Information goes out to play

SOURCE: David McCandless

Serious information used to be relayed in words, graphs and charts - pictures were just pretty window dressing. That's all changing, says David McCandless. E-mails. News. Facebook. Wikipedia. Do you ever feel there's just too much information? Do you struggle to keep up with important issues, subject and ideas? Are you drowning in data? In this age of information overload, a new solution is emerging that could help us cope with the oceans of data surrounding and swamping us. It's called information visualisation. The approach is simple: apply the rules of visual design to information - make information into images, rather than text. So, instead of listing the mind-boggling billions spent by governments, show them graphically - like The Billion Dollar O Gram image at the top of the page. The image arose out of a frustration with the reporting of billion dollar amounts in the media. They're reported as self-evident facts, when, in fact, they're mind-boggling and near incomprehensible without context. Or, in another example, instead of explaining the connection between say, mercury and the influenza jab, depict it visually. SOURCE: David McCandless And instead of leaving your data just sitting in a spreadsheet, let it out to play - use it to structure a visual image. Obvious but effective - telling geographical stories using maps Enlarge Image I've spent the last year exploring the potential of information visualisation for my website and a book. I've taken loads of information and made it into simple, colourful and, hopefully, beautiful "visualisations" - bubble charts, concept maps, blueprints and diagrams - all with the minimum of text. I don't just mean data and statistics. I love doing this with all kinds of information - ideas, issues, stories - and for all subjects from pop to philosophy to politics. Personally, I find visualisations great for helping me understand the world and for sifting the huge amounts of information that deluge me every day. Instant overview - troops in Afghanistan Enlarge Image I love information. I want to stay current. I don't want to be under-informed. But I'm busy. Sometimes, I need an instant overview of a situation that I can grasp in a second. But this is not a new subject. Information Design has been around since the 1970s. Pioneers like Yale University design guru Edward Tufte and design agency Pentagram have long known and used its power. But now with the rise of the internet, it's having something of a second birth. Seeing patterns emerge Enlarge Image Today, there's huge amounts of data out there. Visualisation helps spot important patterns in this data that might otherwise be missed. Already governments are seeing the potential. The American and Australian governments are fast democratising their data and releasing it for free to the public. As an added incentive, they're offering massive cash prizes for the best visualisations. The UK government plans to follow this example in December by opening up all its data for public perusal. They feel it could improve accountability and transparency. Disease Case Fatality Rates Enlarge Image It may also just be enjoyable to see information, rather than read it. In an endless jungle of websites with text-based content, a beautiful image with a lot of space and colour can be like walking into a clearing. It's a relief. So how is it done? A wide variety of online tools are emerging which can help those without design experience to start playing with visualisation. Wordle is a popular tool [See internet links, above-right, for this and other links]. It allows you to make 'word clouds' out of the most frequent words in a document. SOURCE: David McCandless ManyEyes, from IBM, is another great site which auto-generates bubble charts, semantic maps and other types visualisations out of spreadsheets and data that you upload. Beyond the internet, artists and programmers are using information as an artistic material to create amazing pieces of art, films and even real life objects. Leading the charge of this "information art" movement are people like Aaron Koblin who directed Radiohead's generative video House Of Cards, visualisation guru Ben Fry and Marius Watz who creates real life objects out of financial data. Simultaneously, on an even more experimental level, companies are beginning to use information visualisations to overlay or "augment" reality. Data from the web can now be graphically superimposed over a view of a real life space via your phone's camera. When performed in real-time, this creates a mixed or augmented reality. Games companies are already using the technique to hide virtual worlds on top of reality. It's all getting a bit sci-fi, I think all this is a sign of the times. In a subtle but steady way we're all becoming visualisers now. Daily exposure to the internet is creating an incredibly visually literate generation. We're looking at visual design and information visualisation every day. (Or, if you're like me, every minute of every day). So we're used to having, and we're demanding, information in colourful, designed, visual forms. In comparison, reading text like this, in linear paragraphs and columns, can seem pretty dour. Like watching black and white TV. There can be a directness and clarity to visual information that cuts through the noise, the smoke, and the walls of information around us. It can help us zoom in and see what really matters. Or what might be being hidden from us. And that, I think, is beautiful. Information is Beautiful will be published in the UK by Collins in February. It is published as The Visual Miscellaneum in the US by HarperCollins.

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Commentary

I've been looking at visual Data for a long time now and I've enjoyed it tremendously. Here are some great sites to check out if you love visual Data:

http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/
http://chartporn.org/
http://www.mint.com/blog/
http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/
http://www.wallstats.com/blog/visualizing-one-billion-dollars/

Wallstats is a very good site and the links above goes to their greatest charts. One shows you where your taxes are going and the other helps you visualize a billion dollars.

http://www.gapminder.org/videos/

Gapminder is an AMAZING site where tons of amazing videos of interactive working charts are on display. They even offer their interactive chart for free!
Here is the interactive chart: http://graphs.gapminder.org/world/

Enjoy those sites and keep your eye on the look out for more like the above.
Visual data is the wave of the future.