of Randall Munroe’s chart on Money. There’s an enormous amount of data that is almost impossible to read. It needs to be printed whiteboard-sized.
Like Munroe’s Radiation Dose chart, the attempt to show geometric scale through changing units ultimately fails as a visual device. You can work through the Money chart point by point, but to find an overarching message – other than “that’s a lot of money” — you have to replace visual intuition with a mental scale.
Corresponding to the scale problem is a comparison problem. Munroe assembles his square building blocks into all manner of shapes, including time-series charts and maps. The mosaic that results thoroughly fills the page while simultaneously making simple comparisons very difficult. Nothing lines up.
Yet the chart repays the effort it takes to meander about with a wealth of facts, some valiant attempts at creating context and broad connections, and numerous humorous asides.
October 15, 2011, 4:54 pm
The Life of &
By Henry Woodbury
The ampersand’s job is to let type designers cut loose. It’s supposed to stand out, you see.
Jacob Gube offers a splendid appreciation of this splendid character covering history, styling, encoding, and what not to do:
(Apologies to our Facebook fans, who are getting this twice.)
October 6, 2011, 10:48 am
HeadsUP! Competition Invites Designers to Visualize Global Issues on a Large Scale
By Lisa Agustin
How do we make complex and urgent issues like global warming both understandable and memorable? HeadsUP! is an international competition that challenges designers to visualize critical global issues and create a shared sign for the public space– in this case, Times Square², the Thomson-Reuters/NASDAQ digital signboards in Times Square. The goal of HeadsUP!:
Working with global data on issues such as global groundwater levels, climate change and ocean acidification, designers will create a series of visual displays to translate abstract metrics into recognizable and actionable news. It is an opportunity to transform planetary data into a common sign combining the metaphorical power of the Doomsday Clock with the authority of data visualization and the immediacy of activist electronic billboards: a HeadsUP! Display for the planet.
The first challenge is a visualization of global groundwater trends, which indicate that groundwater reserves are currently threatened due to overuse. The winning entry will premiere on World Water Day, March 22, 2012, and run for one month. I do love this idea, although to me, the success of it will not only depend on making the data easier to understand, but giving passersby concrete steps they can take to make a difference.
September 28, 2011, 9:54 am
A Taxonomy of Pasta
By Lisa Agustin
Leave it to an architect to diagram the pasta family tree. George L. Legendre has profiled 92 different kinds of pasta in his new book, Pasta by Design, classifying them into types using ‘phylogeny’ (the study of relatedness among natural forms). From the publisher’s site:
Each spread is devoted to a single pasta, and explains its geographical origin, its process of manufacture and its etymology – alongside suggestions for minute-perfect preparation. Next the shape is rendered as an equation and as a diagram that shows every distinctive scrunch, ridge and crimp with loving precision. Finally, a multi-page foldout features a ‘Pasta Family Reunion’ diagram, reassembling all the pasta types and grouping them by their mathematical and geometric properties!
Check out this one for Cavatappi:
Many of the pasta shapes are diagrammed on the Z-axis (a d/D favorite!), showing the delicate shapes in their full undulating glory (view more pasta diagrams on the NY Times site). I’m hungry already.
September 13, 2011, 9:08 am
What’s on the Schedule for Today?
By Henry Woodbury
Hopefully there’s more of what you like to do and less of what you have to do. And hopefully they overlap.
Via artist and architect Jesen Tanadi (originally from desprezivel). You can view Tanadi’s projects at his eponymous URL.
August 20, 2011, 2:05 pm
“San Francisco Looks Like a Dinosaur”
By Henry Woodbury
Here’s a project where residents of a city draw their mental maps of their neighborhood and the city as a whole.
From the individual’s point of view, a location may have boundaries, barriers, corridors, or an orientation that a street or geographical map doesn’t reveal.
Make sure to look at the project’s PDF presentation for some additional explanation and a series of interesting analytical maps that correspond to the issues listed above.
What does the mental map of your locale look like?
August 10, 2011, 11:55 am
The Key to the Masthead
By Henry Woodbury
It may not work for every web site, but it does for Flip Flop Fly Ball. I’m talking about a site masthead with more iconography than a pre-renaissance painting.
The key to the masthead is a nice example of information design in itself.
Click through to read the labels.
p.s. Flip Flop Fly Ball creator Craig Robinson has a book out. Good stuff. I’ve linked to him before.
August 3, 2011, 1:09 pm
A New Chart for Financial Indicators
By Henry Woodbury
The financial numbers generated by the U.S. and worldwide economic crisis have informed many charts and graphs but most are rudimentary. I have hoped to pull some into this blog, but haven’t seen any worth discussing as visual explanations.
Here is an exception. Bill McBride’s Calculated Risk blog offers a set of charts built on an elegantly different model. For example (click through for others):
McBride explains:
The … graphs are all constructed as a percent of the peak in each indicator. This shows when the indicator has bottomed – and when the indicator has returned to the level of the previous peak. If the indicator is at a new peak, the value is 100%.
The key mental construct is to remember that as positive indicators trend upward they define a new value for 100%. That is why periods of growth are represented as a plateau.
At The Atlantic, where I saw these graphs, Derek Thompson explains the graphs by simile:
The outcome reveals each recession in the last 50 years as a kind of hanging icicle.
The bigger the icicle, the bigger the problem.
July 28, 2011, 12:58 pm
Hello Spatial Humanities, We’ve been Waiting for You
By Henry Woodbury
Patricia Cohen at The New York Times has an interesting article on the “spatial humanities,” the idea of using geographic information systems to reveal the physical context of historical or even fictional events:
“Mapping spatial information reveals part of human history that otherwise we couldn’t possibly know,” said Anne Kelly Knowles, a geographer at Middlebury College in Vermont. “It enables you to see patterns and information that are literally invisible.” It adds layers of information to a map that can be added or taken off at will in various combinations; the same location can also be viewed back and forth over time at the click of a mouse.
The real joy of this feature is the portfolio of projects that accompanies the main overview. Here, for example, is a section from Ms. Knowles’ viewshed analysis of what General Robert E. Lee could actually see in the Battle of Gettysburg:
The pale ovals represent areas that historians have previously assumed to be visible to Lee. In Ms. Knowles analysis, all the light areas of the map could have been visible, depending on tree lines.
July 24, 2011, 5:56 pm
Herschel and the Orreries
By Henry Woodbury
Self-taught astronomer William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus through a series of observations in the winter and spring of 1781. The discovery was widely published the following year. “Instantly,” writes Richard Holmes in his splendid history The Age of Wonder, “all orreries were out of date” (p. 105).
While Dynamic Diagrams’ digital orrery include Uranus (and Neptune), it is inaccurate in a way common to almost all maps of outer space: that of relative distance. Uranus is more than twice the distance from our sun as Saturn. The distance to the stars is ever more impossible to project. While Herschel was one of the first astronomers to conceive of deep space, not even he guessed at its vastness. In a footnote Holmes writes:
No astronomer yet had the least idea of the enormous distances involved, so huge that they cannot be given in terms of conventional ‘length’ measurements at all, but either in terms of the distance covered by a moving pulse of light in one year (‘light years’), or else as a purely mathematical expression based on parallax and now given inelegantly as ‘parsecs.’ One parsec is 3.6 light years, but this does not seem to help much. One interesting psychological side-effect of this is that the universe became less and less easy to imagine visually. (Holmes’ emphasis, p. 88)
Here is a challenge to champions of visual explanation and yet I fear Holmes is right. An example can be drawn from the use of parallax to measure astronomical distances. In another footnote, Holmes writes:
As with road directions, a diagram is a much better way to explain parallax than a written sentence. But it is interesting to try…. Stellar parallax is a calculation which is obtained by measuring the angle of a star from the earth, and then measuring it again after six months. The earth’s movement during that interval provides a long base line in space for triangulation. (p. 90)
Could Pantheon Books not provide Holmes a designer? Let me try a sketch:
The difference in angles A and B allow a simple trigonometric calculation with a baseline of about 300 million kilometers (left). However, astronomical distances are so great, the actual angles are nearly equivalent (right).
William Herschel and other 18th-century astronomers did not have the instruments to measure that difference. It wasn’t until 1832 that Thomas Henderson used parallax to calculate the distance to our closest star, Alpha Centauri. It wasn’t until the 1920s that Edwin Hubble was able to calculate distances between galaxies using the red-shift method (p. 90).
Holmes describes one other picturesque scene, a “human orrery” played by the poet John Keats as a schoolboy:
Keats did not recall the exact details, but one may imagine seven senior boy-planets running round the central sun, while themselves being circled by smaller sprinting moons (perhaps girls), and the whole frequently disrupted by rebel comets and meteors flying across their orbits. (p. 113)
One must assume that like mechanical orreries and the dD Orrery, the position of the planets was calculated in reference to the sun, not to each other.
July 14, 2011, 10:23 pm
Jigsaw Africa
By Henry Woodbury
Scale is a kind of beauty. Here Kai Krause maps out the scale of the continent of Africa in comparison to a selection of the usual suspects:
Click through for full-size map, more data, and editorial content (whose thesis I find entirely unconvincing).
I’m more intrigued by the effectiveness of the visualization as an informational device. The juxtaposition is what matters, not the “true size”. If you mapped the true size of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Central America against the continent of North America the result would be entirely pointless.
What makes Krause’s map intriguing is the contrast between large countries and a continent comprised mostly of small ones. To make a North American map of equivalent interest I would replace the large land masses of Canada, the United States, and Mexico with numerous small countries (to reverse the conceit we could replace Central America with Madagascar — a number of small countries with one large). Thus, we learn about the size of the selected countries as well as the size of the continent.
June 22, 2011, 9:29 pm
Crayola Century
By Henry Woodbury
From artist and scientist Stephen Van Morley:
Quote:
This is just the setup. For the real fun, see where Morley went next:
(via Chris Wild’s fabulous How To Be A Retronaut)
June 18, 2011, 10:00 pm
Follow the Dots, not the Lines
By Henry Woodbury
Over at ESPN’s Grantland, my new favorite sports site, a visual explanation has made an appearance.
Andy Greenwald, writing about HBO’s reuse of character actors in different original series, posted a diagram of “The 66 Busiest Actors on HBO”. The diagram links actors to each series in which they have made three or more appearances. On the left you might find Roxanne Hart. On the right you might find The Sopranos.
This is a chart of a type. It shows a network, but the assemblage of lines that denotes the network is indecipherable. It’s pickup sticks. (Other network diagrams devolve to spaghetti.)
Partly this is an artifact of organization. The alphabetical list of actors has no meaningful correspondence to the alphabetical list of shows. Imagine if shows were listed chronologically and actors listed in order of first appearance. Then you might see a pattern. Would it be enlightening? I’m not sure. A common problem with network diagrams is that the lines don’t aggregate into meaning. An individual line might tell you something, but only in its connection to a pair of nodes. And if you want to focus on individual nodes — an actor or a show — you don’t need a diagram.
Here, the big picture is not in the lines, but the dots. Scan either list and the diagram quickly informs you of something interesting: Stephen Toblowsky appears in a lot of HBO shows. The Wire employed a lot of actors. But not Stephen Toblowsky (no line).
June 2, 2011, 7:01 pm
Corn and More Corn
By Henry Woodbury
On the day that the USDA unveiled a nonsensical replacement for its hopelessly-compromised food pyramid, it’s important to understand what kinds of foodstuffs the government actually promotes.
Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International has produced this image of what the White House garden would look like “if it were planted to reflect the relative costs of the main crops subsidized by US taxpayers”:
The data is from the Farm Subsidy Database.
May 23, 2011, 2:02 pm
Small Uniform Multiples
By Henry Woodbury
The Baseball Hall of Fame’s Uniform Database offers an elegant showcase of the power of small multiples. Here is a simple example:
The database output, by year or team, shows the remarkable variety in baseball uniform design, within the simple confines of cap, jersey, pants, and socks. The outline style shown above was created by Marc Okkonen for his book Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century which concludes in 1994. Post-1994 slightly more naturalistic — and uglier — images are provided by Major League Baseball Properties.
Sadly, where this online exhibit succeeds as information design it fails as information architecture. The search engine is very clumsy. One cannot compare specific teams or specific years. For example, earlier this season the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs played in throwback 1918 uniforms. There is no way to compare Red Sox / Cubs / 1918 / 2011. For larger searches, one cannot show more than three images in a row, or more than eighteen in a page. Please, BBHOF, publish an API.
May 20, 2011, 5:07 pm
Louisiana Economic Development on YouTube
By Henry Woodbury
Louisiana Economic Development has a YouTube channel. Among its interviews and news clips is an animated presentation we created to explain their Digital Media and Software Development Incentive. Based on an executive PowerPoint deck we created for LED representatives to present in person, the movie is a self-running alternative suitable for trade show or web presentation. Enjoy!
May 10, 2011, 10:31 am
“The Dynamics of Rumor Creation”
By Henry Woodbury
SocialFlow, a Twitter-marketing-optimization company has created a striking visualization on the tweets that broke the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death:
At SocialFlow we analyzed 14.8 million public Tweets, and bitly links, posted between news about an unplanned presidential address (9:46 p.m. EST) and Obama’s address (11:30 p.m. EST) to see how dynamics of rumor creation played out during those critical hours on Twitter. Out of the dominant information flows observed in the data, we focus on the largest flow, engaging tens of thousands of users, validating speculation around Bin Laden’s death.
This jellyfish star chart presents a lot of data, but as best as I can guess, there is no coordinate system. It shows us constellations, not distance nor direction. There is no depth to it.
Still, hubs are interesting. Click through to see zoomed views.
May 9, 2011, 10:40 pm
Feelings Interactive
By Henry Woodbury
Columbia Journalism Review writes about one of The New York Times recent features:
…a new interactive graph on The New York Times website invites readers to plot their reactions to two questions: How much of a turning point in the war on terror will Bin Laden’s death represent? (significant to insignificant), and What is your emotional response? (positive to negative).
The format is useful for commenters because they can easily click a square and answer two questions at once, and it’s useful for the casual reader, who can measure the feelings of the crowd at a glance. When you first visit the page, you can click on any square to see others’ comments or to plot your own—or, you can just watch for a few minutes, as I did, as random comments slowly float up and fade out from the mosaic.
To me the format is far more interesting than the opinions. The format shapes the aggregate results.
Given quadrants, there is bias toward adhering to a quadrant.
Given edges there is bias toward approaching the edges.
Given existing dots, I strongly suspect there is bias toward clumping.
Now that I’ve looked at this interactive a few times the other thing that interests me is how it would look as an animation. The Columbia Journalism Review article offers a screen shot taken much earlier than the one above. The patterns are already taking shape.
April 26, 2011, 9:23 am
Launch! (Remodeling Dynamic Diagrams)
By Henry Woodbury
Late on Friday afternoon last week we relaunched DynamicDiagrams.com and this blog. The new site is more scalable than the old and incorporates more ways to present our work. Information Design Watch is incorporated into the main navigation of the site though it still resolves to its own dd.DynamicDiagrams.com subdomain. We like the new look too.
The relaunch has given us the opportunity to update our portfolio and present the popular dD Orrery on its own page. For the latter we’ve created free Mac and Windows screensavers you can download.
Let us know what you think.
April 9, 2011, 9:56 am
Show Me the Seiverts
By Henry Woodbury
The Fukushima nuclear reactor remains in crisis. One informational challenges for media and scientists in this disaster has been explaining the relative risks of the radiation levels. The Sievert, a unit that attempts to measure the biological effect of an absorbed dose of radiation, is measured in micro-quantities for such things as a dental x-ray which is about one-millionth of a dose that is deadly. While a mathematician may easily compare very small and very large number as powers of 10, this is hardly intuitive to the rest of us.
Randall Munroe, at xkcd, has created one of the more comprehensive attempts to show radiation risk by charting doses in blocks and associating them with specific examples. Depending on color each unit represents one of four values from 0.05 microSeiverts (blue) to 1 Seivert (yellow). A large set of examples in one color becomes a small unit of comparison in the next:
The chart reads in a clockwise circle; better would be a horizontal left-to-right for both data and key. Still, it is a grand effort that repays close reading.
March 3, 2011, 3:38 pm
Where Good Ideas Come From (or How to Avoid Clichés)
By Lisa Agustin
I love a good grid, with its precise measurements both horizontal and vertical. We’ve blogged about how grids and scales can serve as guideposts for discussing visual design, a subjective and therefore squishy topic. Now Smashing Magazine offers another take on this, suggesting that mapping clichés to the extremes of a scale can help guide discussions toward an original solution. The article goes on to explore four visual design problems faced by well-known designers, and the process each used to move away from tired, obvious approaches to fresh solutions. The article concludes with some tips for avoiding clichés which include–ironically–embracing them:
Start by drawing every association you come up with for the subject matter. Draw it quickly, and don’t be critical. At this stage, it’s not about making pretty pictures, and it’s not about evaluating your ideas (in fact, the ability to turn the critical part of your brain on and off is one of the most helpful tricks you can develop). Don’t try to avoid clichés — let them happen. Trying not to think of clichés is like the old joke where someone says ‘Don’t think of a pink elephant.’ It’s best to get them down on paper and get them out of your system. Once you’ve jotted down every association you can think of, take a break, come back and jot down a few more. Then, take a longer break…
While this advice is targeted toward designers, this is also good advice for anyone looking to develop a good idea, since it’s often the bad ideas that yield the good ones.
March 2, 2011, 5:03 pm
What You Want to Own
By Henry Woodbury
Self-described entrepreneur and gamer Brad Hargreaves has created a nicely multivariate chart on wealth creation. It is more philosophical than empirical, a way to frame a question rather than a survey. It is also self-explanatory, so I’ve only shown a portion of it below:
I found this at the Sippican Cottage blog, along with Sippican’s typically incisive summation:
1. Make money while you’re awake.
2. Make money while you’re asleep, too.
3. Make money even after you’re dead.
From the information design perspective I’m impressed by the labeling. The examples are well chosen and the repeated two-word “Own” phrases manage to indicate fairly clear distinctions despite their inherent subjectivity. That kind of parallelism is hard to carry off, especially seven times in a row. Why does Brett Favre fall under “Own Entities” instead of “Own Yourself”? I don’t know, but it works well enough to make the point.
February 22, 2011, 10:46 am
Want to See My Etchings? Visualizing “Language as a Window into Human Nature”
By Tim Roy
RSA Animate has produced another wonderful visualization, this time animating a lecture by Steven Pinker deconstructing the manner in which language can be used to create meaning.
The piece, which runs almost 11 minutes, “breaks” the commonly-held belief about the ideal duration of online video (2-3 minutes tops) and is a solid example of an exception to the rule. The combination of the engaging style of Pinker’s narration, complete with examples from Fargo, When Harry Met Sally, and James Thurber, and the visual rendering of his words, held my attention effortlessly. It is an apt demonstration of how words and images can combine to create immersive experiences.
For those interested in the substance as well as the form, there is much to digest. Pinker’s views on the tension between relationship models, actions, and use of language are important facets to consider when presenting information. We have always been told that words are important; this piece provides solid insight into why.
February 1, 2011, 11:37 am
How Big Really?
By Lisa Agustin
We’ve previously posted on methods others have used to make large numbers understandable, including visualization of the number and making the number more intuitive. Large sizes and long distances offer a similar challenge (toilet paper rolls to the moon, anyone?) Now comes Dimensions, a map-based tool that allows you to see historical events, ancient civilizations, and great distances super-imposed on a region or address that’s familiar to you. Built by BERG design consultancy for the BBC, Dimensions is a prototype whose goal is “to bring home the human scale of events and places in history.” Layering data or current events on a map is nothing new. But what I like best about this take is both the ease of the user interface (pick an event from one of 9 categories, type in your address and hit GO) and the introduction of ancient history into the mix. It’s difficult enough to understand the magnitude of current events (e.g., the Gulf Oil Spill) but somehow the added aspect of time makes ancient entities and events like The Colossus of Rhodes and Mount Vesuvius (above) even more difficult to grasp. Dimensions successfully communicates ancient history by putting it in the context of the user’s here and now.
(via Very Short List)
January 27, 2011, 12:50 pm
The State of the Internet
By Tim Roy
Perhaps some day in the future, there will also be a “State of the Internet” address as well as the more traditional “State of” address that happens every January.
Focus has created an interesting data visualization revealing some up to date statistics to consider. Facebook continues on its juggernaut with 600 million users, 250 million of whom signed up last year. And is it true that 89% of all emails sent are spam?
Thoughts on this kind of visual?
The original can be found here at Focus.
January 21, 2011, 2:14 pm
The Power of Concept
By Henry Woodbury
In its Digital Gallery, The State Records Authority of New South Wales offers an exhibition on the design of the Sydney Opera House. The exhibition is really just the online presentation of two documents, the competition drawings by Jørn Utzon and The Red Book, by the same:
This 1958 report (known also as the Red Book) was presented by Jørn Utzon to the Premier and the Opera House Committee in order to “give … a project which realizes in practical form the vision of the competition”. The report comprises: plans, sections, elevations, photographs of models of the Opera House; and reports by other consultants.
The technical plans are intersticed with Utzon’s free-form drawings and conceptual studies, creating, as a whole, an extraordinary essay in realized imagination.
January 20, 2011, 11:30 am
Orrery Movie
By Henry Woodbury
A recent news release from the Minnesota Planetarium Society has cast doubt on the assumed alignment of the sun with the astrological constellations. Pshaw, say astrologers, our zodiac isn’t affected.
That’s because Western astrology strictly adheres to the tropical zodiac, which is fixed to seasons. The sidereal zodiac, observed in the East, is the one affixed to constellations, and is thus the one that would change.
In any case, this gives me the opportunity to highlight the digital orrery created by our creative director, Piotr Kaczmarek.
Within the application you can view the solar system according to the Copernican (sun-centered) or Tychonian (earth-centered) model. You can rotate the system by clicking and dragging on the outer ring, or let it move automatically by adjusting a slider in the top left. As for the zodiac display in the model, let us assume that it is the tropical zodiac, and thus needs no recalibration.
UPDATE (April 23, 2011): With the relaunch of our DynamicDiagrams.com web site we have featured the Orrery on its own page where you can view it as an external Flash file or download a Mac or Windows screensaver. I have updated the links in this post to connect to that page.
December 20, 2010, 3:04 pm
Flip Book Presentation
By Henry Woodbury
Presentation software does flip book animations. There’s nothing complicated about it. It’s just the way presentations work, if you let them. From 2010, here’s a Google Docs example:
This is beautifully done and encourages the typical trash-talking of Microsoft PowerPoint. And I have to believe that Google Docs’ layout and drawing tools are easier to use than PowerPoint’s truly awful toolkit. But the kernel of this presentation is not in the drawing, but in its 450 slides. With enough slides you can animate anything.
From 2008, here’s a Flash version of an animation we created in PowerPoint for Textron.
In contrast to the Google Docs example, we did our drawing in Adobe Illustrator and imported each frame into PowerPoint from the external application. But as I said before, drawing isn’t the issue. What we really lack is a soundtrack.
December 15, 2010, 9:47 am
Map Meme Goes Manhattan
By Henry Woodbury
Back in September I posted on Bill Rankin’s beautiful maps of census data.
Now the New York Times has turned the idea into a powerful data-driven Flash application. As a Flash application it lacks the resolution and elegance of Rankin’s maps, but it makes up for that in coverage and interactivity. Paradoxically, the lack of resolution is most apparent in the suburbs and rural areas that the application makes available for analysis.
December 9, 2010, 2:10 pm
The Phone Call as Community
By Henry Woodbury
If we define a community by evidence of social interaction, how well do political and historical boundaries hold up? That question is posed, and answered (in part) by a study of landline phone calls in Great Britain led by Professor Carlo Ratti of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab. Analysis of over 12 billion calls identified point-to-point geographical connections (defined at the sub-regional level to protect individual identity) whose relative strength was derived by the frequency and length of calls. The result is a map that mostly aligns to familiar regions, but with some unexpected variations.
December 7, 2010, 3:26 pm
What Color are Your Tentacles?
By Henry Woodbury
Thanks to the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, you can build your own squid.
The Build a Squid interactive is akin to the avatar-builders associated with online games and social media sites. It is a great example of the advantage of fewer choices. There are six components, each with three options, and, for all but eyes, the same palette of 14 colors, blends and patterns. All the naming and design options are accessible all the time. You can cycle through options using “Next” and “Previous” but there’s no need to be sequential.
Also refreshing, for a man who has spent a number of hours logging his children into Disney web sites, is the absence of terms, permissions, and validations. Which isn’t surprising since once you create your squid and drag it back and forth across your screen, you’re pretty much done. All you can do is release your virtual creature into the virtual deep.
How interesting is that?
Interesting enough I guess. After you release your squid, it is easy to find it again using its name or your email. You can check its age, weight, and mileage and drag it around the screen again.
Since the real point of Build a Squid is to drive traffic to Te Papa’s colossal squid exhibition it would seem to be doing its job. The application is two years old and hosts plenty of squid.
December 5, 2010, 10:18 am
Hello Skullhead
By Henry Woodbury
Cross Blackbeard with Black Sabbath and you might end up with something like Patrick Galbraith’s Map of Metal:
The map has a method, indicated by the legend above, and a timeline. The latter runs in a diagonal, from the northwest 60s to the southeast 00s.
Aurally, the map offers definitional tracks for each genre. Visually, its delight comes from Galbraith’s emblematic variations on the leather default. Below is his riff on Visual Kei, “a movement among Japanese musicians, that is characterized by the use of make-up, elaborate hair styles and flamboyant costumes….”
Hello Kitty.
(via LearnedLeague)
November 25, 2010, 1:39 pm
A Thanksgiving Visualization
By Tim Roy
For our readers who celebrate Thanksgiving, a visualization of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” seemed the perfect post. Have a great holiday!
and, Part 2 (it’s a long song…):
November 22, 2010, 5:06 pm
Nightingale’s Serendipity
By Henry Woodbury
In the BBC News Magazine, mathematician and author Marcus du Sautoy extols the power of diagrams. The cliche that a picture is worth a thousand words misses the point, he explains. A scientific diagram has the power to transcend language, to “create a whole new visual language to navigate a scientific idea” or even show the impossible. “Words” is the wrong unit of measure.
Among other scientists and thinkers, du Sautoy draws examples from Copernicus, Newton, and Florence Nightingale. In that last case, he links to our recreation of Nightingale’s Rose, the circular set of charts that Nightingale created to show relative causes of death of soldiers during the Crimean war.
du Sautoy’s television series, The Beauty of Diagrams, is offered on BBC Four.
November 22, 2010, 10:51 am
If an Infographic Tastes Light is it Less Filling?
By Lisa Agustin
There’s the “The Gray Lady”, and then there’s her wittier, spunkier cousin. CR Blog posted a mini-tribute to New York Magazine’s infographics, which are sometimes based on data (see the neighborhood news visualized), and sometimes not (as in the Approval Matrix, a “deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies”). Not necessarily a lot to ponder, but attention-grabbing and fun nonetheless.
November 19, 2010, 11:26 am
Two-fer Friday: Science Visualizations Way Small and Way Big
By Lisa Agustin
There’s never a shortage of science to visualize. Molecular animations were the focus of a recent article in the New York Times, and one such animator, Dr. Drew Berry, was recently recognized as a genius (above: a still from Dr. Berry’s “Apoptosis” animation). The Times article raises the interesting question of whether it’s acceptable for animators to take liberties with their depictions:
Indeed, while enthusiasm runs high among those directly involved in the field, others in the scientific community are uncertain about the value of these animations for actual scientific research. While acknowledging the potential to help refine a hypothesis, for example, some scientists say that visualizations can quickly veer into fiction….Dr. [Gael] McGill [chief executive of Digizyme] acknowledges that showing cellular processes can involve a significant dose of conjecture. Animators take liberty with color and space, among other qualities, in order to highlight a particular function or part of the cell.
That said, the fact is that these animated visualizations represent such a vast improvement in explaining complex phenomena that were previously bogged down in text and textbooks, that taking such liberties at this time is acceptable if it helps understanding.
On the (way) bigger side of things, SciencePunk steered us toward Colin Douglas Howell’s gallery of dinosaur size comparison charts, a fun peek at how your favorites stack up to the average adult man or young girl. My only issue on these is lack of a scale for the human-sized figures– should we assume six feet (1.83 m) for the unsuspecting fellow about to get trampled (above)?
And finally, the results are in on Cosmic Variance’s survey: “What is the one concept in science that you really think should be explained better to a wide audience?” Results for “big” concepts include:
- Evolution (IIIIIIIIII)
- Entropy/Second Law (IIIIII)
- Quantum mechanics (IIII)
- Time (IIII)
- Gravity (IIII)
- Genetics (III)
- Supply and demand
- Energy
- Climate change
- Math
- Cognition
- Complexity
- Emergence
- Quantum field theory
I’m not sure how many of these can be explained in a visual explanation; the results for “specific” concepts might fare better.
November 18, 2010, 4:00 pm
How 529 Plans Work
By Lisa Agustin
I really like that Mint.com aims to make financial concepts accessible, especially through its use of infographics. The site’s latest offering focuses on how 529 plans work, something I have a personal interest in as a parent trying to save for two college educations. The title of the infographic suggests that the viewer will get a step-by-step walkthrough of how these college savings plans work, but after looking it over, I feel this infographic isn’t as strong as it could be. While all of the relevant pieces were there, these were not organized in a way that would necessarily help my decision-making process. The infographic includes two kinds of information: background information (e.g., who may be a plan beneficiary) and information that helps me decide which 529 is best for me. It would be great to see these two types of information better delineated. For example, the piece would be more effective if the section “Am I eligible?” were moved to the top of the page, so I could decide whether I should continue to learn about the plans. From there, I’d like to see the Pre-paid vs. Savings options explained in a way clearly illustrating the pros and cons of each, to help me make a decision. That said, I felt the best areas of the infographic were ones in which the graphics facilitated comparisons, namely the middle section (Pre-paid vs. Savings options side-by-side), and the chart of “The Best 529 Plans” at the bottom. (It was also reassuring to see one of the plans I’m considering on the list.)
November 9, 2010, 4:38 pm
Verbing Nouns with Stephen Fry
By Tim Roy
While working with clients on presenting some of the visual explanations we create, our ongoing mantra is to “not read to the audience!” No matter if it is a PowerPoint deck, a Flash animation, or a simple print diagram, reading the text aloud is an almost guaranteed way to make the audience squirm in their seats.
Why is this? The fact is that people can read silently faster than someone can read aloud. The result: cognitive dissonance as the brain is processing one set of words while hearing the exact same text being spoken with a multi-second delay. It leaves us feeling confused, uncomfortable, and most importantly, unable to process the information being presented.
I came across this wonderful example of how the same words can be both spoken and appear on a screen simultaneously on the Open Culture web site. Matthew Rogers, a freelance graphic artist, animated a 2008 piece from the British author Stephen Fry. The results are well-executed, amusing and insightful. More importantly though, it deftly illustrates the clear connection between what we hear and what we read. Do not underestimate its importance the next time you are preparing for a presentation.
November 5, 2010, 9:18 am
Any Questions Mr. Skywalker? No? Good.
By Henry Woodbury
I haven’t linked to Presentation Zen in a while. Having recommended the site to my sister who is teaching business communications, I took a look and came across this gem:
General Jan Dodonna stands and delivers with confidence and brevity.
Who remembers that the destruction of the Death Star (in Star Wars IV) turned on a successful visual presentation? Well no matter. The presentation got results.
Garr Reynolds summarizes:
If you have a large screen, use it to show visuals, not lines of text that remind you what to say. You do not have to use a screen, but if you do, use it to display visual information that illustrates or amplifies your message in the clearest way possible. Stand with your visuals, becoming a clear part of the visual experience from your audience’s point of view.
November 3, 2010, 8:44 am
A Good Year for Maps
By Henry Woodbury
The 2010 U.S. election generated the usual maps (for example, here at CNN and here at the Wall Street Journal), but the New York Times superb multimedia team offers some extras (as well as their own version of the same). In an animated set of maps titled A Historic Shift, they show shifts in voting patterns from 2010, 2008, and 2006. Here are screen shots which capture all of the actual data provided by the animations and allow easier comparison than The Times’ slideshow format:
October 25, 2010, 3:49 pm
Requests from the Audience?
By Tim Roy
Over the past month, we have expanded the range of topics covered here on Information Design Watch. By looking more broadly at art, museums, culture, and some of the earlier work at Dynamic Diagrams, we are discovering connections to our core focus of visual explanation and user experience that had not previously been considered. We have also become much more active on both Twitter and Facebook with the intent of creating additional channels for expressing our ideas and interacting with both clients and peers.
Dynamic Diagrams has enjoyed its own share of exposure in years past. We were featured in Richard Saul Wurman’s Information Architects, d/D founders Paul Kahn and Krzysztof Lenk created Mapping Web Sites, and the company was fortunate enough to contribute a chapter to Understanding USA, Richard Wurman’s book commemorating the 10th TED conference (TEDX). Several of our friends and advisors have suggested we consider writing a new book and perhaps this work on the blog will help us to focus that idea.
More of this?
In the interim, we would like to hear from you, our readers, as to what areas you would like us to cover. More pieces on museum interactives? Continued coverage of terrific work in visualization? Book reviews? Interviews? More work on presentation theory (I have a new piece on Shakespeare that I am almost ready to publish)? I know that our coverage of user experience will certainly continue as we are constantly expanding our expertise in understanding user behavior and information design.
Or this?
The “Remodeling Dynamic Diagrams” series has a number of installments left and we are working to develop additional regular features. And if the current eclectic mix of visualization, storytelling, user experience knowledge, and pointers to the fascinating work we come across is working well, let us know that too.
October 24, 2010, 3:00 pm
Visualizing Scale at the Tate Modern
By Tim Roy
One of the most common requirements for our visualization work is to “show all the data at once”, a request made by clients who want to make certain that the audience is able to see the “whole” as well as the individual elements of which it is comprised. We often explain the challenges associated with this: the inability to provide detail or context, the potential for disorientation, and the challenges associated with a large number of data points. We have been fortunate enough to develop techniques for solving this business challenge and have been able to produce visualizations successfully presenting tremendous amounts of complex data.
It was for this reason I was drawn to a new exhibit at the Tate Modern in London: Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds 2010. This installation takes the idea of representing a large number of objects to new extremes. The piece, on display at the Tate from 12 October 2010 to 2 May 2011, showcases 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds.
100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds on display at the Tate Modern
Juliet Bingham, Curator at the Tate Modern commented:
“Ai Weiwei’s Unilever Series commission, Sunflower Seeds, is a beautiful, poignant and thought-provoking sculpture. The thinking behind the work lies in far more than just the idea of walking on it. The precious nature of the material, the effort of production and the narrative and personal content create a powerful commentary on the human condition. Sunflower Seeds is a vast sculpture that visitors can contemplate at close range on Level 1 or look upon from the Turbine Hall bridge above. Each piece is a part of the whole, a commentary on the relationship between the individual and the masses. The work continues to pose challenging questions: What does it mean to be an individual in today’s society? Are we insignificant or powerless unless we act together? What do our increasing desires, materialism and number mean for society, the environment and the future?”
While not a typical visualization (but then again, what is?), I was fascinated by the contrast between the scale of the overall work and the intricacy of the individual pieces. More than 1600 artisans from the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, worked to produce this collection under the supervision of Ai Weiwei. The results, while physically beautiful, also invite a far deeper intellectual inquiry about the idea of scale and presentation. The accompanying video, despite its 14 minute length, is a fascinating study in the process and context for this project.
October 22, 2010, 4:18 pm
Interaction Costs in Visualization
By Kirsten Robinson
Tim sent me a link to an article on the Interaction Cost in Information Visualization this morning. After I recovered from my grad school flashback, I got to thinking about about the tradeoffs we have to make among decreasing the various “costs” discussed in the article. For example, my visual designer colleagues are really excellent at reducing the cost of visual clutter. Less visual clutter leads to improved perception. On the other hand, removing too many elements can increase the cost of decision — an extremely minimal interface may give too few clues to what an interactive system or visualization does.
October 1, 2010, 11:52 am
Shakespeare Visualized?
By Tim Roy
Earlier this week, I was speaking with Nancy Duarte about her new book Engage and comparing notes about our respective explorations of literature and drama over the past few months. With the help of a dear friend, I had set out on a course of reading some of the great works of drama in order to help develop my skills in creating better narratives for our clients.
I recently came across this site: Understanding Shakespeare, a project undertaken by Stephen Thiel and the University of Potsdam. His goal was to “extract and visualize the information found within the text to reveal its underlying narrative algorithm.” Using a variety of inquiry paths (dramatic structure, summary, enter/exit, and Google results), Thiel has produced a series of static visualizations illustrating objective findings about the Bard’s work.
While the results of this work have produced these not-surprisingly dense visualizations, it remains unclear how useful this type of data exploration might be. We often speak to our clients about first understanding the needs of an audience — what do you want them to think, feel and do after experiencing your story — in this case, what are the benefits of knowing these narrative patterns or the word count of a specific character?
To be fair (and offer Thiel the benefit of the doubt), this close analysis might prove helpful to Shakespearean scholars and others looking for specific linguistic patterns. Yet for the rest of us, it would seem that the art of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the nod towards symbolic communication in Sonnet 23, cannot be divined by a visualization.
September 30, 2010, 2:21 pm
Austan Goolsbee’s Magic Ruler
By Henry Woodbury
Economist Austan Goolsbee, speaking for the White House, explains the virtue of the president’s tax plan by misrepresenting lines as areas:
“We got a ruler and measured out the size of the tax cut is how big the circle is…”
Aargh. Whatever the merits (or grammar) of the argument, a line is not a circle. A circle is not a goose egg, a term that Goolsbee uses later in the show. And in colloquial terms a goose egg does not mean huge. It means zero.
September 27, 2010, 11:40 am
Think You Know Movies?
By Lisa Agustin
Then prove you have The Right Stuff– guess the titles of the (26) films hidden in this short animation, and you could be entered in a drawing to win them all, courtesy of The Guardian. (Quick, though– you only have until October 22).
September 26, 2010, 7:51 pm
Boundaries Without Boundaries
By Henry Woodbury
Almost by definition, map-based data draws a picture. Rarely is the picture so stark as Bill Rankin’s mapping of U.S. Census data on race and ethnicity to Chicago’s neighborhood boundaries.
Rankin draws attention not to the neighborhoods where his map confirms historical racial and ethnic boundaries, but to those whose gradient would otherwise go unnoticed:
My alternative is to use dot mapping to show three kinds of urban transitions. First, there are indeed areas where changes take place at very precise boundaries — such as between Lawndale and the Little Village, or Austin and Oak Park — and Chicago has more of these stark borders than most cities in the world. But transitions also take place through gradients and gaps as well, especially in the northwest and southeast. Using graphic conventions which allow these other possibilities to appear takes much more data, and requires more nuance in the way we talk about urban geography, but a cartography without boundaries can also make simplistic policy or urban design more difficult — in a good way.
Digital cartographer Eric Fischer takes Rankin’s approach and maps cities across the United States. Everywhere, ethnic and racial divisions present themselves, but there are dramatic differences in degree.
September 21, 2010, 10:34 am
The Simple Power of a Graphic
By Matt DeMeis
Most of us know about the 33 miners trapped underground in Chile. I came across this infographic created by Newsweek about the 3″ diameter bore hole that is keeping them alive.
So simple, but so incredibly powerful. I love this kind of thing. With a line drawing, we are given a true window into the unbelievably claustrophobic situation these men are enduring.
September 9, 2010, 2:38 pm
How to Make a Lot of Data Look Like a Lot of Data
By Henry Woodbury
Stockmapper made Time Magazine’s list of the top 50 web sites for 2010. Stockmapper has a lot of data, but is it useful? I can’t tell. Which answers the question, at least for me.
Compare the Stockmapper heat map with Smartmoney’s Map of the Market. Stockmapper is the larger one underneath. You’re not missing much.
The Stockmapper heat map, whether organized by ticker symbol, percent change, volume, or market cap, tells no high level story. You might as well use a spreadsheet with sortable columns. You can sort and filter, but not compare. Click on a filter such as market sector or country and Stockmapper rewards you with some neatly rendered bar charts, but the heat map is a failure.
In contrast, the Map of the Market offers a comprehensible high-level view of market trends. You can compare the activity of each sector of the market and see which are gaining or losing value. Market capitalization is shown by area which provides another way to compare sectors and individual stocks.
Martin Wattenberg created the Map of the Market well over a decade ago. The best of 1998 is better than the best of 2010.
August 25, 2010, 3:10 pm
Data is the New Soil
By Lisa Agustin
TED offers up a talk by journalist/designer David McCandless, who we’ve written about before. McCandless sees himself as a “data detective,” creating beautiful diagrams (“flowers of information”) that expose new insights in the process. Check it out for a fun walkthrough some of his creations.
August 25, 2010, 9:32 am
Egg Cracking Technique
By Henry Woodbury
A friend linked me to the delightful They Draw and Cook web site (thanks Katy!). Here you have simple recipes rendered by artists and illustrators. Many are no more than decorated recipe cards, but some clamber over the illustration fence into visual explanation territory. An example is Alex Savakis’s egg cracking technique:
In this one, the text is superfluous.
August 16, 2010, 1:46 pm
Hello E. Coli, You’re Looking Large
By Henry Woodbury
Start with a coffee bean and zoom down to a carbon atom. That’s a journey in scale from millimeters to picometers.
To experience that journey, try out the interactive Cell Size and Scale application created by the University of Utah’s Genetic Science Learning Center. It is a tool of elegant simplicity. Move the single slider to the right and sets of increasingly tinier biological objects come into view. At micron scale, you’ll encounter the E. Coli bacterium with its friends lysosome and mitochondria. A gang of viruses make their appearance. And you’re only halfway to the atom.
July 22, 2010, 9:01 am
Fastball, Cutter, Slider
By Henry Woodbury
In an appreciation of New York Yankees’ closer Mariano Rivera, the New York Times has put together an impressive animation that shows how he pitches. Even if you are not a baseball fan, this is worth a look for its artistry and integrity. By modeling and animating a season’s worth of data the visualization connects process — how Rivera throws the ball — with outcomes — a scatter plot of where his pitches cross the plate.
One highlight of the visualization is the comparison of three pitches — fastball, cutter, slider. Each is distinguished by a different spin, created by a different grip and release.
Credit for the visualization goes to Graham Roberts, Shan Carter, and Joe Ward.
July 13, 2010, 3:20 pm
Information is Light
By Henry Woodbury
Look down from the sky at a city at night and it falls into two dimensions. In simple dark and light patterns you can see roadways, population centers, and other aspects of urban development.
Inspired by the view from a plane, data visualization engineer Doug McCune decided to use the appearance of city lights at night to present spatial data (just “for fun” he emphasizes). Using publicly available crime and city planning data, McCune has created a number of beautiful visualizations. For example, the image below shows all the trees planted by the city of San Francisco since 1990:
Click through to see more examples, all linked to larger versions.
July 10, 2010, 10:27 am
Boomtown
By Henry Woodbury
At FlowingData, Nathan Yau’s popular visualization on the growth of Walmart recently got an update — “now with 100% more Sam’s Club” he titles it, tongue in cheek. The growth map shows the number of new store openings for Walmart — and Sam’s Club — from 1962 through 2010. The data is just for the United States. The animation reveals both a pattern and rate of growth as Walmart starts at a single location, becomes a regional chain, then expands to the U.S.’s Northeastern and Western population corridors. Zoom out (the plus/minus in the bottom left corner are zoom controls) and you will see the firm’s entry into Puerto Rico in the early ’70s and to Alaska and Hawaii in the late ’90s.
The data does not include store closings, a point that comes out in the comments of the first link. Designer-statisticians can only work with the data they have.
June 4, 2010, 10:21 am
Visual Explanation, 17th Century Version
By Henry Woodbury
Flora’s mallewagen, Allegory of the Tulip Mania, by Hendrik Gerritsz Pot:
The goddess of flowers is riding along with three drinking and money weighing men and two women on a car. Weavers from Haarlem have thrown away their equipment and are following the car. The destiny of the car is shown in the background: it will disappear in the sea.
(via Walter Russell Mead)
June 3, 2010, 11:08 am
Visual Bias at Work
By Henry Woodbury
Last week I blogged about a Harvard Business Review article on the inherent biases in visualization. Visual information makes people overconfident of outcomes.
Today the New York Times offers a perfect example. In the debate around U.S. health care overhaul, the president’s budget director Peter Orszag argued that savings could be found by reforming the current system:
Mr Orszag displayed maps produced by Dartmouth researchers that appeared to show where the waste in the system could be found. Beige meant hospitals and regions that offered good, efficient care; chocolate meant bad and inefficient.
The maps made reform seem relatively easy to many in Congress, some of whom demanded the administration simply trim the money Medicare pays to hospitals and doctors in the brown zones. The administration promised to seriously consider doing just that. [my emphasis]
Unfortunately, the maps don’t show what they seem to show. While they show cost of care (a very specific kind of care it should be noted), they don’t show quality of care. Nor do the maps show anything about the demographics of the patients being cared for.
The Times compares the Dartmouth map (on the left) to Medicare’s own analysis of hospital quality (on the right) to show the disconnect. However, the Medicare map raises questions of its own. To start with, it shows a suspicious correspondence to U.S. population density.
Perhaps quality of care relates to the proposition that higher population density creates demand for more specialists which leads to better diagnoses. I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of this. Before anyone draws another map, let’s work on better analysis.
May 27, 2010, 11:15 am
We Promise to Use Our Powers Wisely
By Henry Woodbury
From the Harvard Business Review comes a cautionary tale of bias and visualization. Visual information can make people overly confident in predicting outcomes. In the study described in the article, viewers who watched a computer animation of driver error “were more likely to say they could see a serious accident coming than those who actually saw it occur and then were asked if they had seen it coming.”
The way human brains process the sight of movement appears to be one reason for this outcome. The visceral reading of trajectory events — such as an animation of moving cars — creates an anticipatory judgment that is highly persuasive to higher brain functions.
Also important is the fact that every visualization incorporates a point of view, one that is all the more convincing for its visual immediacy:
The information can be conveyed with certain emphases, shown from certain angles, slowed down, or enlarged. (In a sense, all this is true of text as well, but with subtler effects.) Animations can whitewash the guesswork and assumptions that go into interpreting reconstructions. By creating a picture of one possibility, they make others seem less likely, even if they’re not. (my emphasis)
In essence, this is what we do on purpose. Whether for marketing, analysis, or scientific reportage, we quite explicitly present the story of the strongest possibility (which may well be that there are multiple possibilities). We do it ethically; we rely upon validated data to tell a story and honor the integrity of that data as we work. The Harvard study cautions us not to let our visual tools — especially our analytical tools — persuade us too easily of what the real story is.
May 25, 2010, 2:58 pm
Simplifying The Story of Stuff
By Lisa Agustin
Seemingly simple stories often have complex beginnings. Consider the well-known web film (and now book) The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. A longtime activist with an interest in waste and its impact on the environment, Leonard was attending a leadership training program when she was asked to give a presentation. She was shocked to find that no one knew what she was talking about. Attendees pointed out that her vocabulary needed simplification and that she was “starting the conversation 20 years down the road.” What to do? Simplify the story:
Humbled, Leonard tried new angles. They all failed. Finally, in frustration, she hung a huge sheet of paper on the wall and crudely drew a mountain, a truck, a factory, a store, and a dump. And then she told the story of stuff. “You ought to make a movie of that,” 30 different people said. [Post-institute, Leonard] traveled the country with her sketch. The rest is Internet history.
Instead of creating “a paradigm shift in relation to materials,” Leonard started asking “Where does all the stuff we buy come from, and where does it go when we throw it out?” By combining this straightforward approach with a simplified visual style (animated stick-figures), Leonard’s film engages and enlightens in a way that makes viewers easily see what the problem is and how they can make a difference.
May 25, 2010, 11:38 am
Saint Ginés Wins MUSE Award
By Henry Woodbury
Dynamic Diagrams and the J. Paul Getty Museum have won a 2010 Silver MUSE award for the Getty-produced video Making a Spanish Polychrome Sculpture. Dynamic Diagrams created the 3D animation that opens the video and shows how the XVII century sculpture was assembled. The Getty integrated this animation with live action footage that shows carving and surface treatment techniques. The effectiveness of this combination was noted by many of the judges:
This is a fine example of technology effectively used to clearly demonstrate an intricate artistic process. It’s the combination of the digital imagery with the live footage of an artist that makes this video exciting and fascinating for all kinds of audiences
The MUSE awards are presented annually by the American Association of Museums’ Media and Technology committee. They recognize “institutions or independent producers which use digital media to enhance the museum experience and engage new audiences.” We are proud to work with The Getty on projects of such scope and distinction.
May 19, 2010, 12:52 pm
Explore the Display Cabinet
By Henry Woodbury
One of the masterworks in The Getty Museum’s newly opened European sculpture and decorative arts galleries is the Augsburg Display Cabinet, a lavishly decorated 17th century cabinet that once would have stored a collector’s curios and precious objects.
The cabinet features many panels and doors beyond those opened for display. To give visitors a look inside the cabinet and help them understand the details of its decoration and construction, The Getty asked Dynamic Diagrams to create an interactive 3D model of the artifact.
Working closely with Getty curators and media professionals, we used a comprehensive set of photographs to build the model and apply surface details. We then coded our application to import text and zoomable images from an external source, allowing Getty staff full control over the descriptions and detail views that accompany the model.
Our application is presented in the gallery on a touchscreen display, as seen at right in this photo from the Daily News of Los Angeles.
April 16, 2010, 1:48 pm
Planes or Volcano?
By Lisa Agustin
Looks like another day of closed airports in Europe, due to the all-encompassing ash cloud from the volcano in Iceland. In the meantime, author David McCandless ponders the question: What’s emitting the most CO2 per day? (If you’re curious about the data sources, you can check them yourself via Google docs).
April 14, 2010, 8:38 am
“Just because it’s graphical, it doesn’t mean it’s useful”
By Henry Woodbury
Phyl Gyford graphs the “infographics” that give infographics a bad name. For example:
Click through to see the whole thing.
April 8, 2010, 4:57 pm
Guest Teaching InfoViz
By Kirsten Robinson
Dr. Bill Gribbons at Bentley University recently invited Dynamic Diagrams to present some of our work to his Information Visualization class. The class is part of the Master’s degree program in Human Factors in Information Design, of which I’m an alumna.
After I gave a brief introduction to Dynamic Diagrams, Piotr took the spotlight, showing a wide variety of visual explanations from past and present projects. Examples included highly detailed web site inventories and architecture diagrams, process illustrations, data visualizations, and animated 3D models. While Piotr explained the challenges and design solutions for each project, I played Vanna White, zooming and scrolling so the students (some of whom were attending online) could see relevant sections.
It was a great experience for me to revisit some of the past work (Samsung Electronics, Holtzbrinck), and to understand some of the more recent work (Getty) in greater depth. There never seems to be enough time to sit back and appreciate our colleagues’ work during a normal workday.
Holtzbrinck web properties inventory
The best part was hearing the audible gasps as we revealed each new piece. As part of their coursework, students are required to create their own information displays, while also explaining the human factors (visual and cognitive) that help or hinder our ability to process them. I hope we were able to provide a bit of inspiration for their next projects!
March 25, 2010, 9:58 am
The Long Shot
By Henry Woodbury
This beautiful diagram, created by Bryan Christie Design for an IEEE Spectrum special report on Mars packs a lot of data into a small space, down to the specifics of the name of each mission.
Yet, with all the data, the overarching story comes through clearly: Up until this decade, most Mars missions failed. Because of the Soviet Union’s dreary record, it is easy, at first to misread orange for failure and blue for success. But a quick check at the labels makes it easy to reorient. Don’t draw the short straw.
(via i09)
March 17, 2010, 12:06 pm
Your Data is my Distraction
By Henry Woodbury
I recently ran across a still-fresh 2009 Nieman Journalism Lab post on “ambient visual data” — a good term for the practice of graphically incorporating metadata into a content-delivery interface. The most common idea seems to be adding subtle bar charts beneath or around links to illustrate various kinds of popularity.
To explain the importance of the concept, author Haley Sweetland Edwards turns to designer Eliazar Parra Cardenas, creator of Backbars, “a GreaseMonkey script to turn the headlines and comments of social link-sites into ambient bar charts (of votes/diggs/views/users…).” Cardenas explains:
“The whole point is to make textual information easier to absorb… [A well-designed site] should maximize the information that a user can understand — that you can just glance at, or take note of -– without actively thinking….
“We’ve already tried the obvious in print: putting as much text as possible in one glance (hence broadsheets), mixing in images, headlines, columns. I think the next step will be digital developments like backbars, favicons, sparklines, word coloring, spacings.”
Count me as extremely skeptical. The sites that Edwards and Cardenas hold up as examples seem both cluttered and shallow — a vote-stuffing contest for “news of the weird.”
I’m old school that way. What drives traffic are the editorial and authorial inputs that Cardenas overlooks in his list of the obvious. Not headlines, but well-written headlines. Not images, but compelling images. Not backbars, favicons, sparklines, word coloring, and spacings, but good ledes.
The New York Times isn’t making money online. But they aren’t lacking for traffic.
February 26, 2010, 3:34 pm
Man as Industrial Palace Animation
By Lisa Agustin
We sometimes use “little people” to depict complex processes, with multiple actors participating in a real-life process (e.g., online collaboration or editorial workflow). But little people can also be used to illustrate processes as they might be imagined. Physician and science writer Fritz Kahn (1888-1968) often used the man-as-machine analogy to show functions and features of the human body. One of Kahn’s most famous works is the “Man as Industrial Palace” poster from 1927. Designer Henning Lederer brings the poster to life with this clever animation that illustrates several systems of the human body, including respiratory, circulatory, digestive, and nervous.
Read more about Lederer’s project: http://www.industriepalast.com/
(via Flowing Data)
February 20, 2010, 10:42 am
Visualizing More Affordable Care
By Henry Woodbury
The February 2010 issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology features work by Dynamic Diagrams for an article titled Alternatives to a Routine Follow-Up Visit for Early Medical Abortion. The article describes a protocol for assessing a woman’s health after an abortion without routine use of ultrasonography. To quote from the abstract:
We constructed five model algorithms for evaluating women’s postabortion status, each using a different assortment of data. Four of the algorithms (algorithms 1–4) rely on data collected by the woman and on the results of the low-sensitivity pregnancy test. Algorithm 5 relies on the woman’s assessment, the results of the pregnancy test, and follow-up physician assessment (sometimes including bimanual or speculum examination).
A sponsor of the study, Gynuity Health Products, asked Dynamic Diagrams to visualize the data. Our explanation shows the results for the current standard of care and five algorithms tested by the researchers. For each approach we show the total number of cases, the number of women returning to a clinic for a follow-up visit, and the number of women receiving a follow-up ultrasound. In contrasting colors we show specific additional treatment cases in two columns; those identified by the protocol on the left vs. those not necessarily identified by the protocol on the right. In large type we provided the percentage of the number of follow-up ultrasounds to the total number of cases. This combination of rich data points and a key percentage makes it easy to compare the effectiveness of each algorithm. A sample of this visual language (without labels) is shown below:
While we cannot reprint the full text of article, we can provide the visual explanation used as Figure 2: Algorithms identifying women who received additional care after medical abortion (PDF, 409K).
February 19, 2010, 12:11 pm
Life in One Cubic Foot
By Lisa Agustin
Sometimes the simplest visual explanations are the most powerful. Case in point: David Liittschwager’s series of photographs in which he shows how much life can be found in one cubic foot. Liittschwager’s team visited five diverse environments including Central Park, New York and Moorea, French Polynesia. At each location, the team used a 12-inch metal-framed cube to carve out a mini-ecosystem, then observed the plants and animal life that moved in and out of the space, down to one millimeter. In all, more than a thousand individual organisms were photographed. Says Liittschwager: “It was like finding little gems.” Seeing the inhabitants of each environment assembled together, the sheer volume of the collection is awe-inspiring. One improvement I’d like to suggest: to give each environment some context, I’d like to see the specimens arranged by groups or the layers in which they were found. Be sure to check out the videos that show how the team documented each eco-system.
February 2, 2010, 9:43 am
Rendered in Neat Circles
By Henry Woodbury
Popular Science links to another interesting information graphic on space exploration. This one, designed by Michael Paukner, illustrates the number of human-created objects orbiting Earth — and assigns responsibility:
You can view larger versions on Paukner’s Flickr page.
The title of my post comes from the Popular Science URL: see-space-debris-cloud-surrounding-earth-rendered-neat-circles. Ironically, this summarizes the problem with the visualization. Despite the attractiveness of the graphic, the neat circles show linear values by area, making precise comparisons completely impossible.
The donut shapes created by the overlapping circles also confuse comparison. Take a quick look at the darkest circles– that for space debris — around the United States and Russia. The United States is bigger, but by what order of magnitude? We see a lot more black — a thicker torus– but the actual ratio is just 1.2 to 1.
January 30, 2010, 9:23 pm
Real-Time Bus Location
By Henry Woodbury
Using GPS and Google Maps, MASCO — the Medical Academic and Scientific Community Organization, Inc., of Boston, Massachusetts — offers this elegant real-time bus map for its shuttle service. The map shows buses in service, their location, and their direction of travel.
For folks waiting at the bus stop, the service is accessible via web-enabled phone at http://shuttles.masco.org/m.
January 20, 2010, 10:33 am
The Known Universe
By Lisa Agustin
Check out “The Known Universe,” a stunning animation developed by the American Museum of Natural History that takes the viewer on a journey from The Himalayas to the afterglow of the Big Bang and back again. The video is part of the Rubin Museum of Art’s exhibition “Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to the Evolving Universe,” on view until May 10, 2010.
December 22, 2009, 12:20 pm
Hiding Text in PowerPoint
By Lisa Agustin
I stumbled on this odd post about the use of PowerPoint in the college classroom. The basic question is this: How do you help students who rely on your PowerPoint slides as a study aid, especially if they missed the class? Some academics are aware of PowerPoint best practices, but Julianne Dalcanton suggests the following as a way to help students without breaking the rules:
My trick for [giving students the key points without cluttering the slide] is using black text on a black background. The text doesn’t show on the screen, but it does show up when printed as a handout, since the black background defaults back to white. Thus, you get the following:
Dalcanton should rethink her approach. Hiding the bulleted text so it will appear when printed wrongly assumes everyone will want (or remember) to print it, and using a black background with red text results in poor legibility (not to mention encouraging a nice nap if the lecture takes place in a dark room). In short, she’s sacrificing a good presentation for the sake of printability. Other problems with this slide:
- The graph is key to the slide and should be bigger. Remove the box that surrounds the question, since this is visually distracting. If the question itself is a key point, hopefully a subsequent slide answers the question.
- The language in the bottom-right comment needs the speaker to provide context. What does “This” refer to–the graph? If it’s important to connect energy loss with calculating the age of the universe, spell this out explicitly.
- The bullet points are better placed in the Notes area, but Dalcanton isn’t a fan of this feature (see comments following her post). If the bulleted text must be kept in the slide, it shouldn’t be sized for presentation, since this is a waste of slide real estate. Instead, use a smaller font, and move the bullets to the bottom of the page. Then use a color other than black for the font and matching background color (we used white, and this prints fine).
Our quick redo shows the presentation version on the left, and the printed version on the right. The bulleted text is in ten-point font, and legible when printed.
December 17, 2009, 12:24 pm
Last Slide Standing
By Lisa Agustin
The New York Times recently profiled biologist-turned-stand-up-comic Tim Lee, who describes his act as a “parody of a seminar.” And what seminar would be complete without PowerPoint? It seems to come in handy when describing the similarities between nuclear fission and sports bars.
December 14, 2009, 10:59 am
The Periodic Box of Chocolates
By Henry Woodbury
People seem to forget that the periodic table is a table because it reads in two dimensions. Read it left to right and atomic weight increases. Read it top to bottom and you find elements with similar properties — for example, the alkali metals in group 1 or the noble gases in group 18. The gaps in periods 1, 2, and 3 represent physical realities about the electron configuration of those lighter elements (see this Periodic Table by Chemicool).
Most attempts to fit other data sets to the periodic table result in strange confections.
This Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is a prime example. A simple categorized list is puddled into the matrix of Dmitri Mendeleev’s table and shoved around to fit. There are exactly six “compound visualizations.” How serendipitous. The really interesting data — the examples of the methods — are hidden under reductive two-letter acronyms, making comparison impossible even when you do find something interesting.
If the categories are meaningful and not just quantified to fit the table, the next step is to abandon the presentation method that doesn’t work and come up with one that does.
December 2, 2009, 12:45 pm
Visualize Italy
By Henry Woodbury
In Tim Parks lyrical and learned history, Medici Money, he provides this description of Italy:
Let us dispense with the “boot” image and imagine a cylinder topped by an inverted equilateral triangle. The cylinder is surrounded by the sea and mostly mountainous, the triangle is generally flat but shut off to the north by the Alps. (p. 66)
It is an interesting gambit, this delineation of a visual idea with prose, yet the result is quite odd. The cylinder is a three dimensional volume; the triangle is a two dimensional plane. Parks creates this juxtaposition intentionally, to drive home the geographic difference between the mountainous south and the flatter north. The poor fit of the two shapes also evokes the political and cultural disagreement between the north and south of Italy throughout its history.
It is a visual explanation, but one that exists best in a mental space. Made graphic, it adds little to the map.
November 18, 2009, 8:55 am
Resume as Infographic
By Kirsten Robinson
Designer Michael Anderson has created an infographic representation of his resume:
View the full-size image.
November 9, 2009, 11:20 am
Abstract Berlin
By Henry Woodbury
Christoph Niemann has combined history and personal narrative to tell the story of the Berlin Wall, in words and stunningly simple images:
Niemann’s iconic images reference specific events and larger ideas. One image shows an East German border guard hurdling barbed wire to escape into the West. Other images remind me of M.C. Escher’s tessellated patterns, reduced to elemental form. Niemann’s underlying theme is the transformation of a city, history as augury and echo.
November 6, 2009, 4:04 pm
Making Your Data Intuitive
By Lisa Agustin
How can we make data intuitive–that is, so it “hits home”? We’ve posted previously on the technique of making large numbers meaningful by using a clever or shocking image. But this method has its limitations. A big number explained with a visual analogy may get people to say “Hey, you’re right, that IS a big number.” But in order to get the audience to act (rather than just react), it takes extra effort to translate that statistic into something they can relate to on a personal level.
Consider the funding coming through the U.S. government’s Recovery Act: $787 billion. Sure, that sounds like a lot of money. But is it too much? Too little? It depends. Authors Dan Heath and Chip Heath explain it this way:
How can you relate to this monstrous figure in the daily-life zone? Well, there are roughly 112 million households in the United States, with a median household income of about $50,000. So an $800 billion stimulus works out to be the rough equivalent of seven weeks’ income for an American household. Is that worth it? By way of comparison, we already work three or four months a year just to pay our federal, state, and local taxes. So maybe this seems like a no-brainer to you: seven weeks’ worth of work to stave off a potential depression. Or maybe you’re appalled. Regardless, we can finally have a real argument, because we have a better idea of what we’re arguing about.
Well said.
November 6, 2009, 10:35 am
The Final Frontier
By Henry Woodbury
Sean McNaughton of National Geographic and Samuel Velasco of 5W Infographics have produced a majestic map of the nearly 200 lunar, solar, and interplanetary space missions over the past 50 years.
At the National Geographic, the map is presented in a “Zoomify” Flash object.
Better is the full size image placed by Adam Crowe on Flickr.
What I really need is a wall-sized print.
November 5, 2009, 12:25 pm
Follow the Necktie
By Henry Woodbury
It is always interesting to me to see how designers using different methods tackle some of the same visualization challenges that we do. How do you represent an abstract idea like “mobility” or “business”?
Here is Virtualization in Plain English, a marketing video for Intel made by Common Craft.
Keep track of that necktie.
October 30, 2009, 3:39 pm
Hey Jude, Don’t Get Confused
By Henry Woodbury
Created by love all this (via Sippican Cottage).
October 23, 2009, 3:45 pm
The Mummy Animation Joins the Mummy
By Henry Woodbury
At the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Getty Villa Malibu, our 3D animation of the of Mummy of Herakleides is now installed in the gallery:
It’s a perfect day for a trip to Malibu.
October 16, 2009, 10:10 am
Infographics for Web Workers
By Lisa Agustin
Web Design Ledger offers a collection of infographics of special interest to web workers, including process flows, data driven visualizations, and musings (like xkcd.com’s Map of Online Communities, above). Enjoy.
October 15, 2009, 9:22 am
What Are the Odds?
By Lisa Agustin
Just out this week, the Book of Odds claims to be “the world’s first reference on daily life.” Normally, I’m not too interested in finding out my odds of surviving a plane crash or ever having eaten pizza for breakfast, but with its broad collection of statistics, articles (“Behind the Numbers: the Sharks and the Vending Machines”), and a personalized feature for creating your own book of odds, the site makes for a fun diversion. Browse statistics by area of interest (Accidents & Death, Daily Life & Activities, Health & Illness, and Relationships & Society), or use the Visual Browse tool to view odds on a keyword of your choice. But don’t let the title fool you: while the site is about numbers, it doesn’t offer gambling or predict the future (too bad).
September 25, 2009, 3:32 pm
Data in the Round
By Henry Woodbury
An interesting, but flawed chart at O&G Next Generation shows how much oil the United States imports from other countries:
There are several big problems with this chart. First, U.S. oil imports per day by country is linear data. When one-dimensional values are presented as two-dimensional areas, proportional differences between values are rarely perceived correctly. This problem is compounded by the placement of the data blobs on the global map. It is good to attach each blob to a country, but not good to scatter them both vertically and horizontally. With a little design attention the values could be presented as bars and aligned along a single x-axis in the tropics.
Another problem is that several important data points aren’t shown. Most importantly we need a figure for the United State’s domestic production. This is vital for context. Upon investigation, we find that the bar chart on the bottom left is either not accurate or not tracking the same petroleum product as the map. If you subtract Total Imports from U.S. Consumption for 2008 you get a ballpark figure of around 6,000 thousand barrels per day. This is far off the mark. The real number for 2008 is 4,921 thousand barrels per day, a little bit less than total U.S. crude produced since a small amount of U.S. crude is exported. In June 2009, domestically produced minus exported crude is 5,126 thousand barrels per day.
Another missing figure is the total of oil imports from all countries after the top 10. Once we can look up the June 2009 total for all countries — 9,172 thousand barrels per day — we can easily calculate the sum of all countries after the top 10. The long tail total turns out to be 1,613 thousand barrels per day which is greater than all but Canada. The 9,172 total and various subtotals also allow us to validate the 82% percentage on the far right and update the 2007 ratio of 60% to the actual June 2009 ratio of 64%.
If we add circles to show the oil consumed by the United States from its own production and the “Rest of World” total identified above, the chart looks something like this:
It is even more difficult to read. But that’s not a problem with the data. The data needs to be shown. The problem is with the presentation. The chart still shows linear values with areas, it still doesn’t show totals, it still uses an out-of-date figure from 2007 on the far right, it still has questionable, out-of-date data on the bottom left, and it still has a jumble of factoids on the bottom right that don’t relate the data above. Alas, I am out of time.
September 8, 2009, 1:02 pm
The Max Baucus Health Care Lobbyist Complex
By Lisa Agustin
The current health care reform debate has presented plenty of opportunities for visual thinkers (and aspiring ones) to clarify the issues and explain possible solutions. My current favorites have been Dan Roam’s “back of the napkin” series on fixing health care and the flow chart prepared by the office of Congressman John Boehner (R-OH) showing the Democrats’ health care proposal. (Should we assume that the awfulness is on purpose?).
But subtler visualizations grab my attention more for what they imply. Consider “The Max Baucus Health Care Lobbyist Complex,” which was developed by the Sunlight Foundation, a group whose goal is to “use the power of the Internet to shine a light on the interplay of money, lobbying, influence and government in Washington in ways never before possible.” The Max Baucus visualization is named for Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who heads the Senate Finance Committee, which has been singled out by advocates and news organizations as the toughest obstacle for the President’s health care priorities. The visualization shows the connections from Baucus to five of his staffers-turned-lobbyists to their health care sector clients, which, in some cases, overlap. Most of the organizations are directly involved in the health care or insurance industries.
According to the Foundation:
In his many years on the committee, Baucus has amassed a wealth of connections to the health care and insurance industries, often through his ties to former staffers turned lobbyists. These connections expose how close the many organizations seeking influence on health care reform are to one of the most powerful players in Washington.
Data for the visualization was provided by OpenSecrets.org.
September 4, 2009, 1:12 pm
The Times Goes Google on Us
By Henry Woodbury
I just discovered the New York Times Developer Network.
This resource provides data from The Times to third party developers through content-related APIs:
Our APIs (application programming interfaces) allow you to programmatically access New York Times data for use in your own applications. Our goal is to facilitate a wide range of uses, from custom link lists to complex visualizations. Why just read the news when you can hack it?
Most or all of the APIs respond to a query by returning data in XML or JSON format. Some developers have built custom search engines and topic-specific mashups around this functionality. Others are more interested in the sheer excess of the data — and how it can be visualized.
Artist Jer Thorp is one of the latter. Thorp accesses the Times Article Search API to create visualizations that compare the frequency of key words over time. The image below, for example, compares ’sex’ and ’scandal’ from 1981 – 2008:
When you zoom in, the visualization reveals branching segments called “org facets”. Thorp writes:
[These are] organizations which were associated with the stories that were found in the keyword search. This is one of the nicest things about the NYTimes API – you can ask for and process all kinds of interesting information past the standard “how many articles?” queries.
August 26, 2009, 1:29 pm
Mummy of Herakleides
By Henry Woodbury
The Mummy of Herakleides at the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Getty Villa Malibu is an Egyptian mummy from the Roman period (about A.D. 150). To explain the mummification process, the Getty asked Dynamic Diagrams to create a short movie for display in the gallery.
This particular mummy has several unique features, revealed by CT scans, including the removal of the heart (more commonly the lungs were removed) and the placement of a mummified ibis on the abdomen of Herakleides within the final wrapping.
Using 3D modeling software we animated the process by which the nearly 2000-year-old artifact was created. The final cut, with voice over, has now been posted to the Getty web site and YouTube:
A higher resolution version is also available on YouTube.
August 19, 2009, 9:50 am
You Are…
By Matt DeMeis
MIT Phd student Aaron Zinman has created an interesting data driven visualization experiment called “Personas”. Simply enter your name and a Flash app scours the web for bits and pieces of information about you. As it does so, its progress is displayed in visual form (albeit at warp speed, so it’s more for “ooh ahh” factor than usefulness). You are then characterized as a colored strip of categories ranging from books, sports, management and aggression to education, legal and illegal (activities?). It’s an interesting experiment. I think it would be great to have a bit more control over the categories and info about the user. Just to help weed out the cruft. As is, it’s probably pretty inaccurate for someone with the name Bob Smith or Michael Jackson. I am curious what our resident Flash maven Piotr would add to it. Go try it out over at the MIT site.
http://personas.media.mit.edu/
July 28, 2009, 12:16 pm
“Both stayed close to the mound where the Eagle set down, except for Armstrong’s quick jaunt over to the rim of East Crater to shoot some photos of the outfield.”
By Henry Woodbury
To provide context for the first walks on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, NASA provides us with a map of the Sea of Tranquility superimposed over a baseball diamond. The Lunar Module is situated on the pitchers mound with the activity of the astronauts indicated as tan paths. This shows a blob of extensive activity around the module and a number of longer walks by each astronaut.
Created by Thomas Schwagmeier from a suggestion by Eric Jones, the map is part of the NASA Apollo 11 Image Library. To really appreciate the details (including a legible key), click through to the full size version.
What looks like the original for the overlay is Schwagmeier’s elegant rendition of the “Traverse Map” — Figure 3-16 from the Apollo 11 Preliminary Science Report. The two maps are shown side-by-side below. As with the baseball overlay, click through to the full size versions to see all the detail.
June 30, 2009, 1:00 pm
How Tall is the Green Monster?
By Henry Woodbury
Flip Flop Fly Ball is Craig Robinson’s collection of “baseball infographics”:
Essentially, this site is what I’d have been doing when I was 12 years old had the Internet and Photoshop been available to me in the eighties.
What stands out for me from this collection is Robinson’s ability to ask good questions — intriguing or amusing or both.
In some of the work, the question is more the point than the answer. What if baseball players literally stole bases? For more complex questions Robinson often produces just a well-drawn pie or bar chart. But occasionally, Robinson combines question, data, and visual idea into a smart visual explanation that goes beyond that.
For example, the left field wall in Fenway Park is 37 feet and two inches tall. And how tall is that?
June 29, 2009, 2:08 pm
Sunny Days Over 3D Cities
By Henry Woodbury
The Chinese firm Edushi (“E-city”) has created 3D models of over 40 Chinese cities, including Hong Kong:
Google Map-like pan, zoom, and search features make it easy to explore these candy landscapes, until one reaches the edge of the model and the world either fades or flattens — as in the screen capture of Guangzhou below.
Oddly, the Edushi artists generally point North 45 degrees off vertical (counterclockwise). This means that the 3D maps don’t align with common roadmap or satellite views.
(via PopSci.com)
June 2, 2009, 1:08 pm
The Break of the Curve
By Henry Woodbury
Here is a very cool optical illusion — with an equally interesting (to me) real-world example.
April 23, 2009, 9:12 am
The Carnivore’s Dilemma
By Lisa Agustin
Showing large numbers in a way that both grabs the attention of an audience and also compels them to think about their relationship to the data can be a challenge for statistics-based visualizations. Animal Visuals has just released an animation depicting the rate of slaughter of chickens, pigs, and cows in the United States in 2008:
Initially, I found the speed of the animation to be somewhat distracting, but the effect of the animals moving/twitching along the conveyor belt gave me a visceral feeling that was hard to ignore. In a way I wonder if this was really the point of the graphic, rather than making me think about the numbers themselves.
April 22, 2009, 8:27 am
Broken on Purpose
By Henry Woodbury
Seth Godin at Gel 2006 explains how This is broken. What is broken? Almost everything.
Including Napoleon’s March to Moscow.
Starting at 17:53, Godin buries Edward Tufte in order to praise him. Note that Godin doesn’t really bother with the graph itself, but rather Tufte’s promotion of it as “the best graph ever made.” Godin responds:
I think he’s completely out of his gourd and totally wrong!
If you need to spend 15 minutes studying a graph you might as well read the text underneath. Godin then backs off. Tufte’s promotion of Napoleon’s March, he says, is an example of something “broken on purpose”:
For the kind of person you want to reach — they want to read a complicated difficult to understand graph and get the satisfaction of figuring it out, because then they get it…. Sometimes the best thing to do is break it for the people you don’t care about and just make it work for the people you do.
Agree?
Watch the rest of the talk as well. It’s a very funny, pointed critique of bad information and product design.
March 24, 2009, 8:24 am
At Least We Know It’s Being Spent Wisely
By Kirsten Robinson
The folks over at PageTutor have come up with a visualization to show what the huge sums of money being bandied about by banks, insurance companies, Bernie Madoff, and our government actually look like, using stacks, shopping bags, and pallets of $100 bills.
March 19, 2009, 1:25 pm
An Introduction to Information Design: A Manual for Advocacy Groups
By Maia Garau
Tactical Tech and John Emerson of Backspace have published a useful information design manual for NGOs looking to strengthen the impact of their campaigns:
Information design uses pictures, symbols, colors, and words to communicate ideas, illustrate information or express relationships visually… It is not the same as graphic design, nor is it only about making something aesthetically pleasing. It’s not about branding, style, making a glossy product or something that looks “corporate.”
They add that information design is not about making something aesthetically pleasing, but about making your data clear, compelling and convincing (to which I would add memorable).
The authors make a convincing case for using information design to effect social change at many levels. Information design is a powerful tool not only for storytelling but also for the earlier stages of discovery (finding patterns) and decision-making (making comparisons and weighing options).
Download the pamphlet here or or request a copy.
March 9, 2009, 8:49 am
Successful Teams Don’t Communicate Only With Words
By Kirsten Robinson
An interesting excerpt from Jared Spool’s blog, on successful design teams and diagrams:
For almost ten years, the research team at UIE has been searching to uncover the secrets behind great designs. As we talk to team after team, a key truth continues to emerge: The best teams communicate internally really well, while those teams that struggle also struggle at their internal communication.
When we think of a team that communicates, the first things that comes to mind are hallway conversations, meetings, and emails. But, as our research continues to show, are only a part of the communication puzzle.
It turns out that one of the differences between the successful teams and the struggling teams is their use of diagrams and maps. Struggling teams almost always try to communicate important design ideas through talking or word-based documents, while the successful teams put a heavy emphasis on diagrams.
It’s nice to see this validation for what we at Dynamic Diagrams have always advocated.
Jared’s comments are a lead-in to an article on concept models, which in turn referenced Bryce Glass’s concept model for Flickr — a nice visualization for a complex social media ecosystem. Apparently this visualization has been around since 2005, but this was the first time I’d seen it.
