Thoughtful Chunk 9: Visualizing Data--Look, See, Understand

Hans Rosling uses the power of visuals, animation,and digital tools to create a context or platform for the understanding of statistical data. Watch an amazing BBC broadcast documentary hosted by Hans Rosling about the impact of using simplified graphical representations of local and global data to promote change and greater understanding of information.

Download  Gapminder and use the provided data sets in teaching or for your own edification: it is a fabulous application and is made freely available because "Gapminder is a non-profit foundation based in Stockholm. Our goal is to replace devastating myths with a fact-based world view. Our method is to make data easy to understand" (Hans Rosling, Co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation)

Here global trends in health and economics come to vivid life:

Here Hans Rosling effectively uses visuals to posit the impact  

that acquiring a washing machine can have on different parts of the world.

Here Hans Rosling uses the power of visuals to debunk pervasive 
myths about the status of the 'developed' versus the 'developing' world:

Our class Media Wiki has many connections to valuable information and resources concerning the wise use of various media elements.

For Edward Tufte, a guru of information design, the choice of how to display information can be a life or death matter. He uses the example of the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster in which seven crew members died to show how the design of the chart, which related launches to dates not to temperature, had hidden the important information that may have changed this terrible outcome.  For Tufte, "There is all the information necessary here to have saved the Challenger astronauts" (Tufte, as quoted by Phil Patton for the New York Times, 1992). He continued by demonstrating a more efficient, meaningful, and accurate way to chart the information, with the essential data--damage most often happened at low temperatures in the past, and this launch had been activated at the coldest temperature ever compared to the chart--clearly available!

Tufte admonishes that "Content-light splashy graphics, or 'chartjunk' are bad" and that "Clutter is a failure of design, not an attribute of information" (Christopher Bonanos in Culture Pages, 2007). However, given the amount and variety of visual and presentation tools available to all of us today, I wonder whether we have gained enough visual and information literacy to appreciate the finer points that Tufte advocates. It seems that there is far more care and thoughtfulness needed in our digital world, as evidenced by many a website. For example, what is the information to be gleaned from here?

However, I am taken by this interactive graphical Universcale from Nikon that illustrates the idea of "scale" using a very innovative graphical interface. I wonder if Tufte would approve?

There is such a plethora of ideas "out there" regarding the manipulation of graphics, icons, images, etc., that can be wisely and artistically combined to help scaffold cognition both on and off the web. Below is the popular Periodic Table format that has been, in and of itself, usurped for use in many a presentation of information. In fact, Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel of Winterhouse Institute ,which is focused on design education, express concern about such utilization of that which is associated with astounding and outstanding intellectual work, and they worry that visual design tempts us to under utilize intellectual and academic inquiry or worthy social investigation and the like.

As they say,

Often though, we see voice expressed less as an act of subversive will, and more as a staging of false identity: this work says a lot about designers wanting to be artists, using "design" as a weak metaphor for "art" and expressing their personal experience without practical context or intellectual foundation. (Helfend & Drentell, 2003)

It was informative to read through their presentation given at the  AIGA  (national professional design organization) National Design Conference: The Power of Design in Vancouver, 2003. As you continue reading through this presentation, you will see samples of the many uses the periodic table design template has been used for. Continue reading and you will see a different slant from a design perspective: an actual re-designing of the original, familiar template. Here then we see truly creative and informed minds at work!

Again, I wonder whether Tufte would agree.

Link to the Interactive Periodic Table of Visualization Methods