David McCandless: The Beauty of Data Visualisation
The TED talk by David McCandless is about turning complex data sets into beautiful simple diagrams.
Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut and possibly change the way we see the world.
McCandless believes that if you ask the right kind of question, or you work it in the right kind of way, interesting things can emerge.
To see the bigger picture, what’s needed is relative figures that are connected to other data, this can lead to changed perspectives
McCandless’ process begins with applying information visualisation to ideas and concepts. He believes that solving problems and providing elegant solutions, and information design are about solving information problems.
Visualising information can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems. Even when the information is terrible, the visual can be quite beautiful.
Reflection
The TED talk by Michael McCandless was an insightful lecture about the art and beauty of data visualisation. He talks about the complexity of data and how to turn these sets into beautiful simple diagrams.
Historical and Contemporary Visualisation Methods – Part 2
Why visualise?
To help us gain an insight and an understanding into complex issues
The Functional Art:
An introduction to information graphics and visualisation by Alberto Cairo.
Visualisations are Useful and Functional
Cairo reads an article on the population of the world, he then reads of the conflicting ideas on the fertility rates; the average number of children born in each country.
Rising fertility in poor regions is the reason the earth has to support 7 billion people now and a forecast of 9 billion in the next 2 decades. Other doomsayers focus on the aging populations in developed countries where fertility rates are below 2.1 children per woman. This number is known as the replacement rate. If the replacement rate in a country is significantly below 2.1 that population will shrink over time, if it’s much higher than 2.1 you’ll have a much younger population in the future which can cause problems. Predominantly younger populations show greater rates of violence and crime.
The author of this article contradicted both of these apocalyptic thinking by discussing two interesting trends. On average fertilely in rich countries is very low but in the past few years, there has been a slight increase in the trend. On the other hand, poor countries are showing a decrease in average fertility. The author suggests that due to these trends, fertility rates everywhere will converge around 2.1 in a few decades and the world population will stabilise at 9 billion people.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley
The graph, however, does have some insufficient information, the graph is an aggregate of the data of all countries in the world it doesn’t show the multiple patterns the author discussed, it doesn’t show the rich countries with recovering fertilities and poor countries stabilizing their populations.
It’s hard to extract meaning from a table. Data from a table is difficult to look at and find a number and then memorise additional numbers and then make a comparison. It’s much clearer when looking at a graph and then easier to make compassions.
All the examples of graphs require an active engaged reader.
Reflection
Part Two to the history lecture pod continued to expand my knowledge and understanding of why we visualise data, how useful they are their primary functions.
Jordan's Data Visualisation Blog 