In the talk, McCandless takes us though some infographics he has designed, why he has designed them and how they help an audience comprehend information better.
The billion-dollar-o-gram
The billion-dollar-o-gram was created out of McCandless' frustrations with the financial reporting on a global scale. "These numbers are meaningless without context - £500 billion for this pipeline, £20 billion for this war…it doesn't make ay sense, so the only way to understand it is visually ad relatively."
The colours represent the motivation behind the money - red is giving money away, purple is fighting, green is profiteering. McCandless points out that now they are presented with a relationship between size and cause, we can also see other patterns between them, for example OPEC's $700 billion revenue compared to their teeny-tiny $3 billion climate change fund. The diagram shows, very starkly, how small OPEC's contribution to an important issue is compared to how much they are keeping for themselves. A similar comparison is the $308 billion in charity donations by Americans compared to $120 of foreign aid payments by the government. The statistic which raised a chuckle but is also very alarming is the projected cost of the Iraq War vs the actual cost. All of this might have been lost in context had McCandless not created this info graphic.
Public fears in the media
McCandless' graph of fears was an interesting take on the fears of the public as portrayed in the media over a timeline. Very entertaining are the green peaks, which represent asteroid collisions! What I find most interesting about this graph is that while it is very scientific it is not a traditional way for a subject such as fears to be presented. In my mind, this kind of thing would be presented in a similar format to those inforgraphics seen on Happify.com (which I'm going to write about soon), with a balance of illustration and text. But, as McCandless notes, presenting data in this way is not only pleasing to the eye as it sees patterns, but it also allows us to find links between those patterns.
One such example is the twin peaks which occur at the same time every year in the red area, which represents video games. Every year in April and November, there are spikes in fear surrounding violence related to/spawning from video games. The November peak is apparent with the run up to Christmas, as big releases are strategically played up for the pre-Christmastime shopping. The April peak, however, is interesting and more chilling as it relates to the anniversary of the Columbine high school shootings, which was notoriously inspired by video games and has at times sadly inspired copycat shootings. As news coverage highlights the anniversary, the apparent relationship between the shooting and video games (while disproved) stirs up fears in the public of a repeat event.
A similar fear-centred pattern is the gap which starts in September 2001, as the attacks on the world trade centre put everything into perspective when people "had something very real to be afraid of."
The bandwidth of senses
Senses as bandwidth was a surprise to me - of course we know that senses have a kind of hierarchy how how impactful each one is to the information we receive, but seeing them presented as bandwidth was a charming spin on the subject. It is very easy to gauge how much impact sight has in comparison to hearing and smell - much more so than if it were written on paper in the typical language that would centre around percentage and values.
Evidence of supplements for health
A balloon race chart makes for an easy comparison as to which extracts/substances have the most evidence behind them, in relations to the claims made when marketing them. The balloons higher up have the most evidence behind them. The graph can be manipulated to show specific information, for example info relating to heart health, or only the balloons which contain natural substances. What I found interesting about this one is that all the information is stored in a Google Doc, so McCandless can update the document at any time and the information there will be translated into the graphic.
Political charts
McCandless designed the "Right vs. Left" politics poster as a way to present the conversation around politics in a fresh way which affords direct comparison for each area. For example, the "Family" sections can be compared directly due to the mirrored layout and repeated images. McCandless says: "There is something very unthreatening about seeing a political perspective as opposed to being told about one or listening to one…it's even fun to engage in them because it's visual." The talk is summed up by a great quote, which is quite applicable to my own project at the moment:
"Information design is about solving information problems." I feel that I can call the topic of mindfulness an information problem to some extent, as there is so much of it there that people could know about but it is usually presented as a wall of text so many people don't peruse the data.
My next step will be to read McCandless' books as recommended by Simone, so at the moment I am trying to track down any copies I can be lent or otherwise ordering them online. McCandless has a blog, Information is Beautiful, which charts inforgraphics he has found or made, so that will be a good source for this area of research.
References
TED Talk: McCandless, David. 2010. The Beauty of Data Visualisation [online video] Available at:
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization?language=en
[Accessed Feb 15 2015]
Images: All screen shots from the above TED Talk, with the exception of the last image under "Political Charts":
McCandless, David and Posavec, Stephanie. 2010. Inevitable Capitalist Agenda or Left vs. Right
[online image] Available at:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/left-vs-right-us/
[Accessed Feb 15 2015]
No comments:
Post a Comment