Archive: Visual Explanation
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
Christopher 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 (hat tip to 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:
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 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.
March 5, 2009, 1:52 pm
Correlation is not Causation, not Even on Facebook
by Henry Woodbury
Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith stirs the statistical pot:
Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence….
Griffith came up with the idea as a way to show how to take two separate sets of data that were pretty straightforward on their own – in this case, the average SAT score and the favorite books among students at various universities – and combine them to become more interesting. Griffith says, “Their unity is hilarity incarnate. This is to inspire people to think creatively about the data sets that are on the Internet.”
Given Griffith’s puckish sense of humor, I read “think creatively” as “be skeptical.”
His other well-publicized “be skeptical” project is WikiScanner a tool that that uses IP addresses to identify anonymous Wikipedia edits made from corporate and government domains. (In my mind the joke here is the idea that Wikipedia is trustworthy in any fashion, but that’s just me.)
March 4, 2009, 1:19 pm
Visual Explanation of the Credit Crisis
by Kim Looney
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo
For any of you visual thinkers still struggling to understand how this country got into this current financial mess, take a look at Jonathan Jarvis’s narrated video. I didn’t really start to put the pieces together until the bombs appeared, but then I began to get it. Now we need one for corporate bail-outs!
February 24, 2009, 12:40 pm
Global Problems Demand Good Maps
by Henry Woodbury
The study of climate change is a global endeavor which means that data is often plotted to continental or world maps. As such, many of the challenges of good map making reappear as problems in presenting climate change data. Two researchers at the University of Idaho, Jean McKendry and Gary Machlis, point out that a key map from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers (PDF, p. 10), fails in both intelligibility and accuracy:
One of the most common ways in which climate maps can be misleading is to fail to take account of the map’s projection. “All map projections have distortions (distance, area, direction, and/or shape). For example, if temperature is displayed using coloured squares of equal size across the map, but the map projection does not minimize areal distortion, the squares appear to but do not represent equal areas on the Earth,” McKendry told environmentalresearchweb.
Other problems include overlapping data points, a multi-colored data scale, and unclear labels.
The map is reproduced below in all of its orange glory:
February 18, 2009, 8:53 pm
3D Modeling Reveals Construction of Saint Gines
by Henry Woodbury
In conjunction with a current exhibition of Luisa Roldana’s Saint Ginés de La Jara, the J. Paul Getty Museum created a video of the techniques used to create the medieval polychrome statue.
Dynamic Diagrams work is featured in the first section of the video, in which 3D modeling software is used to recreate the assembly of the XVII century wooden sculpture.
February 3, 2009, 3:55 pm
How We Read Graphs
by Lisa Agustin
Cognitive Daily offers up some recent research into how we read graphs, including some results gleaned from using an eye-tracking device, a tool more commonly used in evaluating web sites.
February 3, 2009, 9:28 am
Lego Minimalism
by Henry Woodbury
Christoph Niemann has another abstract city column up.
January 21, 2009, 11:31 am
Examples, Symbols, and Signposts
by Henry Woodbury
Comics impresario Scott McCloud takes on the TED conference and delivers an engaging and funny talk titled “Understanding comics.” The title doesn’t do McCloud justice. He’s really talking about vision. And it’s a great presentation.
One reason for that is McCloud’s playfulness. Even as he unpacks his thesis, he tells stories, plugs in cross-references, and puns on his own ideas. When he gets to talking about comics he uses simple, but effective animations and symbols to highlight concepts such as directionality, space, and time.
Ah, but maybe this is too easy. He’s a comic artist, talking about comics, and his examples are comics.
Not true. When McCloud is talking about ideas, he is equally creative. Except for one key sequence, there are almost no words on his slides. Instead, McCloud offers visual references — a picture of Jung when talking about Jung, a sequence of Ray Charles, Albert Einstein, Wernher Von Braun, and Thomas Edison as he describes his father: ”a blind genius rocket scientist inventor.” He also uses simple, but effective symbols such as an eye to symbolize science, “where what we see and can ascertain are the foundation for what we know.”
(hat tip to Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen)
January 16, 2009, 10:39 am
Gerrymander Away
by Henry Woodbury
Computers have arguably made the gerrymandering of U.S. Congressional Districts easier and more egregious. They should be able to make the problem go away. That is, if anyone can figure out an algorithm:
…it is surprisingly hard to define, or at least reduce to a set of rules, what a “gerrymandered district” is. Writing a formula for drawing districts requires us to define how funny-looking is too funny looking. And what is funny, anyway?
“The idea is that circles are the best shape for districts,” said George Washington University’s Daniel Ullman, talking about one school of thought. “Unfortunately, they don’t tessellate well.” This was apparently a joke, because the room burst out laughing. For the rest of the afternoon, the word tessellate never failed to produce giggles. (Tessellate means to tile together, as in an M.C. Escher drawing.)
Mathematicians and lawyers are focused on improving the reapportioning process coming up in less than two years. Another use of their analysis is simpler – to find the worst offenders and shame the politicians that put them in place. Is this too funny looking?
January 12, 2009, 10:24 am
Ahead of Our Time?
by Matt DeMeis
I came across this video recently titled “Did You Know” that was created by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and XPLANE. It reminded me of a project dD created almost 8 years prior called “Global Village”. I dug around in our archive and after some careful cross converting and video capturing (the first generation ActionScript didn’t want to play nice), I was able to resurrect the presentation. Some of the sound effects were lost due to the age of the file but it’s enough to show the similarities between the two. It’s not as fancy as the 2007 “Did You Know” but the way the visual statistics are represented has much more of an impact. Have a look…
“Global Village” 1999-2000
“Did You Know” 2007
December 17, 2008, 11:03 am
Rivermap Visualization by Kerr | Noble
by Lisa Agustin
The recently announced breakup of design studio Kerr | Noble prompted me to revisit some of their work, including “Rivermap” from 1999, in which the meandering contours of the River Thames are depicted using the John Banck’s poem from 1783, “A Description of London.” The map uses the Caslon font, which was designed at the same time that the poem was written. Lovely.
See the London Design Museum’s site for an interview with the duo, including samples of their work.
December 12, 2008, 12:17 pm
Creating Guideposts for the Visual Design Process
by Lisa Agustin
A web site’s design is the marriage of the analytical and the aesthetic. The analytical side involves sifting through the front-end research (strategic documents, content inventories, user interviews, etc.), and translating these into a positive and engaging user experience. Coming up with the architecture is a creative activity, but it has its roots in research activities that most clients understand and accept.
Developing the site’s visual design is usually the bigger challenge, since this is when subjective concerns like personal preference may come into play. Personal opinions about design may put the project at risk (read: endless review cycles) if these are not managed correctly. With our projects, we frame design discussions in the context of project goals and best practices. Conversations about the site’s desired look and feel are as specific as we can make them: Are there corporate brand guidelines? Does the site have to complement other sites and collateral? Are there sites you like/don’t like and why? This approach has served us well. Still, there have been exceptions where we’ve created a visual design concept that clearly meets all the requirements, but the client is not satisfied with the result. In the best scenarios, the feedback is specific and actionable. But then there are other design reviews where the response is a little more cryptic: “It’s not quite I was looking for,” or the dreaded “I know it when I’ll see it.” What then?
I thought about this when I read how Droid, the font for the new G1 cellphone, came to be. Google wanted a font that was “friendly and approachable” with “common appeal.” The iterations developed by font studio Ascender Corporation ranged from an early typeface that was considered too “bubbly” to the more “techno” computer-based font, which was also rejected. Because the definition of an “approachable” font isn’t exactly clear-cut (at least to me), I suspect debates about the options used some kind of visual scale, a more complex version of the continuum graphic at the top of this post. Seeing the range of options would be easier than just talking about them, and it would then be possible to pinpoint the desired result. We’ve developed such tools ourselves, adding information about what the advantages and tradeoffs may be in choosing one direction over another.
Another example of this design continuum is the perceptual map used to guide the design development of the Xbox 360 game console (scroll down for the perceptual map). The project team arranged seven console designs on a grid that used “architectural/organic” vs. “mild/wild” axes, with the existing design as a reference. This tool ensured that the conversation was about design language and not about design preference, while also giving non-designers a way to compare the different console designs. (For more on the Xbox 360 design process, see this earlier Information Design Watch post.)
I would love to see more examples of visual tools that can help guide the design process. Readers, have any of you successfully adapted or developed similar tools for guiding design-related discussions with clients?
December 3, 2008, 9:45 am
I Heart Coffee
by Henry Woodbury
Christoph Niemann brews up a brilliant illustrated essay on one man’s history with coffee. Don’t miss the chart on coffee-bias-over-time about halfway through (oh sure, it could be improved, Tuftelike, but that’s not the point).
November 19, 2008, 11:32 am
Up in Smoke
by Lisa Agustin
GOOD magazine offers an interactive visualization illustrating where people in the U.S. are still smoking — an interesting question, given recent smoking bans in eating and drinking establishments. Roll over a state to see which bans are in place (none, workplace, restaurant, bar), what percentage of the state’s population smokes, and the price for a pack of cigarettes. The state’s national ranking with regard to number of smokers and pack price are also presented. Overall, it’s a good approach: users can focus on single states, and also get a nationwide picture of bans and smoking populations. But I found the use of visual metaphors — a cigarette for smoker percentage and a pack of cigarettes for the pack’s price–to be distracting. (I originally mistook the cigarette as a bar graph measuring two different variables.) For example, it’s unclear if a cigarette that extends the full width of the column equals 100%, and what the tallest pack of cigarettes cost (my guess was $7.00). A better approach would be to eliminate the symbols, and place the percentage and cost closer together so the user can review them as a pair, with national figures placed closer to each for comparison.
November 12, 2008, 2:00 pm
Crisis Metaphors
by Henry Woodbury
To explain the baffling complexity of the current U.S. and global financial crisis, Marketplace Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch has become a man of metaphors.
Here, he explains CDOs (Collaterized Debt Obligations) as a champagne fountain.
Other videos in this series include The credit crisis as Antarctic expedition, and Margin calls and the financial markets decline with girl scout cookies and barbie dolls as collateral.
Also recommended is Michael Lewis’s old-fashioned personality-based history of the CDO crash. As Hirsch demystifies the transactions that fueled the crisis, Michael Lewis tracks down those responsible. His article is simply titled “The End.”
November 7, 2008, 3:44 pm
Best Business Books of 2008 #5: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
by Henry Woodbury
The list is by Jon Foro, a books editor at Amazon.com.
Anyone read it?
October 16, 2008, 11:08 am
The Cortical Homonculus
by Henry Woodbury
I recently came across two classic examples of visual explanation: neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s two-dimensional map of brain functions and its three-dimensional cohort, the cortical homonculus:
A cortical homunculus is a physical representation of the primary motor cortex, i.e., the portion of the human brain directly responsible for the movement and exchange of sense and motor information (namely touch: sensitivity, cold, heat, pain etc.) of the rest of the body.
More information about brain function and Penfield’s maps can be found here.
September 25, 2008, 3:48 pm
The Wire Meets 43F
by Tim Roy
One of my all-time favorite television series is “The Wire” and one of my all-time favorite blogs is Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders. Imagine my joy at finding that Merlin has written an extensive posting on “The Wire” as a close-to-perfect example of how a story arc should be constructed.
Here at Dynamic Diagrams, we spend a lot of time talking with our clients about visual story-telling. Part of this involves developing a narrative arc that allows an audience to connect to the story being told. Cognitive issues come into play here — establishing tension and then release, as well as providing the necessary “rests” so as not to create information overload.
Merlin writes: “…you very much do have the power to design the arcs you make, starting today. And even if you haven’t figured out how your final episode ends, consider how the pieces you want to lay down might fit together. And how the string that you gather might crack a case you hadn’t expected.”
If your own work is missing a narrative arc, take a look at The Wire: Writing Into Your Arc.
To quote Omar: “I’ll do what I can to help y’all. But, the game’s out there, and it’s play or get played. That simple.”
September 17, 2008, 10:22 am
Personal Visualization Project
by Kirsten Robinson
Flowing data held a contest for the best “personal data visualization.” Here’s one example:
September 16, 2008, 1:50 pm
Why Kids Have Tantrums (Visualization)
by Kirsten Robinson
The New York Times has published a time series of brain scans, colorized to show how a child’s brain matures from age 4 to 21. This appealed to me as a parent, cognitive science enthusiast, and information designer.
September 12, 2008, 2:46 pm
12 Beanbags for Nine Planets
by Maia Garau
If every person on Earth generated as much CO2 as the average North American, our planet’s carbon emissions would reach nine times the sustainable level — hence Nine Planets Wanted, the title of a striking installation designed by Zago for the United Nations Lobby in New York. The installation marks the launch of the United Nations Development Programme’s One Planet, One Chance campaign on climate change and social inequality.
Manuel Toscano and his team at Zago have taken a thoughtful and provocative approach to visualizing data from this year’s UNDP Human Development Report. Twelve giant bean bags spread throughout the hall capture the comparative emissions of different countries, while offering visitors soft, comfortable seats on which to take it all in. The largest is the one that represents the United States per person per capita yearly emissions — it is 30ft in circumference!
Present at the inauguration, the President of the General Assembly Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann said that the great problems facing humanity need more than words — they need novel means of communication that will enable people to absorb and respond to information in new ways.
The installation runs until October 5th. More information is available at http://nineplanetswanted.org/
September 4, 2008, 3:16 pm
Visual Storytelling in the Great White North
by Tim Roy
Having just returned from a two week car trip in Canada, I wanted to post my observations that information design challenges seem to be just about everywhere. My time in Montreal created some interesting experiences with regard to the balance between French and English signage (especially exciting while on a six lane congested highway trying to decide if this is the right exit).
Leaving the city and moving into the Province of Ontario saw a reversal of the same — English signs became dominant with a secondary nod towards French. Finally, arriving at the obligatory visit to Niagara Falls, it became clear that even here, presenters of information struggle with the fundamental principles of communication. In this case, the info-graphics seem to do a reasonable job of telling the story, but they certainly do not convey a message of “unusual.”
September 4, 2008, 10:31 am
There Will Be Visualizations
by Lisa Agustin
Given the impact of rising fuel prices on, well, nearly everything, it’s not a surprise to see some oil-related visualizations cropping up online.
Portfolio magazine offers a starting point, with an interactive map of gas prices around the world. View the spectrum of prices worldwide, or zoom into a given region to see how individual countries rank (good for putting gas-pump gripes into perspective — I’m glad I don’t live in Turkey).
Other visualizations focus on mapping sources of oil. The Sierra Club’s campaign to discourage new off-shore drilling includes a map of existing leases in the U.S. The map is a good start, but it could be improved by showing the gap between what’s been drilled and what’s leased but remains untouched (68 million acres, according to SC). Science Daily reported on Durham University’s mapping of disputed Arctic territories and who may lay claim to untapped oil resources (see left). Showing how the Arctic cap might be divided is no easy task, thanks to a combination of international law and geography. Take Russian claims (in green), for example:
“Russian demands relate to a complex area of law covered by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS). Under that law, any coastal state can claim territory 200 nautical miles (nm) from their shoreline (Exclusive Economic Zone, EEZ) and exploit the natural resources within that zone. Some coastal states have rights that extend beyond EEZ due to their continental shelf,…the part of a country’s landmass that extends into the sea before dropping into the deep ocean. Under UNCLOS, if a state can prove its rights, it can exploit the resources of the sea and the seabed within its territory. Russia claims that its continental shelf extends along a mountain chain running underneath the Arctic, known as the Lomonosov Ridge. Theoretically, if this was the case, Russia might be able to claim a vast area of territory.”
August 28, 2008, 11:28 am
Groovin’ with Some Energy
by Henry Woodbury
Here’s an ad that actually caused me to click.
Areva, “the no. 1 nuclear energy products and services vendor in America,” has constructed a new print and Internet ad campaign around the birds-eye isometric view of its world. The Web animation shows energy production and use from mining to power generation to the disco.
It reminded me of the Royskopp video we linked here, but with a somewhat different rationale. Both animations were done by the French firm H5 (look under FILMS > CLIPS for Royskopp; under FILMS > PUBLICITE for Areva).
August 28, 2008, 10:57 am
Infoviz Art on Slate
by Lisa Agustin
Slate offers its take on “infoviz art” via this slide show of visualizations. It includes the usual candidates, like Martin Wattenberg’s famous Name Voyager, as well as lesser-known works like Golan Levin’s The Dumpster, a visualization of blog-documented teenage breakups from 2005, which was co-commissioned by The Whitney Museum’s ArtPort and Tate Online.
August 20, 2008, 9:33 am
Pop vs. Soda
by Henry Woodbury
My brother sent me a link to the “The Great Pop vs. Soda Controversy” along with this comment:
When I got to BYU I found it funny that one of my Rocky Mountain friends referred to Soda as Pop. I said, “Pop is what you call your dad!” He said, “Soda is a cracker.” Apparently some folks mapped out the colloquial use of Soda vs. Pop and it proves that both my friend and I were right!
The Pop vs. Soda site includes an interactive version of the map below, as well as a more sophisticated rendering of the data by county. You can also submit your own data. The most recent map on the site dates back to 2003, but a stats table appears to be updated daily.
August 6, 2008, 11:38 am
Housing by the Numbers
by Henry Woodbury
Carl Bialik, The Numbers Guy at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com), directs attention to a new site that culls public government data to map neighborhoods, cities, and states by real-estate values, demographics, income and other indices:
PolicyMap was created by The Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia-based organization that finances urban development. The group found that it needed mapping tools to help it choose neighborhoods for investment, and also to help investors track their projects in the context of neighborhood characteristics rather than through unenlightening pie charts. [my emphasis]
The result is a Google-Maps-like tool that easily maps geographically-based information using mostly public data (additional data sets and projections of public data are available to subscribers). For example, the sample below shows household income in our home city of Providence, Rhode Island (USA) in some of the neighborhoods around Brown University.
August 1, 2008, 10:38 am
The Pop Charts
by Henry Woodbury
Recently we came across two sites generating comic pop-culture charts — GraphJam and Song Chart Meme on Flickr. Song Chart Meme is all about pop songs. GraphJam charts pop songs, movies, and the occasional bad joke. Here’s a sample from each.
From GraphJam:
From Song Chart Meme:
July 17, 2008, 11:59 am
Wardrobe Infographic of the Week
by Lisa Agustin
Do these pants make me look…like a criminal? They might, if you’re in Flint, MI, where police officers are under orders to arrest anyone whose pants expose underwear and, well, maybe more. (Thanks, CR Blog)
July 10, 2008, 9:52 am
Talking Call to Action
by Henry Woodbury
At The Girl Effect, a call for educating girls in the developing world is presented in a powerful animation that uses just typography and music to hold our attention.
The animation leads into a microsite — essentially an executive briefing — that identifies key points and provides links to more detailed information in PDF format and at partner sites like The Center for Global Development.
There are a few stumbles — they almost lost me with “turn this sinking ship around” — but overall The Girl Effect is a great example of how to communicate a message and make it stick in the mind by paring down the details to a single narrative.
At first I thought the links I mention above were too difficult to find, but it occurred to me that they aren’t the point. The call to action is to share the story. And here we are.
June 26, 2008, 11:52 am
Running the Numbers: A Portrait of America
by Lisa Agustin
To photographer Chris Jordan, today’s American culture is the product of daily and often unconscious decisions made by individual citizens. Further, these decisions can add up, to the detriment of the environment or the population (“One million plastic cups are used on airline flights in the US every six hours.”)
While such statistics are important, these large numbers are also abstract, harder to comprehend, and therefore easier to dismiss. Jordan’s exhibition, Running the Numbers, addresses this by visualizing such data in a way that makes these numbers tangible and accessible. Each large-format photograph is the result of assembling many small images (or individual choices, if you prefer). For example, the image “Skull With Cigarette, 2007″ (based on a painting by Van Gogh) is an assemblage of 200,000 packs of cigarettes, or the equivalent of Americans who die from smoking every six months.
From the artist’s statement:
My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month…Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
Jordan’s approach to visualizing statistics addresses a common challenge in visualizing complex data. Statistics themselves will do little to convince or persuade an audience and can even have the opposite effect. (When was the last time you were inspired by a pie chart?) But presenting data in the context of a visual analogy or story makes the numbers easier to grasp, more memorable, and more likely to motivate.
For more on Chris Jordan, see: http://www.chrisjordan.com/
For his related talk at this year’s TED conference, see: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/279
June 26, 2008, 10:59 am
New York City Waterfalls
by Henry Woodbury
Artist Olafur Eliason’s public art project, New York City Waterfalls, officially opens today.
There’s a lengthy write-up on The New York Times City Room blog, while the project’s elegant Flash-based web site provides background information, photos, directions, and this visual explanation (click on “About The Waterfalls” then “How The Waterfalls Work”):
June 24, 2008, 12:15 am
Your Risk of Death, Annotated
by Mac McBurney
Update (27 June): The comments posted by Wired Science readers are an amazing case study in information design, how well-intentioned readers get confused, limitations of the Google Motion Chart. I chronicled my own confusion and suggestions on a screen shot.
Wired Science wants to know if a Google Motion Chart helps explain that smoking could kill you. So far, you only includes men born between 1933 and 1973, but that’s not what makes the interactive graph confusing.
Author Alexis Madrigal chose to experiment with this data set, “because the researchers had the stated goal of presenting health-risk data in ways that could let people see the true risks associated with smoking.”
Comments on the blog point out a variety of confusing bits and suggest ways to improve this particular plot and the Google Motion Chart in general.
June 20, 2008, 10:32 am
A Radiated Library and the Televised Book
by Henry Woodbury
In the canonical history of the origins of the Internet, Belgian Paul Otlet does not make an appearance. He was, perhaps, too early and too utopian, setting forth a plan for “a global network of computers” in 1934. Otlet’s vision derived from his life’s work creating the Mundaneum, a “universal bibliography” cataloged on index cards. For a fee, anyone in the world could mail or telegraph a request that Otlet’s small staff of professional librarians would investigate.
As the Mundaneum accumulated millions of entries, Otlet realized that his index-card-based system was becoming too cumbersome to manage. At that point he began working on ideas for electronic data storage and a totally paperless system — in his words, “a radiated library and the televised book.”
Eventually lack of funding and the onset of World War II doomed the project. Only recently have Otlet’s writings and the remnants of the Mundaneum archive begun to receive attention.
In this vein, The New York Times article linked above provides a history and appreciation of Otlet’s work, a visual explanation of the Mundaneum card cataloging system, and a clip from the documentary film The Man Who Wanted to Classify The World.
June 17, 2008, 2:38 pm
Because All Politics is Local Politics
by Lisa Agustin
In recent U.S. elections, classifying voter opinion has been reduced to describing a state as “red” (voting Republican) or “blue” (voting Democratic). While this approach gives the final outcome at the state level, it says little about the factors influencing voter decision. The Christian Science Monitor’s Patchwork Nation Project explores what voters care about most during this year’s presidential campaign by slicing the American populace into eleven distinct voter communities (e.g., Monied ‘Burbs vs. Evangelical Epicenters) and examining how each community’s issues may affect residents’ votes. Visitors can follow the campaign in real time through blog posts by local community writers, public messageboards, and an interactive visualization that tracks how many times candidates visited each type of community (a particularly interesting feature when it came to following the Democratic primaries).
June 4, 2008, 12:37 pm
Olympic Medals: Small is Beautiful
by Lisa Agustin
With the Beijing Olympics just around the corner, the Economist’s Daily Chart presents a different way of considering wins per country. Using the 2004 Athens Olympics as an example, the typical approach is to show the total number of medals won by each country. As one might expect, the bigger “superpower” countries make up the top ten. But slicing the data a different way — in this case, medals per million citizens — puts the Bahamas in first place. It’s an interesting take; an added plus would have been some reference to total populace for each of these smaller countries to put it all in perspective.
May 20, 2008, 9:34 am
Obesity, Organ by Organ
by Henry Woodbury
Click on a body part and get grossed out.
I must say that much of the effectiveness of this presentation is not in the virtue of the content, but in the visceral impact of the imagery. Organs, guts, that sort of stuff. Add to that the fact that the cutaway child, mouth agape, is illustrated to look ill.
May 12, 2008, 3:42 pm
How Time Travel Works
by Henry Woodbury
The Wikipedia entry on the 2004 film Primer provides this helpful diagram:
If I just had the time, I’d diagram Robert Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps.
May 2, 2008, 10:02 am
A New (Old) Subway Map
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times City Room blog reports that Men’s Vogue will publish an updated version of Massimo Vignelli’s iconic 1972 subway map:
With its 45- and 90-degree angles and one color per subway line, the 1972 subway map by Massimo Vignelli was divorced from the cityscape, devoid of street or neighborhood names. It was criticized because its water was not blue and its parks were not green. Paul Goldberger called it “a stunningly handsome abstraction” that “bears little relation to the city itself.”
New:
Old:
Part of a continuing series:
April 23, 2008, 9:49 am
Charts, Unjunked
by Henry Woodbury
For 100% applied Tufte you can’t do better than the Junk Charts blog. The author, Kaiser, takes charts that appear in mass media venues, analyzes how they go wrong, and redraws them for accuracy and easier interpretation (similar to what we did with Nightingale’s Rose).
Most interesting are the possibilities that arise when a chart has sufficient data to benefit from a variety of approaches. An active comments section provides sophisticated feedback to Kaiser’s posts.
In one recent post, for example, Kaiser redraws a chart of tertiary education by country that originally appeared in Atlantic. The original is shown below on the left, with the first of Kaiser’s redrawn versions on the right:
In the comments, zuil serip links to another set of redrawings, including this one:
April 4, 2008, 12:18 pm
Forget the Parachutes and Cheese: Meet Johnny Bunko
by Lisa Agustin
Many information architects and designers are familiar with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which explains the mechanics of the medium while shedding light on the principles of visual communications. Now comes Daniel Pink’s new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, a graphic novel that claims to be “The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.” The book follows the protagonist as he learns the six secrets to a satisfying career, courtesy of a sprite named Diana who can be conjured by splitting a pair of magic chopsticks. (I’m not kidding.) The book is written in the Japanese style of comics called Manga. Why? According to Pink:
Because most career books just plain stink. They’re too long, too boring, and too quickly outdated. Today most people get their tactical career information online — how to write a resume, what questions to ask in an interview, who to use as a reference, etc. What they want in a book, or so people tell me, are what they can’t get from Google. They want strategic lessons — and they want it presented in an accessible, to-the-point way.
It’s an interesting approach, newer in the U.S. than in Japan where, Pink claims, 22% of all printed material is in Manga, covering topics as diverse as “how to help you manage your time, learn about Japanese history, or find a mate.” Will the format work? You decide.
April 2, 2008, 8:58 am
Where the Singles Are
by Henry Woodbury
Author and researcher Richard Florida tells us where single men and women outnumber each other with a map and accompanying essay (originally published in The Boston Globe). The blog reprint gives commenters a chance to get into the discussion.
Tom kicks off the comment thread with a decisive point:
I think this map would be more informative if it was based on percentages rather than raw numbers.
One hopes Florida will respond. As he chatters on about the extreme cases of “greater New York” and “greater Los Angeles” I look at his map and wonder about Memphis and Miami. Why does greater Memphis, with a population around one million, have a greater singles-gender imbalance than Miami-Ft. Lauderdale with a population about five times that?
March 10, 2008, 11:40 am
Let the Penguin Explain
by Henry Woodbury
In a few weeks an AOL penguin will begin educating users about advertising cookies. Here’s a sample storyboard from the ad campaign:
A penguin?
February 27, 2008, 1:06 pm
The Movie Money Landscape
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times has a very nice interactive chart on The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 – 2007, partially captured below:
This visual explanation does many some things well. It uses both sides of the horizontal axis to double the amount of data displayed in a vertical slice of time. It avoids unnecessary gridlines and tick marks. It uses color to clarify the area plot for “total domestic gross” allowing easier comparison between movies with short and long runs (compare Shrek to Hannibal, for example). A “Find Movie” feature helps locate any release in the time frame and highlight it among its contemporaries.
All that is missing is a single view of the entire chart. Even a static thumbnail image would help illustrate seasonal and macro trends. Here’s a sample view of 1986 – 1990.
Update: Thanks to commenter “tomp” I’ve made a few edits. My original “double the amount of data” statement was off base. By using both sides of the horizontal axis, the chart may increase the number of peaks, but since the data is stacked (not overlapping as I originally assumed), this technique does not increase data density. The macro view would, in fact, be much easier to analyze if all the data was stacked in the same direction (upwards). I also replaced a reference to The Animal with Hannibal so that my point about total domestic gross would actually make sense.
January 9, 2008, 4:06 pm
Nightingale’s Rose
by Henry Woodbury
Two ways of reading the word area — its general vs. its mathematical meaning — leads to confusion in this otherwise superb article on Charts in the Economist. The chart in question is Florence Nightingale’s “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army of the East.” The data is plotted by month in 30-degree wedges. In each month, red represents deaths by injury, blue death by disease, and black death by other causes:
The Economist explains how to interpret the diagram:
As with today’s pie charts, the area of each wedge is proportional to the figure it stands for, but it is the radius of each slice (the distance from the common centre to the outer edge) rather than the angle that is altered to achieve this.
Herein lies the confusion. In fact, the areas of the wedges are not proportional. The data actually maps to the radius of each wedge. It appears that in her annotation, Nightingale used the word area in the generic sense of section or range. The great sweep of blue around the center of each chart is an artifact of the unusual radial plot. Perhaps unintentionally, Nightingale overdramatized the facts that made her case.
Our Creative Director, Piotr Kaczmarek, recalibrated Nightingale’s chart to correct this error. The diagram below uses all the elements of the original, but makes the data proportional to area:
Nightingale’s diagram, often referred to as Nightingale’s Rose or Nightingale’s Coxcomb, represents one of the inherent risks in visual explanation. An image may be so visually interesting — so iconic (a rose, a coxcomb) — that we assume its conclusions without examining its data.
This is better: a stacked bar chart that introduces a scale (!), more readable labels, and a single chart for the entire 1854-1856 period. These changes provide context and continuity, and make clear the two campaigns of the war:
UPDATE: In the comments, hstern recommends separating the three data types to allow better comparison. As it happens, Piotr created that chart as one of his alternatives to the radial plot. I’ve uploaded it below.
December 26, 2007, 2:00 pm
Proton Therapy
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times explains proton radiation therapy with a superb visual explanation. In addition to describing how the technology works, the visualization tells a second story — why proton therapy is so expensive.
One thing the Times doesn’t do (at least in the online version) is present the visualization on the same page as the photograph that accompanies the article.
Presented together, both visual explanation and photograph gain in impact. Compare the size of the human figure and nozzle in each image. Then look at the photograph and imagine all the superstructure you do not see.
December 19, 2007, 9:34 am
The Visceral Timeline
by Henry Woodbury
The opening credits of The Kingdom race through a century of Saudi Arabian history using a mixture of archival video, photographs, and animated text and diagrams.
It’s a narrative aimed at setting the stage for the movie. So what’s been left out?
(via GoodExperience)
December 6, 2007, 11:30 am
Foodpairing Diagrams
by Lisa Agustin
The Foodpairing web site takes a scientific approach to recipe creation. Diagrams of 250 ingredients show the major flavor components of each using a series of branches where ingredients with shorter distances between them have more in common. By selecting a flavor from each branch of the product diagram, the chef creates new and tasty combinations:
“If I want to reconstruct the basil flavour without using any basil…search for a combination of other food products where one contains linalool (like coriander), one contains estragol (like tarragon), etc…. So I can reconstruct basil by combining coriander, tarragon, cloves, laurel.”
It’s an interesting idea, making innovation in cooking less of a guessing game and more systematic.
October 4, 2007, 1:28 pm
Visualizing Digg
by Lisa Agustin
Making sense of the activity on Digg is the mission behind Digg Labs. The Labs offer four different views of Digg data: Arc (shown at left), BigSpy, Stack, and Swarm. Like the Digg site itself, each visualization tracks similar information, including the newest stories that users “digg,” story popularity (number and frequency of “diggs”), and the names of “diggers” themselves. Best of all, the visualizations are in real-time, making the energy and behavior of the Digg community a palpable one. But while the tools give a new perspective on Digg activity, they fall short on helping users see any obvious patterns or draw specific conclusions. Some critics even consider them confusing. Despite the criticism, these data visualizations have provided direction on how to improve the Digg user experience, according to Digg creative director Daniel Burka:
“After seeing users congregate around stories and examining their relationships, we’ve tweaked our algorithms to take [content] diversity into account when determining how popular a story really is,” Burka says. This allows a wider range of subjects to show up on the home page, for example. “Many of the lessons we’ve learned in the Labs are also influencing future feature development and the general direction of the site.”
An article in Technology Review offers further details on Digg Labs: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19079/?a=f
October 4, 2007, 12:31 pm
Access Control Poster
by Henry Woodbury
I was discussing a new project with a colleague yesterday, one in which we need to turn a preliminary framework into a detailed process model, when I realized that a past project might help us out.
Back in 2002, we designed a Modeling Access Control Poster for that year’s ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit. We intentionally challenged ourselves to explain web-based access control systems on a conceptual level, rather than show a particular case.
This approach now helps us, internally, to define the appropriate requirements-gathering baseline for a newly conceived system.
The printable poster is here: Modeling Access Control Poster (PDF, 287K).
September 26, 2007, 12:34 pm
Map of Endangered Languages
by Lisa Agustin
A joint effort between the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, the Enduring Voices Project “strives to preserve endangered languages by identifying language hotspots — the places on our planet with the most unique, poorly understood, or threatened indigenous languages — and documenting the languages and cultures within them.”
The narrative on the National Geographic site provides some statistics to describe the gravity of the situation (“Every 14 days a language dies”), but it’s the project’s interactive map that is particularly engaging. The map offers two levels of exploring the extinction threat levels. A bird’s eye view of the Earth shows the four levels of hot spots globally, while clicking on an individual location provides more detail into the history and uniqueness of the language and the specific nature of the threat.
September 13, 2007, 2:41 pm
Mindmapping Wikipedia
by Lisa Agustin
While Wikipedia is rich in content, approaching a given topic can seem overwhelming. The visual design for each entry steers users to approach the information in a linear way, top to bottom. In addition, the interconnections between subject areas are difficult to grasp at first glance, since hyperlinks to other subjects are found only by reading the text. Wikimindmap uses the concept of mindmapping to make researching any topic on Wikipedia more efficient and approachable. After running a search on their desired topic, users can size up a topic and what it covers at a glance, including crosslinks into related topics. Clicking on a node’s (+) icon lets users expand that node, while clicking on the green arrow icon reorients their view to focus on one of the crosslinked topics. Interestingly, if an entry contains many crosslinks, these will dominate the visualization, suggesting to the uninitiated that an entry is more about hypertext links than core subject content.
August 30, 2007, 10:50 am
Dance Notation Bureau Rebounds
by Henry Woodbury
After flirting with insolvency in 2005, the Dance Notation Bureau has new funding and a broader mission, including the digitization of its entire collection of “scores, films, videotapes, photographs, programs and posters.”
Students of visual explanation may be familiar with the concept of dance scoring through the works of Edward Tufte. The Dance Notation Bureau uses Labanotation, a particularly specialized system:
Rudolf van Laban, a Hungarian-born choreographer and dance theorist, developed his system of notation in the 1920s. (Systems have existed since the 15th century, but Labanotation and Benesh notation, developed in Britain in the 1950s, are the two types most used today.) Like music notation it uses graphic symbols on a staff. But the extreme complexity and detail needed to represent timing, direction, impulse and dynamics make it the province of very few specialists.
The debate about the usefulness of the visual tool is interesting. Dance notator Sandra Aberkalns contrasts the “nuance and depth” of a score to the “dancer’s interpretation” presented in video or photographs. Some choreographers have doubts:
“The notation is based on an agreed-upon form of moving, which I believe is misleading,” Mark Morris said after his “All Fours” was staged from a score at Ohio State University last year. “It’s nearly impossible to accurately communicate dynamics and phrasing, although I grudgingly admit that it was a far better tool than I had anticipated.”
The Dance Notation Bureau web site is here.
August 23, 2007, 11:03 am
How Google Works
by Henry Woodbury
Condé Nast Portfolio offers this “infographic” on How Google Works. (The text version is here.)
Interesting stuff, and nicely visualized — especially step 3 on “The Cluster”.
August 5, 2007, 5:57 pm
Around the Bases — 500 Times
by Henry Woodbury
I’ve often been critical of New York Times interactive graphics, but this one works for me, a chart of home runs by age for the 22 Major League Baseball players who have hit 500 or more. Hank Aaron’s line in bold red is the default. A mouse rollover on any other line highlights it and identifies the player responsible.
For followers of baseball, the most statistically-minded of sports fans, each line on the chart tells a story: the injuries that cut down the output of Mickey Mantle; the lost years of Ted William’s career when he served in WWII; the late start of Mike Schmidt; the early decline of Jimmie Foxx; the extraordinary consistency of Hank Aaron.
August 4, 2007, 3:14 pm
A Beautiful Orbit
by Henry Woodbury
A foam boomerang with LED lights creates a beautiful visual explanation showing the path and rotation of the device from launch to landing. The picture accompanies a Popular Mechanics article on the sport and science of boomerang throwing.
August 3, 2007, 9:47 am
Are Pixels Better Than Piecharts?
by Lisa Agustin
“The Way We Live Now: Eternity for Atheists” in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine included an infographic illustrating what Americans believe will happen to them after they die. Is this just a trendy twist on the piechart, or are we meant to glean more information from this technique? Presumably the main advantage of the pixel view is that each square represents a known quantity with which the viewer can estimate the actual number of people. A good idea, except there’s no key telling us what a pixel represents (or even a total number of people surveyed so we can extrapolate numbers ourselves). And what does the white rectangle in the middle represent — agnostics? The brightness of this shape makes me focus on it, rather than the data surrounding it.
July 27, 2007, 10:32 am
Map Markup
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times takes note of internet mapping tools, highlighting the non-expert angle:
“It is a revolution,” said Matthew H. Edney, director of the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Now with all sorts of really very accessible, very straightforward tools, anybody can make maps. They can select data, they can add data, they can communicate it with others. It truly has moved the power of map production into a completely new arena.”
Most of the sample maps linked by the article are better described than seen, for the actual visual product is a cookie-cutter hodge-podge — often just a Google or Microsoft Map overlaid with clunky icons. While this is a new way to serve up data, it is not really a new approach to mapmaking. Many local, printed trail guides, for example, benefit from the contributions of non-experts, hikers who annotate U.S. Geological Survey Maps with descriptions of trail markers and landmarks. I remember my dad planning cross-country vacations with end-to-end road maps and highlighters. Anyone always could — and did — make maps, they just couldn’t share them as easily.
July 24, 2007, 9:59 am
Visualizing Network Dynamics
by Lisa Agustin
The submissions from this year’s Visualizing Network Dynamics competition (part of the larger NetSci07 meeting) represent an intriguing collection of the different ways to represent the complex structures of dynamic networks. A mix of both movies and still visualizations covering a wide range of subjects, including citation pathways in BioMed Central, ideological alliances on the Supreme Court, and editing patterns on Wikipedia (above), the entrants all set about to map real world networks that are dynamically evolving over time in response to their usage. This year’s winner was Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns Movie, an animation of North American flight travel paths based on aircraft data collected by the Federal Aviation Administration. Set to music, this hypnotic visualization offers insights on multiple levels, including the environmental. According to one of the competition’s judges: “In an age of climatic crisis and carbon footprints, the [patterns] are rhetorically powerful as ecological visualizations showing the almost absurd degree of mobility in the USA.”
July 16, 2007, 11:31 am
All Fundraising is Local
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times provides an interactive visualization of U.S. presidential campaign fundraising. Click on a candidate to see their activity. Click on a time series at the bottom to watch fundraising over the last six months.
The results are not surprising. Every candidate raises a lot of money in their home state: Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guiliani in New York, Barack Obama in Illinois, Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
But Mitt Romney does better in Utah than Massachusetts and draws well in Michigan, reflecting, I assume, his religious and family connections. Meanwhile Clinton leads all fundraising across the country, but Obama does significantly better in Denver. Denver?
The visualization does not explain. Designed to fit the narrative of fundraising as horse race, it has no revelatory power. What demographics apply to the numbers? How does local fundraising compare on a per-capita basis? What accounts for high points in the time-series data? Is the spike for most candidates at the end of March an artifact of reporting requirements or something else? You can either backfill your own research or wait for the next feature story.
Update: Some editing, addition of an image, and a full rewrite of the last paragraph on July 19, 2007 at 1:00 pm
July 13, 2007, 3:50 pm
Graph Design I.Q. Test at Perceptual Edge
by Kirsten Robinson
Stephen Few at Perceptual Edge has posted a Graph Design I.Q. Test. It’s not difficult, but it does make you stop and think about your past sins…. Who among us has not been tempted by Excel’s 3D capabilities?
June 30, 2007, 12:12 pm
Simple Physics
by Henry Woodbury
A simple, interactive Flash application at thecleverest.com offers a mesmerizing glimpse into classical mechanics. By adjusting the location of two “planets” and the location and angle of two planes you can send a cascade of bouncy balls flying into space — or into orbit.
It’s like the spare, algorithmic, interactive version of this.
June 29, 2007, 10:03 am
Defining InfoVis
by Lisa Agustin
Brad Paley of Information Esthetics has set up a series of tests for determining if a program intended for creating data-driven visualizations can be considered a true information visualization tool. While these tests could be used to assess an application, they are just as relevant for examining the image itself. Criteria range from the Basic (“Does it contain data?”) to those that tend to be harder to meet, such as Reliability (“Are the smallest or largest meaningful differences in the subject visible?”) and Operations (“Does it display all relevant data needed to answer a question or complete a given task?”) My favorite: the Parsimony criteria, which evaluate the tool’s appropriateness in terms of its visual attributes, method, and technology: Is this program the right tool for the job, or is there a easier, simpler way to answer the big questions?
June 21, 2007, 9:05 am
The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System
by Henry Woodbury
Driving across country never looked so easy (courtesy of the addictive Strange Maps blog).
May 23, 2007, 2:09 pm
Worry Indicator
by Henry Woodbury
For all our focus on diagrams, sometimes illustration is the best explanation.
http://www.bearskinrug.co.uk/_articles/2007/05/17/the_worry_constant/
May 10, 2007, 9:09 pm
Hyperbolic Views: Mapping the Blogosphere
by Mac McBurney
Discover Magazine discusses a series of maps of the blogosphere created by Matthew Hurst.
Discussion of the pros and cons will have to wait for another day. Until then, here are two more hyperbolic tree visualization examples:
Interactive Tree View of the LexisNexis Directory of Online Sources
National Science Digital Library
Tell us what you think.
May 4, 2007, 9:20 am
Visual Tool at the Gonzales Hearing
by Lisa Agustin
During last month’s hearing on the U.S. Attorneys firing scandal, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales just couldn’t seem to produce the proof needed to convince the Senate Judiciary Committee that the dismissals were anything but politically motivated. In contrast, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) managed to put together some convincing evidence in the form of a chart detailing the protocol for contact between the Bush White House and the Department of Justice. According to Slate magazine’s Dahlia Lithwick:
One of the finest moments comes when Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of R.I., busts out a big, big chart. Which happens after almost everyone has gone home. The chart compares the Clinton protocol for appropriate contacts between the White House and the DoJ on pending criminal cases with the Bush protocol. According to Whitehouse, the Clinton protocol authorized just four folks at the White House to chat with three folks at Justice. The chart had four boxes talking to three boxes. Out comes the Bush protocol, and now 417 different people at the White House have contacts about pending criminal cases with 30-some people at Justice. You can just see zillions of small boxes nattering back and forth. It seems that just about everyone in the White House, including the guys in the mailroom, had a vote on ongoing criminal matters.
See Senator Whitehouse’s presentation of the chart on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iibnQfK-2ho
April 24, 2007, 9:48 am
The Reasoning of “I’m Hot”
by Henry Woodbury
Rob Harvilla in the Village Voice has a brilliant send-up of the breakout rap single “I’m Hot” and pseudo-scientific reasoning all in one music review. Consider this “proof” by Venn chart:
Mims is hot because he’s fly. But it raises the question: Does being hot guarantee one’s being fly? “You ain’t ’cause you not” would seem to clear that up:
April 20, 2007, 12:32 pm
The Walmart Projection
by Henry Woodbury
On a Mercator grid, artist Benjamin Edwards presents a Walmart projection: a world map that sizes nations by the number of goods they sell in Walmart.
The data was compiled in 2001 using a simple methodology:
Go to the nearest Wal-Mart from your present location. Inside each store, count as many objects as possible while noting their countries of origin.
To represent this data, Edwards roughly scales each country by percentage of the total product count, removes countries with zero results and places those remaining in approximate orientation. The result is crude but graphically effective.
But if you approach the map neutrally (elide the word “Walmart” from your brain), what does it mean? Compare the Walmart map to WorldMapper’s Total Population map.
Now my question is not “why is China so big?” but “why is India so small?” (And, “why Italy instead of France, Germany or Spain?”)
April 16, 2007, 2:15 pm
On Tufte and Napoleon’s March
by Mac McBurney
In February, the Dynamic Diagrams staff made a field trip (some might say pilgrimage) to Edward Tufte’s day-long seminar, “Presenting Data and Information.” If you’ve ever heard of Edward Tufte, you have probably seen Napoleon’s March to Moscow, Charles Josef Minard’s visual explanation of Napoleon’s disastrous attempt to conquer Russia in 1812.
Tufte says, “it may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” The graphic appears repeatedly in Tufte’s books, posters and brochures. At the recent seminar, I realized that the image has become a defacto corporate logo of Tufte and Graphics Press. At the seminar, the graphic was used in a sign directing participants from the hotel lobby to the upstairs lecture hall. It worked: Napoleon’s March quickly caught my eye and confirmed I was headed in the right direction.
Conventional wisdom v. six-variable masterpiece of information design
Because Napoleon’s March is so innovative, so lauded, so pervasive in Edwardtufteland and so emblematic of Tufte’s teachings, it was (I’m chagrined to admit) not easy for me to see that it undermines, rather than supports, the conventional view of the historical events. (Thanks to Piotr, creative director at d/D, for leading the way.)
Minard created his map to show the horrors of war. Tufte uses it to explain grand principles of data display. Both are succeessful, but Tufte misses an opportunity to emphasize just how powerful Minard’s graphic is. Tufte repeats the popular belief that “General Winter” defeated Napoleon’s army. I haven’t studied the history since high school, but this fits the image that sticks in my head: soldiers freezing to death.
In fact, according to Minard’s map, nearly three times as many French soldiers were lost (never mind the Russians) before the retreat and before the coldest weather. 90,000 died on the retreat–horrible to be sure — but 250,000 were lost before that. Only because the map follows Tufte’s grand principle number one, show the data, are we able to really question the conventional wisdom, ask useful questions and formulate alternate narratives. Now that I’m re-thinking my own understanding, I wonder why Tufte even mentions General Winter as the moral of the story.
Recency bias
In addition to temperature itself and the impending threat of winter, I suspect another factor strengthens the prevailing interpretation: recency bias. Only ten thousand French soldiers lived to tell the tale. They had just endured three months of immense suffering and witnessed the deaths of 90,000 comrades (90% of the retreating force). It’s hard to imagine their state of mind, but the previous summer was probably a distant memory.
April 16, 2007, 9:59 am
Google Presents Gapminder
by Henry Woodbury
We last mentioned Hans Rosling and his stunning displays of economic data in reference to his 2006 TED Conference presentation (view it on YouTube).
Now Rosling offers Gapminder World on Google. As with Rosling’s other shared statistical applications, you can define your own indices and run your own animations. And, with Google’s Subscribed Links feature, you can target the Gapminder World dataset when you do a Google search.
You can still view or download other Gapminder applications on the Gapminder web site.
April 5, 2007, 3:56 pm
The Neurological Case for Diagrams
by Henry Woodbury
Researchers at the University of New South Wales say the brain is not equipped to read and listen at the same time:
The findings show there are limits on the brain’s capacity to process and retain information in short-term memory.
John Sweller, from the university’s faculty of education, developed the “cognitive load theory”.
“The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster,” Professor Sweller said. “It should be ditched.”
“It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.” (my emphasis)
Powerpoint is everyone’s favorite target these days, but of course, it’s how people use Powerpoint that is the problem.
Also interesting: People learn by studying already solved problems. Learn a solution and you have a better chance of applying it the next time you run into a problem.
February 26, 2007, 9:35 am
Visual Identity: Identicon
by Lisa Agustin
Reading a string of comments on a blog is not the most stimulating user experience. Moreover, if a blog post is riveting enough to start an online conversation via comments, following the exchanges between participants may require closer reading to see who said what. Enter the Identicon. Programmer Don Park developed the Identicon as a way of enhancing the commenter’s identity by using a privacy protecting derivative of each commenter’s IP address to build a 9-block image to identify the writer. Referred to in its debut as “IP-ID,” the Identicon is written in Java and based on the first four bytes of SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm). The Identicon’s visualization consists of a small quilt of 9 blocks that uses 3 types of patches, out of 16 available, in 9 positions. To try this yourself, visit Park’s blog and scroll down to the comment form, which will display your current Identicon. Mine at the time of this writing:
How it works: the Identicon code selects 3 patches: one for center position, one for 4 sides, and one for 4 corners. There are additional details in the code for determining positioning, rotation, color, and inversion of the blocks.
For users with dynamic IP addresses, their Identicons will change over time. However, according to Park, it doesn’t appear to change often enough to affect identification beyond a “typical comment activity cluster” (presumably a single session during which a comment might be posted). Park adds:
I originally came up with this idea to be used as an easy means of visually distinguishing multiple units of information, anything that can be reduced to bits. It’s not just IPs but also people, places, and things. IMHO, too much of the web what we read are textual or numeric information which are not easy to distinguish at a glance when they are jumbled up together.
Besides the intended purpose of identifying individual users among a sea of many (e.g., wiki authors, customer tracking in CRM tools, etc.), there may be other uses as well, such as identification of individual computers within a large network. Plus the Identicon seems to be gaining in popularity: a PHP version is now available, as well as one that works for WordPress.
February 20, 2007, 4:43 pm
Visual Information for Origami
by Henry Woodbury
The New Yorker has a long article on physicist and origami artist Robert J. Lang that also illuminates the dynamically changing world of origami. In short, this ancient artform has changed radically with the application of modern mathematical tools:
In 1970, no one could figure out how to make a credible-looking origami spider, but soon folders could make not just spiders but spiders of any species, with any length of leg, and cicadas with wings, and sawyer beetles with horns. For centuries, origami patterns had at most thirty steps; now they could have hundreds. And as origami became more complex it also became more practical. Scientists began applying these folding techniques to anything — medical, electrical, optical, or nanotechnical devices, and even to strands of DNA — that had a fixed size and shape but needed to be packed tightly and in an orderly way.
Lang’s personal origami site is rich with images and ideas. For many of his constructions, Lang provides a “crease pattern,” a one-page diagram of singular complexity (see above). Lang explains:
Crease patterns have become much more popular in the last 15 years as a means of conveying origami. Part of the reason is that it’s a lot easier to draw a single crease pattern than to draw a detailed step-by step folding sequence. Part of the reason is that many origami composers (including myself) construct crease patterns as part of their design process, so the finished crease pattern comes ” for free.” And part of the reason is that with the general rise in folding ability worldwide, a reasonable number of people now have the skill to “read” a crease pattern and fold the encoded form.
Further on, Lange expands on his last point:
…a crease pattern can sometimes be more illuminating than a detailed folding sequence, conveying not just “how to fold,” but also how the figure was originally designed. And thus, it can actually give the folder insight into the thought processes of the origami composer in a way that a step-by-step folding sequence cannot.
Lang’s entire essay is enormously interesting for anyone concerned with models, diagrams, and visual explanations. Crease patterns need to show both details and large scale features of a pattern. They may be simplified for readability, or be augmented with additional lines or symbols that indicate key elements of the design. Like a musical score, they are designed for the trained eye but democratically open to anyone who wishes to learn their language.
February 9, 2007, 10:31 am
Strange Maps
by Lisa Agustin
Forget about Google Maps and G.P.S. Here’s one for history and cartography buffs: Strange Maps is a blog covering fictional, hypothetical, and just plain odd maps found online. Image sources run the gamut from the U.S. Library of Congress (for Johananes Vingboons’ “Island of California” map from 1693, below) to the official site of author Stephen King. Besides being a visually-rich collection of approaches to mapmaking, each represents its creator’s view of an alternate reality, whether whimsical (a rendering of the Land of Oz), thought-provoking (the Armed Forces Journal’s re-drawing of the Middle-East), or somewhere in the middle (the world as seen from New York City’s 9th Ave). A bonus: each map comes with a detailed commentary on its background, history, and the occasional factoid for interesting reading.
January 23, 2007, 6:29 pm
Politically Convenient Misunderstanding
by Mac McBurney
Aircraft noise in your neighborhood could increase by almost 1000 percent! Are you scared yet?
Call it the politics of ear.
Late last year, a map of suburban Philadelphia — using data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) — became a hot topic among citizens and candidates for local office. The map estimates how “noise levels” would change if the FAA approves new flight patterns in the area. Zip Code areas are color-coded on a scale from negative 56% to 925% increase. Not surprisingly, citizens were concerned and politicians made much of the dramatic statistic. What does 925% more noise sound like? Perish the thought!
No one questions the underlying FAA data change in decibels. The issue here is not accuracy, but validity. It turns out that the decibel is not a valid measure of the sensation you or I would call noise. Noisiness is mostly in your head, as much a function of perception as physics.
The student newspaper at Swarthmore College makes the confusion clear:
While the decibel is used to measure the relative difference in power or intensity, the sone is the unit of loudness as perceived by a person with normal hearing. Some people who examined the maps provided by the Delaware County Planning Department erroneously interpreted the projected increase in decibels as equivalent to a linear increase in noise level.
A Swarthmore engineering professor brought the misinterpretation to light a few weeks before election day, but the sensational misinterpretation had already spread far and wide. Plus, “1000 percent” just sounds so much more electable than, well, the truth. When did the map makers finally correct the error? Two days after the county election.
Local parent and partisan Daddy Democrat gives it the sniff test:
Given that [candidate] Tom Gannon had essentially staked his entire re-election bid on his stance on the FAA…he needed that data to be overwhelmingly bad. Rep. Gannon continued to claim that the potential noise increase would be upwards of 1000% — even in the final days before the election. Even though the error had been pointed out weeks before. It just doesn’t get people worked up into sufficient lather if you say that there might be 10-90% increases in noise levels. 90% is not 1000%, even though it may be damned loud.
I don’t want more planes flying over my head. And I expect my representatives to protect our local interests to the fullest extent possible. But I also don’t like flouting the truth about data.
Check out the revised maps on the Delaware County site. If the decibels and sones maps don’t quench your thirst for confusing information design, don’t miss the one called “Percentage Increase/Decrease in Population Already Highly Annoyed by Aircraft Noise.”
December 15, 2006, 10:27 am
Map of the Internet
by Lisa Agustin
The latest approach to visualizing the Internet space comes from former NASA researcher and sometime cartoonist Randall Munroe.
Munroe uses the Hilbert Curve fractal to preserve IP address grouping, showing how any consecutive string of IP addresses will translate into a single region on the “map.” Supporting comments on the visualization indicate that “the upper left section shows blocks of IP addresses sold to corporations and governments before the 1990’s before the RIRs [Regional Internet Registries] took over allocation.” It would be interesting to see how adding a dimension for time might affect the diagram. For more detail on his approach, check out the related blog entry.
December 14, 2006, 1:31 pm
Stock Chart Interface Design
by Henry Woodbury
The Yahoo and Google Finance pages both sport neat Flash-driven stock chart applications, worthy of comparison. Both show daily (or hourly) highs for a particular indexes, equities and mutual funds, allow you to specify a date range via a drag interface, and provide a variety of preset viewing options.
One big difference between the two is the amount of historical data. Yahoo lets you track the Dow Jones Industrial Average back to the 1920s, offering the choice of a logarithmic or linear scale. On Google, while some individual stocks may take you back to the 1970s, the Dow Jones data starts in 2001.
November 30, 2006, 11:05 am
Scholarly Publishing Meets YouTube
by Lisa Agustin
One of the challenges in scientific research involves the transfer of knowledge: explaining, and then understanding and learning laboratory techniques. This can be a time-consuming process, especially if the techniques are state-of-the-art or experimental. While written protocols are often quite detailed, even these can be prone to misinterpretation. The newly released Journal of Visualized Experiments wants to address the knowledge-transfer hurdle by offering video-based (“visualized”) biological research studies online.
By presenting research in the form of “video-articles,” the equipment, samples, and steps taken become transparent. (Supporting written documentation is also provided.) JoVE is similar to the traditional scientific journal in that researchers are invited to submit their work, which is then reviewed by an editorial board before being posted. In the future, JoVE plans to list their offerings in PubMed and other databases. In the true spirit of the Web, submissions and access to the journal will be free. One only hopes that this model will be able to sustain itself via funding or other means for the benefit of the larger scientific community.
November 8, 2006, 10:49 am
A Pair of U.S. Mid-Term Election Maps
by Henry Woodbury
Here’s CNN’s take on the Virginia Senate Race:
What’s interesting: Color gradation makes it easy to see each candidate’s regional strengths. In effect, since “Other” did not make a showing, the full gradation is from saturated blue (DEM) through white (tie) to saturated red (GOP). The key could be redesigned to demonstrate this.
What’s missing: Names of cities. Ability to compare the separate “Webb Strength” and “Allen Strength” maps in tandem.
Here’s the New York Times take on the House of Representative races, nation-wide:
What’s interesting: The geographical map first displayed morphs to present each congressional district as an equal unit. Click on any state to see the district numbers.
What’s missing: Ability to toggle back to a geographical view.
November 1, 2006, 3:15 pm
The One Page Powerpoint of Iraq
by Henry Woodbury
To track the situtation in Iraq, the United States Central Command turns to visual explanation. A slide shown in a recent classified briefing includes a one-dimensional heat map — what the New York Times calls a “color-coded bar chart” — to present an “Index of Civil Conflict”:
Befitting the news angle, reporter Michael R. Gordon focuses on the indicators that inform the index. From an information design angle, the most interesting part of the graphic is the gray arrow labeled “Last Week.” All it would take to create a two-dimensional line chart out of this graphic is to add a time axis and fill in the historical data. To create a truly multivariate information graphic, the indicators could be indexed to the map, assuming a coherent algorithm for doing so exists. Of course all that information is classified.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/world/middleeast/01military.html (free registration required)
Update: On my first go, above, I missed an obvious extra variable that should be integrated into the index: geography. Where a time series would illuminate trends, a heat chart overlaid on the map of the country would identify trouble spots. Add in the geographic location of the indicators and you could start seeing holes in the data.
October 31, 2006, 2:07 pm
Computer Culture
by Henry Woodbury
Computers may still be binary calculating machines, but their social impact is profound. According to a New York Times report on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board “2016″ symposium, computers have become so integrated into scientific and popular culture as to drive qualitative changes in how people interact — and how social scientiest can study them:
The new social-and-technology networks that can be studied include e-mail patterns, buying recommendations on commercial Web sites like Amazon, messages and postings on community sites like MySpace and Facebook, and the diffusion of news, opinions, fads, urban myths, products and services over the Internet. Why do some online communities thrive, while others decline and perish? What forces or characteristics determine success? Can they be captured in a computing algorithm?
Don’t miss the “a Web Site as a Living Organism” diagram linked to the article. The format is a fairly typical node map, but adroit display of multiple properties of each node makes for an engaging graphic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/science/31essa.html (free registration required)
October 25, 2006, 2:32 pm
The Informational Power of Scale Models
by Henry Woodbury
Jeff Russell’s Starship Dimensions web site presents visual information of a single type, the scale model. The power of this approach is its universal applicability. Note Russell’s disclaimer:
This site is only intended to compare the actual physical dimensions of the starships herein, and makes no claims as to any other aspect of these ships (firepower, speed, etc.).
In displaying the models, Russell makes some elegant design decisions. The starships (and other objects) are grouped by size, on background-gridded pages scaled from 1m/10px, to the truly enormous 500,000km/pixel. The largest models on each page reoccur on the next, helping define a visual continuum. The site also allows you to drag and drop images on each page (Internet Explorer only), making direct comparisons that much easier.
Maybe I’m old school, but the most entertaining comparison for me was this one:
October 11, 2006, 9:36 am
Science and NSF Announce 2006 Visualization Challenge Winners
by Lisa Agustin
The results are in: Science magazine and the National Science Foundation recently announced the winners of this year’s Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Categories for competition include photography, illustration, infographics, and multimedia (interactive and non-interactive). The winning visualizations offer new perspectives on a variety of subjects: mathematical surfaces rendered as glass objects, how air traffic looks at night, cellular dynamics, the vasculature of conjoined twins, and the science behind daVinci’s work.
According to Felice Frankel, a senior research fellow at Harvard University and one of this year’s judges, good visualization plays a key role in advancing scientific thought:
The science community needs to discuss the enormous contribution good visual translations can bring to both communication and advancing the thinking behind the science. Critically thinking about what makes an honest and successful representation and raising our standards can only be beneficial for the science community as a whole.
The site includes a slide show of this year’s winners as well as links to results from previous years.
October 4, 2006, 3:53 pm
Visual History
by Henry Woodbury
The Maps of War Web site currently features an animated map of the Middle East that asks and answers the question “Who has conquered the Middle East over the course of world events? See 5,000 years of history in 90 seconds…”
In its final sequence, the entire history is replayed in very fast time with the cities of Jerusalem and Baghdad as anchor points. The replay evokes a theme: impermanence, instability, an unknown future.
September 29, 2006, 3:23 pm
We Feel Fine
by Chris Jackson
There’s a bunch of ways to talk about We Feel Fine: It’s Web 2.0, social networking, Flash UI, and several other buzzwords. But the most interesting aspect to me is the synthesis of data from across the Web that makes a diary of Us.
The magic behind We Feel Fine involves a data collection engine, statistical analysis based on information in the blog (feeling expressed, age, gender, date, location, and weather), and a cool interface that presents the results in “movements.” In the first movement, blog entries are represented by dots and squares that swarm. When you click a dot, the other dots move away from it (to represent looking at someone apart from the group) and the “feeling” snippet from that blog appears. The other movements let you look at the data in different ways, each provoking a different way to respond. And you can filter the data: How were other males your age feeling on a rainy day in your hometown?
created the site/application as part of their “exploration of humans through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web.” Put together, these blog artifacts give a composite of our collective emotional state, while respecting our individualities (you can click through to the original blogs, and only publicly published data is displayed).
So what can we make of this, other than to admire the concept or spend some (or a lot) of time playing voyeur? What happens when we map the data against specific events such as the 2004 Red Sox Championship or the 2000 Election Complications? How can marketing people use this? What other information can be gleaned from the mountains of data we publish every second? What are we going to do with it?
Today, as a 39-year-old male in Boston on a sunny afternoon, I feel inspired. And a little nervous.
September 25, 2006, 9:12 am
Maps as a Tool for Creativity
by Lisa Agustin
The latest edition of BusinessWeek Online’s IN: Inside Innovation offers its picks for seven tools and trends that companies are using to jump-start creativity. Mapping is included in two instances: as a way of diagramming social networks within organizations, and also as a tool for visualizing collaborative work on wikis via IBM’s History Flow tool. While IN suggests that these tools and trends are used to “accelerate the creative process,” I wish they had elaborated on this point, especially with regard to social network mapping–e.g., Does a bigger network generate more (or better) ideas?
September 20, 2006, 4:37 pm
How to Generate New Ideas
by Henry Woodbury
Statistician Seth Roberts, “best selling author and paragon of scientific self-experimentation,” is the feature of a link-rich blog post by Tyler Cowen, titled How to Be Happy. What struck me, upon following several links, was Roberts’ interest in idea generation. The “how to be happy” link leads to an unpublished paper titled “Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight.” Even better is the first section of this paper: Three Things Statistics Textbooks Don’t Tell You (PDF). Roberts writes:
Statistics textbooks usually discuss graphic displays of data, but the stated goal is presentation, not idea generation (e.g., Howell, 1999). This reflects the statistics literature, where sophistication and enthusiasm about graphics usually concern presentation (e.g., Gelman, Pasarica, & Dodhia, 2002; Schmid, 1983). Tufte’s (1983, 1990) lovely books, for example, are entirely about presentation; nothing is said about idea generation.
What Roberts found through his own experiments should resonate with anyone who communicates visually:
A major reason for graphing one‘s data [is that a] tiny fraction of one‘s graphs will suggest new lines of research.
Or, to repeat his quote of statistician John Tuckey:
The picture-examining eye is the best finder we have of the wholly unanticipated.
When developing visual explanations we think in terms of the information we want to clarify, the story we want to tell, the audience we want to engage. What goes unmentioned is the fact that moving from text and numbers to visuals can change the way we think about our overall concept. Sometimes a visual explanation suggests powerful alternatives for further exploration. Sometimes we realize that the data doesn’t support the stated goals of the project and a new approach is needed.
While our own process model involves extensive research and analysis, we have learned to begin drafting visual ideas as soon as we have any applicable information to work with. Iterative thumbnails and sketches do more than illustrate the research. They themselves are analytical tools that help us (and our clients) steer clear of blind alleys and drive toward more persuasive, innovative visual results.
September 13, 2006, 11:04 am
How Not to Sell Something
by Lisa Agustin
While reading the Sunday paper, I came across this advertisement for McCormick spices. While I don’t have a background in advertising, my general understanding is that ads should:
- Tell you what the product/service is;
- Say why you need the product/service;
- If appropriate, convince you that this product/service is better than the competition;
- Inspire you to act (buy the product/service or do something else).
The other thing I assume is that, in most instances, all of the above should be accomplished in a relatively short amount of time (after all, this isn’t a PowerPoint presentation).
After my initial read, it was clear the ad was for McCormick Spices and involved figuring out the age of your spices. Other than that, the rest of it had me confused:
- The ad has two spice containers, and the one on the left is clearly the McCormick brand. My first thought: Is the bottle on the right from a competitor (turned around to hide the name)?
- But further reading (including looking at the teeny writing on the bottle) indicates that both containers are from McCormick and both are too old. Now what?
- Is black pepper in a tin older? Or is the age of black pepper impossible to determine?
The text at the bottom clears things up only slightly: it asks me the question that should have been at the top of the ad. But then I’m instructed to visit the URL to calculate the age of my spices (assuming I even have a computer).
Two obvious points that may have improved the message:
- Why not just come out and say what the web campaign suggests (yes, I gave in): For the Freshest Flavor, TOSS (Toss Old Spices Seasonally)? This is much clearer than this print ad.
- Why isn’t there a picture of the bottle that I should be buying?
The whole experience made me think: Isn’t there an easier way to explain this concept and get me to buy new spices?
August 30, 2006, 2:30 pm
A Visual Re-telling of the 9/11 Story
by Lisa Agustin
The 9/11 Commission Report is now available as a graphic novel. Two veteran comic book creators, Ernie Colon and Sid Jacobson, undertook the task of graphically translating the 600-page volume in an effort to make it more accessible to anyone interested in understanding the findings and their significance. The project was inspired by Colon’s attempt to read the original report which was “well-written, but [made] times, places, and names hard to track.” According to its creators, The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation is not a sensationalized, dumbed-down comic book, but “graphic journalism” that quotes directly from the report, and aims to be non-partisan and respectful in its visual retelling. As Colon notes, “We’re in the business of clarification.”
From a personal perspective, I’ll admit that I’ve often thought that the Commission’s report is a must-read, not only for its historical importance, but because of its implications for our near future. But its length and density can make it seem inaccessible. Presenting the report’s findings and recommendations in this way will hopefully make it easier for a broader audience to understand, giving further proof of the power visual explanations can have in telling the most complex of stories.
To hear an interview with the authors on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” see: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5690970
August 11, 2006, 2:44 pm
Visualizing Algebra
by Chris Jackson
My daughters aren’t old enough to experience the joys of algebra yet, but when they are I plan to revisit Oliver Steele’s blog for some inspired thinking on how to explain algebra visually. Steele’s post Visualizing Basic Algebra begins with line drawings representing the associative property for addition:
and the commutative property for addition:
He then illustrates the commutative, distributive, and associative properties for multiplication using squares and cubes. These illustrations could be recreated on a kitchen table with building blocks; they’re tactile (unlike algebra). By making the conceptual visual, they provide that “Yes, I see it now!” moment.
Steele’s post continues by showing visualizations for some more complex algebra concepts: the Product of Alternates, Triangle Numbers, and this one for the Difference of Squares, which states that the difference between perfect squares always is odd:
Steele’s visualizations result from his asking the question, “What would a proof that stayed grounded in visuospatial concepts look like?” In a few years, when one of my daughters grapples with her first algebra problem, I plan to ask her, “What might the problem look like?”
August 10, 2006, 1:58 pm
Animations, Small Multiples and Alex Rodriguez
by Henry Woodbury
Baseball fans may be interested in this analysis of Alex Rodriguez’s current power dropoff.
Visual explanation fans may be interested in swing instructor Jeff Albert’s use of video clips (in the form of animated gifs) and small multiples to support his analysis. The video clip discussion, focused on subtle differences in hip rotation, is fairly technical. More interesting, visually, is Albert’s use of spray charts as small multiples. A spray chart is a scale diagram of a ballpark with a player’s hitting denoted by location and outcome (g for groundout, f for flyout, s for single, h for home run, etc.). Presenting spray charts from 2002 to 2006 (2004-2006 reproduced below), Albert shows that Rodriguez’s home run sprays look different when he is hitting better.
August 1, 2006, 9:02 am
Podcasting, Literally
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times has a story today on the visualization of whale songs by engineer Mark Fischer:
Mr. Fischer creates visual art from sound using wavelets. Once relatively obscure, wavelets are being used in applications as diverse as JPEG image compression, high definition television and earthquake research, said Gilbert Strang, a math professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on wavelets.
They are popular now in part because they can capture intricate detail without losing the bigger picture, and when presented in circular form (using a cylindrical coordinate system), repeated patterns are even more evident.
While the images have the candylike quality of� iTune’s “Visualizer” they may have practical application in identifying particular whale species and even individual whales. The patterns may also help researchers identify meaning and grammer in whale communication.
On Fischer’s web site, aguasonic.com,� he links to still images and� movies, such as this visualization of the song of a Northeast Pacific Blue.
July 28, 2006, 11:33 am
A New Dimension to Cancer Research
by Lisa Agustin
New research at MIT indicates that there may be a better way of evaluating anti-cancer therapeutics. Currently, pharmaceutical companies use simplistic two-dimensional assays, or tests, to measure success in stopping metastasis, the process by which cancer cells break away from the primary tumor, settle in a new location, and divide. Researcher Muhammad Zaman discovered the cells move differently in three dimensions:
“Two-dimensional assays ignore the obstacles that cells face in their natural contexts,” said Zaman. “In 3-D, cells move through a thick jungle of fibers, or ‘vines,’ that hinder forward progress.”
Cells need at least some vines to move, as they latch onto the “branches” with claw-like proteins called integrins and pull themselves forward. When Zaman disabled some of these claws, in a manner analogous to the workings of certain anti-cancer drugs, the cells moving across the top of the jungle canopy (in two dimensions) needed a greater number of vines to keep up their pace, while cells plowing through the jungle instead needed fewer vines to maintain the same speed.
For his 3-D study, Zaman worked with one sample at a time, using a special confocal microscope at the Whitehead-MIT BioImaging Center to divide each specimen into virtual slices, generating a new stack of images every 15 minutes. According to MIT Professor Paul Matsudaira:
“[Zaman's] computational model predicted what would happen in virtual experiments and then he was able to go straight to test the predictions with these complicated 3-D experiments. As a result, the sophisticated models of cell movement enhance our understanding of key biological processes, including metastasis.”
July 12, 2006, 1:11 pm
Architects Using Visualizations (No, We Do Not Mean Blueprints)
by Lisa Agustin
More interesting use of visualizations from the 2006 TED meeting: architect Joshua Prince-Ramus elaborates on the “hyper-rational” process he uses for developing architecture projects. In the case of the Seattle Public Library, the visualizations of client priorities that were literally translated into the Central Library’s physical space are particularly interesting. From the site:
Joshua Prince-Ramus is architect of the Seattle Public Library and principle of REX (Ramus-Ella Architects). Previously, he was U.S. Director of Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture. Through a series of beautiful visualizations, he deconstructs the collaborative process of building the Seattle Public Library, and also offers a sneak preview of his works in progress (The Wyly Theater in Dallas, Texas and Museum Plaza in Louisville, Kentucky).
A “concept book” for the SPL Central Library (which includes details of the visualizations discussed in the Prince-Ramus talk) is located here.
“Ego trip” or accurate rendering? You decide.
June 30, 2006, 11:20 am
Visual Explanation Meets MTV
by Tim Roy
I was recently sent a link to a YouTube video that someone thought I would find amusing. It turned out to be a music video containing an amazing series of visualizations. While some might enjoy the techno backdrop of this Norwegian band (Roysksopp), it is equally fascinating to turn off the sound and see the various elements both as stand-alone visualizations and the manner in which they are connected.
The visualizations themselves range from process-flows, to pure explanation. I enjoyed seeing the use of a brief isometric projection model, which is the approach we favor here at d/D. It was also nice to see one of our favorite diagrams, Harry Beck’s Map of the London Underground.
And so, to see the video, please click here: Roysksopp — Remind Me.
June 29, 2006, 2:08 pm
Debunking Myths About the “Developing” World
by Lisa Agustin
For the first time, select presentations from the annual Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference are now available online, including a presentation by Hans Rosling from this year’s meeting. Rosling is a public health expert, director of Sweden’s world-renowned Karolinska Institute medical university, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that visualizes critical world development data. With the narrative style of a sportscaster, Rosling focuses on debunking myths about income and mortality in the “developing” world.
Key to his presentation are animated visualizations based on statistics from Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Created by Gapminder, these Flash-based animations rely on well-known visualization models, most notably the bubble map. This talk brings to mind two key issues with regard to information design and visualization: First, it underscores the importance of data visualization in representing complex statistical information (the viewer comes away with an understanding of the data more quickly than if it were simply presented in a written narrative). Second, it reminds us that representing complex information visually can only take you so far, and that providing an appropriate narrative may be a necessity, especially if the underlying message(s) are not that obvious.
Hans Rosling’s Presentation at TED 2006 is here: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=hans_rosling.
Gapminder’s animations are available at: http://www.gapminder.org/
June 20, 2006, 1:05 pm
Designing On a (Really) Small Scale
by Lisa Agustin
Nanotechnology is science and engineering at the scale of atoms and molecules. Think about these futuristic-sounding scenarios, described by the New Scientist:
Imagine a world where microscopic medical implants patrol our arteries, diagnosing ailments and fighting disease; where military battle-suits deflect explosions; where computer chips are no bigger than specks of dust; and where clouds of miniature space probes transmit data from the atmospheres of Mars or Titan.
Now think about what would be involved in designing these materials and devices–objects that are so tiny that nothing can be built any smaller. The NS Technology blog recently posted a link to NanoEngineer 1, software that lets nanoengineers create moving blueprints for their nanoscale designs. The NanoEngineer site’s gallery of animations includes intricate gears and bearings, among them a first-time simulation of the Drexle-Merkle Differential Gear. (A much larger version of this kind of gear lets the wheels on a car rotate at different speeds as it goes around a corner.) While the static model did a good job of describing the gear’s internal assembly, the animation adds another level of understanding to how the various components work together.
For the New Scientist Technology blog: http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2006/06/nanoengineers-toolbox.html
For more information on nanotechnology: http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/nanotechnology
June 8, 2006, 1:25 pm
Bar Graphs at Em Height
by Henry Woodbury
In his forthcoming book, Beautiful Evidence (2006), Edward R. Tufte explores the idea of “sparklines,” simple graphs whose y-axis is scaled to the height of a line of text. A draft chapter of Beautiful Evidence provides many examples of the concept and is accompanied by additional comments from Tufte and others.
I came across sparklines on David Pinto’s Baseball Musings site, where he has recently experimented with text-height graphs for such data sets as strikeouts per game (Jason Schmidt) and hits per game (Joe Mauer vs. Alex Rios).
Pinto credits Joe Gregorio who created the Baseball Musings sparklines on his online image generator. Gregorio, in turn, links to Tufte.
May 15, 2006, 11:29 am
Success by Design Conference, Providence, Rhode Island, 4/27/06
by d/D
Introduction
We recently attended the Success by Design Conference, an annual event sponsored by The Center for Design and Business in Providence, Rhode Island, USA (http://www.centerdesignbusiness.org/conf.html). The Center’s mission is to explore the intersection of design principles and business intelligence. This year’s conference focused on innovation in product design and service delivery. The following is a recap of our team notes and conclusions from several key sessions.
“Service Innovation: Design’s New Frontier” by Jeneanne Rae, Co-founder, Peer Insight, LLC
A nationally recognized thought leader for innovation management and design strategy, Jeneanne Rae of Peer Insight, LLC, (http://www.peerinsight.com/) helps organizations recognize and take advantage of critical business opportunities. Services currently represent 80 percent of the U.S. economy and is growing. As this market expands, companies need to think creatively about how to get a competitive edge. According to Rae, infusing service delivery with well-established design skills can lead to innovations in the customer experience. The designer’s skill set is a natural fit for improving service delivery because it encompasses the following:
Empathy. Designing a service experience requires understanding users — not just their goals, but also their emotional, social, and cultural needs.
Broader Thinking. Designers think about the possibilities: What if? What could be?
Visualizing and Prototyping. Designers are used to developing typical scenarios to better understand how and why a product might be used. Some service scenarios can be studied with a physical model (for example, a passenger train car, built to scale); others can benefit from getting user response to verbal, visual, or virtual scenarios.
Iterative Testing. Designers know that good products only become better by repeated testing and iterative improvement.
Integrated Solutions. Design takes into account the perspectives of both users and key stakeholders. Achieving a balance is key.
Rae acknowledged that innovation in service delivery is not without its challenges:
There is no product portfolio. A company that innovates a service will find it challenging to describe the offering in a way that has immediate appeal and can, at a glance, stand apart from the competition. This is where visualization can make a difference.
Services are fuzzy. Unlike products that can use a platform strategy and established pricing model, services require companies to think more conceptually about an offering that is intangible and perishable (can’t be inventoried).
It’s hard to go it alone. Innovating services delivery with design approaches requires some expert help; service companies need to recognize this and form professional partnerships as appropriate.
We found Rae’s talk to be both observant and insightful. Design isn’t (only) about making objects more attractive or fun to use. It’s about understanding what goes into the ideal customer experience, and working to achieve that through research, modeling and testing.
“Designing the Xbox 360 Experience” by Jonathan Hayes, Xbox Design Director, Microsoft
Jonathan Hayes was responsible for leading the development of the Xbox 360 (http://www.xbox.com/), the Microsoft entertainment system known not only for its powerful performance, but also its beautiful presentation. Microsoft’s goal of expanding the audience for Xbox beyond core gamers to a global market demanded a unique collaboration of artists, engineers and researchers. According to Hayes, “technology needs poetry.” But balancing the tension between technology and design required some ground rules:
Structure the process. Because the team was very large and distributed worldwide, establishing a process, milestones, and master timeline was essential to keeping the project on track. Groups worked on specific activities independently, but also had a clear idea of when to converge with the rest of the team to share results and feedback.
Structure the solution space. The subjective nature of design can lead to excessive iterations, sometimes without an end in sight (“The right design? I’ll know it when I see it.”) The Xbox team managed this risk by creating a visual framework for articulating possible solutions: a quadrant system that indexed “Mild to Wild” on one axis vs. “Organic to Architectural” on the other. Stakeholders and users were told to frame their feedback within the context of these terms. This allowed very different prototype designs to be evaluated at a thematic level with specifics deferred for later.
Predefine inclusive design values. Before beginning the design process, the team established the requirements that the new product had to meet. By doing this, the team eliminated the risk of personal preference steering the design solution.
Look at work in context and in person. Throughout the process, the team validated the proposed solution by testing the Xbox with potential users and eliciting their feedback.
Hayes’ session demonstrated that successful design solutions aren’t crafted in a vacuum and often require the input of other talented individuals such as researchers and technologists. To make such a collaboration work, there needs to be agreement on the criteria for success and how to get there.
“Innovate/Resonate: Tools for Change” by Stuart Karten, Principal, Stuart Karten Design
Stuart Karten Design (http://www.kartendesign.com/) is an industrial design consultancy that creates products using a user-centric approach. During his session, Karten outlined a specific process, “mode mapping,” that visually represents observational and ethnographic data. The mode mapping process for human activity typically involves the following key steps:
- Do the research, then determining personas for the research subjects and a common set of appropriate “modes.” For example, the modes for a person’s average day might include: family, friends, work, play, rest, transit, etc.
- Determine more specific modes for specific inquiries. Peoples’ relationships with their cars might generate modes like: chauffer, errand, commute, maintain, etc.
- Create sub-modes for the personas that tie into a primary person’s mode. A “parent” may link to a “child” or a “patient” may be linked to a “caregiver”.
- Map the modes against appropriate axes, such as “State of Mind” and “Time” or “Active / Passive” and “Time.”
- Add pressure points, or the fixed demands on individuals, features that do not change (e.g., soccer practice schedule).
- Mark decision points — points where subject has choices.
- Look for patterns across multiple subjects and label them with descriptive terms (e.g., “mad rush”)
- Look for ways to improve transitions and decisions within the key patterns.
Karten’s approach to solving product design challenges resonated with our own approach to discovering user goals and needs. Using visual methodologies to translate research into requirements is a powerful tool for creating successful design solutions.
April 20, 2006, 3:00 pm
Media, Money, and Demographics
by Henry Woodbury
Based on the principle that democracy requires a knowledgeable citizenry, the Carter Center, FOCAL (Canadian Foundation for the Americas), and the University of Calgary have created Mapping The Media, a visual mapping tool that combines demographic data with information about media ownership and political financing:
The map, which will be ‘virtually’ housed and easily accessible on the Internet, also will illustrate connections between media ownership and the networks to which they belong, making evident at a glance if some portions of the country are served by only one media owner or news network or are served by multiple media outlets with the same political affiliation.
Unfortunately the application is astonishingly difficult to use. Compared to Google Maps, the zoom and pan interface is clunky and slow to respond. If you show more than one or two layers of data, the jarring combination of colors, patterns, and icons turns the map into a visual cryptogram.
Part of the problem is the ambition of the project. By differentiating so many separate data layers, only an experienced user will know which ones relate. Data that deserves per-capita presentation, such as campaign dollars, is given in gross figures. The fact that population density is offered as its own layer doesn’t help. The result is likely to encourage misreading of data, confusion between coorelating and unrelated factors, and casual invention of causal relationships.
April 20, 2006, 2:47 pm
A Cartogram Portfolio
by Henry Woodbury
Using a population diffusion algorithm, a team at the University of Sheffield, along with Mark Newman of the University of Michigan, have been creating a compelling series of data-driven cartograms. Each shows a world map with territories reshaped to represent a different data set. The math is complex, but apparently highly versatile:
A recent development by Mark Newman and Michael Gastner (described in their paper Gastner and Newman 2004 [http://aps.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0401102/]) has led to the creation of this website; they recognised that the process is essentially one of allowing population to flow-out from high-density to lower-density areas, and hence borrowed the linear diffusion method from elementary physics which describes this process. The algorithm used to create the maps on Worldmapper is a variant of the Gastner and Newman one.
The site contains several dozen cartograms and hopefully more are on the way. Good design decisions, such as using similar colors for regional groups of territories, help with interpretation of the most distorted maps, such as this map of Net Out-Tourism.
February 10, 2006, 10:04 am
Ambigrams and Inversions
by d/D
Scott Kim and John Langdon are two designers who play with letter forms to create interesting illusions and transformations. These ambigrams (Langdon’s term) and inversions (Kim’s) are easier to see than to describe, so we direct you to each artist’s gallery:
http://www.johnlangdon.net/ambigrams.html
http://www.scottkim.com/inversions/index.html#gallery
In addition to using a separate term for their common invention, Kim and Langdon exhibit different sensibilities. Kim has a mathematician’s instinct for puzzles and brain teasers. Langdon’s more artistic approach lends itself to logo and branding design.
February 10, 2006, 10:02 am
Locating Last Names
by d/D
Recently we’ve come across two sites that use U.S. census data and other sources to shown the distribution of last names on a map. The results suggest patterns of emigration and influence, though you have to bring your own outside knowledge to intepreting them. Both tools have two major weaknesses. First is the lack of meta-data. For example, we don’t know the sample sizes for different states, a real handicap in interpreting the 1800s displays. Another weakness is the inability of the interface to allow comparisons, either by showing multiple maps at once, or by allowing quick transitions from name to name or date to date.
The geneological software maker, My Family, Inc., has data for both U.S. and England on its Ancestry.com Web site for the years 1840, 1880, and 1920:
http://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts/default.aspx
Hamrick Software provides a similar interface, only for the U.S., which includes data from 1990:
January 13, 2006, 10:21 am
Style and Design Still Out of Sync
by d/D
Recently revised, Jeffrey Zeldman’s classic essay on the difference between style and design still rings true:
“Many young web designers … mistake Style for Design, when the two things are not the same at all. Design communicates on every level. It tells you where you are, cues you to what you can do, and facilitates the doing. Style is tautological; it communicates stylishness.”
The consequence, Zeldman points out, is that experimental Web sites often have little application to the improvement of Web usability:
“[A]fter ten-plus years of commercial web development, [Internet users] still have a tough time finding what they’re looking for, and they still wonder why it’s so damned unpleasant to read text on the web — which is what most of them do when they’re online.”
http://www.adobe.com/motiondesign/MDC_Dialog_Box.html?u%5FsLang=en&u%5FnTextSize=14&u%5FsFontType=sans&u%5FsContent=Style%5FVersus%5FDesign (requires Flash Player 8)
If you can’t see the Flash version above, you can read a PDF here:
http://www.adobe.com/motiondesign/content/en/Dialog_Box/Style_Versus_Design/Style_Versus_Design.pdf
December 9, 2005, 10:34 am
Creating a Digital Past
by d/D
Conserving digital information is turning out to be a tremendously complicated endeavor. One response is the DSpace Digital Repository, an open source platform for archiving electronic files developed by the MIT libraries and Hewlett Packard. In an article in IEEE’s Spectrum, Mackenzie Smith of the MIT Libraries gets into the details:
[S]aving raw data solves only part of the preservation problem. We also want to be able to read, play, or watch these bits when we need to. Then there are pesky legal obligations, which demand that we be able to guarantee that certain records haven’t been altered by human hands or computer malfunction.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul05/1568
This is a project we were pleased to work on, creating a visual explanation that MIT can couple with articles and white papers to increase understanding of the technology.
Our DSpace case study on our Web site includes a PDF version of the diagram:
December 9, 2005, 10:31 am
Remembering Saul Bass
by d/D
We suggest a moment of silence for Saul Bass’s AT&T logo, now replaced by a cartoonish revision. The AIGA site has a nice slideshow of Bass’s work in branding, logo and poster design (click on the picture).
November 10, 2005, 10:43 am
Mapping the City-States of America
by d/D
The CommonCensus Map Project presents U.S. Maps redrawn to show the spheres of influence of different cities. The underlying data comes from a short Web survey filled out by anyone who chooses to take to the time to do so.
“This information will finally settle the question over where disputed cultural boundaries lie (like between New York City and Upstate New York), contribute to the national debate over Congressional redistricting and gerrymandering, and educate people everywhere as to the true layout of the American people that they’ve never seen on any map before.”
http://www.commoncensus.org/index.php
The Maps page is here:
http://www.commoncensus.org/maps.php
The concept is reasonably apolitical, which hopefully makes vote-spamming unlikely. However it does represent a missed opportunity. By declining to draw more information from visitors (except for favorite sports teams!), the map of influence can’t be indexed against other data.
November 10, 2005, 10:00 am
A Gallery of Complex Networks
by d/D
Manuel Lima’s VisualComplexity.com is a bravura attempt to display and describe a wide variety of network diagrams. Each thumbnail on the site’s home page links to a page with more views of the visualization along with details about its origins and meaning. By focusing on almost exclusively on complex networks, the site allows for intriguing comparisons between the different projects:
“The … main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web…. [A]ll projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.”
October 10, 2005, 11:07 am
Media vs. Media
by d/D
An exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library allows visitors to compare ads made for print, radio, television and the Internet. How do these differ? The New York Times’ Sarah Boxer puts it this way:
“With radio and, oddly enough, even with television ads, the humor is largely verbal. With online ads, the wit is almost always visual. In this way they have the most in common with their oldest cousin, print advertising – another medium that doesn’t have a captive audience and must therefore rely on grabby graphics.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/arts/design/03boxe.html (free registration required
The exhibition Web site is here:
October 10, 2005, 10:56 am
To Illustrate is to Enlighten
by d/D
Science magazine and the National Science Foundation have posted the results of its annual visualization challenge on the publication’s Web site. The inspiration for the challenge is eloquently stated by Curt Suplee and Monica Bradford in the contest’s Introduction:
“Some of science’s most powerful statements are not made in words. From the diagrams of DaVinci to Hooke’s microscopic bestiary, the beaks of Darwin’s finches, Rosalind Franklin’s x-rays, or the latest photographic marvels retrieved from the remotest galactic outback, visualization of research has a long and literally illustrious history. To illustrate is, etymologically and actually, to enlighten.”
August 11, 2005, 12:31 pm
Hands-On Visualization
by d/D
Taking visualization to the third dimension, Lego Serious Play is a consultancy program that uses the colorful building blocks as the basis for corporate workshops. Participants use Lego bricks, joints, and gears to model work processes and business strategies. In a typical session, simple building exercises might be followed by more complicated endeavors:
“Groups are asked to capture a work process or dynamic using Lego, and again to explain their creations. The resulting ’sculptures’ tell a rich story, [Consultant Robert] Rasmussen says. Examples include an upside-down pyramid balancing on its point and a vehicle with an elaborate design, but without the ability to move.”
http://www.idonline.com/features/feature.asp?id=1511
The Lego Serious Play Web site is here:
July 11, 2005, 1:00 pm
Now You CAN be the Center of the Universe
by d/D
Within reason, of course. The Personal World Map Flash application lets you pick a starting point, then see the bounds of the world in terms of time and budget. The two are not the same:
“The main purpose of the Personal World Map is to give awareness of the user’s actual position in the world in relation to other places by taking into account the ‘effort’ needed to get to a certain destination. Because the Personal World Map is based on flight data, this effort is defined not only by time (travel time) but also by money (ticket fares).”
The quote above is from the “About” page linked at the bottom of the application. For developers, the “Data” and “Details” pages (linked from the “About” page menu) offer a nice overview of how the application is built.
June 17, 2005, 1:13 pm
Name that U
by d/D
Here’s a diversion for designers. Joey Katzen has extracted letterforms from product and corporate logos. The game is to name the source:
June 17, 2005, 1:11 pm
Cool Clock
by d/D
This Flash-based clock was originally created by Insert Monkey and updated by Anne Jan Beeks:
June 17, 2005, 1:09 pm
A Sideways Pyramid
by d/D
With the release of the new “Food Pyramid” the United States Department of Agriculture presents a case study of how not to develop a visual explanation. By attempting to fit a new data scheme into a existing concept, they’ve created an explanation that is metaphorically and visually incoherent. Without a concept of hierarchy, the pyramid becomes just an oddly-shaped area chart; readers must compare the sizes of skinny triangles to determine the department’s recommendations:
http://www.mypyramid.gov/index.html
The thinking behind the new pyramid is explained in an animated tour:
May 11, 2005, 1:26 pm
Election Maps, BBC Version
by d/D
The BBC visualizes the recent parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom with this interactive map:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/vote2005/flash_map/html/map05.stm
One elegant feature of this tool is its ability to pan and zoom to a constituency by name as well as geography. What it lacks is a separate layer for indexing the results to demographic data or past results.
May 11, 2005, 1:24 pm
Search Results in Groups and Folders
by d/D
Several new search engines are experimenting with ways to group search results into categories. Two competing approaches are Vivisimo’s Clusty, a site that sorts results into “Windows”-like folders, and Groxis, Inc.’s Grokker, a technology the turns results into a visual map. The Vivisimo crowd is not impressed:
“‘A lot of these fancier visualization systems look appealing,’ said Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer scientist, who is an adviser to the Web search engine company Vivisimo, ‘but they are pretty confusing. Even for expert users they don’t enhance productivity’”
For generic Web searches, Etzioni is probably right. However, for search analysis, Grokker may be quite useful. Its filters allow a map to be changed on the fly, by keyword, date, or even the ranking of results by the Yahoo! search engine feed that drives it (click “Show Tools at the bottom of a Grokker results page to see these options).
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/technology/09yahoo.html (free registration required)
April 7, 2005, 1:31 pm
Earthquakes in Near Real Time
by d/D
This online seismic monitor presents a wealth of information in both global and regional views. Updated every 20 minutes, the monitor draws earthquakes by magnitude as they happen. Below the overlap of recent earthquakes, historical data effectively show the edges of the earth’s tectonic plates:
April 7, 2005, 1:27 pm
Game Flows and Shot Charts
by d/D
The sports pages have long inspired dense presentations of information, most uniquely in the form of the box score. Now, many online sports venues are turning statistics into interactive charts and visuals. Consider the “Game Flow” chart in this recap of the recent NCAA Division I College Basketball Championship (scroll down and mouse over):
http://sports-att.espn.go.com/ncb/recap?gameId=254000063
Another example is the interactive shot chart that ESPN creates for each National Basketball Association game:
March 11, 2005, 2:03 pm
Learning Objects Online
by d/D
“Learning objects” are self-contained content modules that educators may use independently, add to lectures, or aggregate into a broader course of study. At Wesleyan University, a dedicated team is using the Internet as a distribution medium for multimedia-based modules:
“We are working with faculty to develop interactive learning tools and animations that will help students understand difficult concepts. These modules can be shared across campus, with faculty at other institutions and be used both inside and outside of the classroom.”
http://learningobjects.wesleyan.edu/
The team’s projects show the range of possibilities, from an interactive map of the temples of Palenque to a simulation of protein synthesis.
http://learningobjects.wesleyan.edu/palenque/map/map_high.html
http://learningobjects.wesleyan.edu/proteinsynthesis/flash.html (Flash)
March 11, 2005, 1:41 pm
Baby Name Popularity
by d/D
Using data compiled by the U.S. Social Security Administration, the publishers of the book Baby Name Wizard have created an interactive Java application that charts the popularity of various names over time. Most interesting is the application’s letter by letter response as you type in a specific name. You can launch the application from here:
http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/
For the source data, go to the Social Security Administration’s online database of baby names:
February 11, 2005, 2:12 pm
Google Adds Maps
by d/D
Google has just rolled out a roadmap feature (in beta). Appropriately, Google has taken a different approach from established map providers like Yahoo and Mapquest. Instead of querying for an address first, then refreshing the screen whenever a user changes the location, Google’s application “stitches” map images together, allowing users to pan by dragging the mouse.
December 8, 2004, 2:55 pm
The Fine Art of Audience Analysis
by d/D
In the mid 90s, artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid used professional market research surveys to create a series of “most wanted” and “least wanted” paintings. Still available on the Web, the project can be seen as a case of audience analysis taken too far:
“In an age where opinion polls and market research invade almost every aspect of our ‘democratic/consumer’ society [the] project poses relevant questions that an art-interested public, and society in general often fail to ask: What would art look like if it were to please the greatest number of people?” (from the Director’s Introduction)
Getting beyond the parody, the paintings make for interesting viewing, especially in comparison to each other. Mapped to a large body of real data, they represent an enigmatic, but perfectly valid example of visual explanation.
November 10, 2004, 3:08 pm
Election Wrap
by d/D
Following up on our link to Professor Sam Wang’s U.S. Electoral College map in our October 13 issue, here is a set of interesting post-election maps. Created by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan, each geographical map of state or county results is paired with a map that is distorted to reflect population:
“…on such a map, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.”
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/
One map that Gastner, Shalizi and Newman manipulate is Princeton Unversity Professor Robert Vanderbei’s “purple” map that shows the full continuum of percentage-based results. The patterns that result indicate interesting correlations between geography and demographics as well as a more complex view of the vote:
October 10, 2004, 3:26 pm
Political Geography
by d/D
In recognition of the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, we link to the Electoral College map on Princeton University Professor Sam Wang’s Electoral College Meta-Analysis Web site. The map resizes each U.S. state to correspond to its share of electoral votes; it is arguably “truer” to its data than geographically-based projections. The map is also interactive; individual states can be assigned to one of the two candidates (or neither) to show different possible electoral outcomes.
http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/pollcalc.html#EVmap (click on static map to see interactive map in a popup window)
The University of Virginia Library offers a collection of more traditional electoral maps (1860 to 1996):
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/elections/maps/
September 16, 2004, 3:32 pm
Mapping Census Data
by d/D
One rich body of publicly-available data is the U.S. Census. The Census Bureau itself publishes many reports based on this data. Filled with tables, charts and maps, these are interesting for their information design practice as well as their analysis.
As an example of how simple adjustments can clarify the display of data, we modified the “Differences in 2-Year Average Uninsured Rates by State” map on p. 24 of the report linked below. In our version, the three gradations of color on the map are matched to the negative to zero to positive range of the numbers in the data, making the extremes easier to distinguish.
The original report:
Current Population Report P60-226 (PDF, 792K)
The original “Uninsured Rates” map (first page) and our version (second page):
Differences in 2-Year Average Uninsured Rates by State Map (PDF, 386K)
August 12, 2004, 3:40 pm
Update: The Tube as Template
by d/D
We recently came across another example of the London Underground map as design template. In this case it is repurposed as “A subway map of cancer pathways”:
August 12, 2004, 3:37 pm
Information Density and the David Rumsey Map Collection
by d/D
A common problem of digital media is its relatively low information density compared to print publications. Maps can be an especially rich way to present information, but online versions are often reduced to multiple bitmaps of equal simplicity (consider Yahoo Maps or Mapquest, for example).
The David Rumsey Map Collection manages its library of high resolution scans with powerful compression software and the use of the Insight® browser, an Internet application designed specifically for the browsing of images as oppposed to text.
While one might consider alternative presentation methods that fit more seamlessly with standard browsers, the Insight® technology offers an example of a fully customized approach that is worthy of examination.
July 9, 2004, 3:47 pm
Typeface for a Memorial
by d/D
An interesting article in the New York Times discusses the aesthetic and social implications of Gotham, the typeface used to engrave the Freedom Tower cornerstone that memorializes the events of September 11, 2001.
Different commentators see the typeface as simple, urban, ambiguous and, in its all-caps presentation, institutional.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/08/nyregion/08blocks.html?8hpib (registration required)
July 9, 2004, 3:46 pm
The Tube as Template
by d/D
U.K. designer Martin Kay has taken the Harry Beck map of the London Underground and turned it into a template for process diagramming:
“The standard box, circle and arrow style of flowchart is the main style of process map used in business, but these are often poorly produced and even with good ones, you do not get the users saying ‘I want one’. The tube-map style creates really good process awareness because people just like looking at them. Adhere to the design principles and you create familiarity even if the process itself is unfamiliar to the user — especially if they are someone who uses the London tube to get to work!”
It’s a quirky idea that brings up some interesting points. Successful visual explanations often build upon a viewer’s experience with such visual tools as maps, graphs, and charts. Reusing a well known visual model can be an efficient way to present data with a similar structure and may reveal unexpected possibilities as the model is tailored to the task at hand. Other data sets demand a completely new approach. When this happens, the challenge is developing a visual system that still triggers a viewer’s intuitive understanding.
July 9, 2004, 3:44 pm
A Map of Languages
by d/D
Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, the Modern Language Association has created an application that ties the number of speakers of different languages to an interactive map of the United States.
Unfortunately, by visualizing absolute instead of per capita numbers, the map often highlights population density more than language concentration. At the national scale, the most definitive results come from choosing a regional language such as French Creole. For other languages, the most interesting results can come from focusing on a single city or region, with data mapped to zip code.
Beyond a per capita presentation, the map would most benefit from a visual methodology for multivariate display. This would make it easier to compare multiple languages in a specific region (the current application shows two maps side by side). It would also create the potential for language data to be indexed to other types of census data, such as income, family size, median age, and so forth.
June 17, 2004, 3:48 pm
Bio Motion Lab Walker
by d/D
Here is a fascinating example of data visualization, a simple animated figure based on data captured from 40 male and 40 female subjects walking on a treadmill. Interactive sliders allow you to adjust the motion of the figure to correspond to sex, weight, and psychological state.
“Sex and weight of each walker were directly available from our records. The other two attributes were derived from psychophysical experiments. A number of observers were presented with point-light displays of the 80 walkers. For each of them they had to rate the attributes nervous/relaxed and happy/sad on a scale of 7 steps.”
May 8, 2004, 8:22 am
Saturation Coverage
by d/D
Based on data from the Google News aggregator, Marcos Weskamp’s “Newsmap” uses similar algorithms as the well known Map of the Market to show the amount of news coverage in regards to prominent stories:
“Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.
April 8, 2004, 9:08 am
New Material from Edward R. Tufte
by d/D
Edward R. Tufte has posted a draft chapter from his new book Beautiful Evidence. The topic is “sparklines” a word coined by Tufte to refer to “data-intense, design-simple, word-size graphics.”
One question about Tufte’s idea is its ability to work electronically. Most of Tufte’s examples derive from time-series data that a computer program could use to create sparklines on the fly — assuming they could be optimized for digital display.
Tufte invites readers to contribute responses to his posting, so his original text at the URL below is followed by many interesting comments and examples.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR&topic_id=1&topic=
March 9, 2004, 9:19 am
A Map of the Airwaves — Visualization as Viewpoint
by d/D
Released in 2003, the New America Foundation’s “Citizen’s Guide to the Airwaves” includes a 52-page Explanation Report and two-sided, 11″ x 38″ color poster. The poster’s front side is a visual “map” of the radio frequency spectrum; the back provides a nine-panel overview of the policy debate about its use.
Using a chart of radio frequencies as its organizing principle, the map displays the market value of different slices of the spectrum, the devices that use them and the physics of radio waves that determine that use. The result is a highly informative example of the use of visual explanation to make a public policy case.
February 9, 2004, 9:36 am
Needles in Haystacks
by d/D
One of the most important benefits of visual explanation is its ability to show patterns, trends, or anomolies in large sets of data.
Martin Wattenberg, creator of SmartMoney’s Map of the Market, is now researching visual methods to help users navigate news forums, track collaborative documents, and manage email.
“‘Everyone has too much to read,’ Wattenberg says. ‘It’s easy to get overwhelmed. Visual representations can show you what’s important and what’s noise.’”
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/78/conscious.html
Sample visualizations from Wattenberg’s “History Flow” concept can be found on the IBM Web site:
January 8, 2004, 10:12 am
Chat Circles and Babble: Visualizing Social Interaction Online
by d/D
Attempts to visualize social dynamics on the Internet start with fundamental questions. What kinds of data do social affiliations and interactions generate? And how can that data be visualized?
“The most evident schemes draw the social networks as graphs, i.e. nodes representing the actors and lines or arrows that represent the link between them. One of the most well known is the typical organization chart of a company.”
The samples in this article move beyond the organization chart, but with sometimes ambiguous results. Such ambiguity demonstrates the complexity of the problem; it also indicates the difference between illustrating an idea (using a circle to show affiliation, for example) and actually conveying its meaning.
January 8, 2004, 9:43 am
Looking at the Real Underground
by d/D
Transportation for London provides a simple Flash movie on its Web site that shows three versions of the London Tube map: the classic 1933 Harry Beck map (shown below), the current map, and the current map as it would look if it matched actual geography.
At http://tube.tfl.gov.uk/content/tubemap/default.asp, click on “The Real Underground (Flash Movie)”.
The map’s schematic treatment of geography and scale is one of its most compelling aspects. The relative placement of stations along the lines, and the lines to the river (the only surface feature shown) provide users of the Tube all the orientation they need.
A more detailed geographically-aligned version of the map can be found at http://www.kordy.dircon.co.uk/misc/lul.gif. A history of London Tube Maps can be found at http://clives.members.easyspace.com/tube/tube.html (site loads very slowly).
December 8, 2003, 9:49 am
A Map of the Internet: Art or Information?
by d/D
The value of maps and other visuals, even when generated by an information-gathering process, may be more artistic than informational:
“A project to create a comprehensive graphical representation of the Internet in just one day…has already produced some eye-catching images.”
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994434
The sheer complexity of some representations makes them hard to use analytically. By using labeling or filtering mechanisms, one can begin drawing information out of such complexity. In the instance of the Opte project described above, an option to display IP addresses along a traceroute (via a preset preference, or, for an interactive display, by mouseclick), would begin to make the Internet map more maplike. More information on the Opte project is at http://www.opte.org/.