GOOD MAGAZINE (IN PRINT, AND ONLINE AT WWW.GOOD.IS): “In the Transparency section of GOOD, we work with a different design studio each issue—we did the whole thing ourselves in the Design issue—and let them change the rules each time,” says OPEN principal and GOOD lead designer Scott Stowell. “It’s fun for us to set up just a few guidelines and then wait and see what happens. For a long time in information graphics we saw a lot of these ostensibly objective diagrams that were soulless and boring, and on the other hand there were wacky charts and graphs that were distracting and unclear.”
As visuals go, pie charts are a snooze. The very term conjures their habitat, an enervated ecological niche of conference rooms, where dust motes sift slowly through projector beams, sliced by the laser pointer’s anxious red eye. Charlie Brown’s teacher, in a short-sleeved “dress” shirt, drones in the dark. Until recently, pie charts and other traditional infographics exuded associations like bad smells: governments, statistics, urgency buried in a thousand desiccated facts. For those whose skepticism shades into paranoia, old-style infographics also evoke data’s dirtier side: autocracy, sanitization, creeping slant.
Things are changing fast: Since Eye magazine urged web designers in 2003 toward more “interactive map-making,” The New York Times’ web infographics have told revelatory datastories underlying two contentious presidential elections, providing a model for the future. This year Wired announced the arrival of the “Petabyte Age,” an era of super-sized quantities of data—when our most urgent need is for processing tools and visualizations to make sense of it all.
PROPHET OF THE OVERLOAD
While ever-increasing bandwidth and social-networking tools are enabling a badly needed shakeup in data visualization, what’s really driving the movement is human desire: Bluntly put, we’re drowning in data that we cannot wrap our minds around fast enough. If any prophet for addressing the overload syndrome exists, it might be John Maeda. As past associate director of MIT’s Media Lab, founder of MIT’s groundbreaking, now-defunct Aesthetics + Computation Group and current president of the Rhode Island School of Design, he’s had nearly every recent pioneer of data visualization as student or colleague, earning him granddaddy status in the field.
Maeda locates data visualization’s turning point in 2005, when Google stopped telling users how many pages it searched to yield results. According to Maeda, in June 2005 Google searched around 8,058,044,651 web pages. “Who knows how many more pages Google searches through now?” he asks. “My point is that we’re all well aware that Google’s simple, pretty UI masks incredible amounts of data that are continually produced every second, all around the world.” Maeda sees the “grand challenge” for infodesigners in web and print as “be[ing] the first to catch a glimpse of what it might mean to understand all the information in the world at once.” In other words, measly line graphs and puny bar charts don’t tell half of what’s coming—or what’s already arrived.
Stowell thinks infographics can and should be accurate and interesting at the same time. “I don’t think the work we do or see these days is consciously influenced by what’s happening online,” he continues, “but I do think both things are part of a move toward a world with a greater level of participation. It’s clear that there are a lot of different stories out there being told in a lot of different ways.”
NUMBERS TRIGGER EMOTION
The new crop of infographics colonized politics, science and business first—stats-heavy disciplines in which infographics have traditionally been essential to decision-making. Perhaps the most noticeable change is skin-deep: no more pastel-rainbow pies, no more jazzy dimensional bars. The new infographics embody numbers in fresh forms to jolt the audience to attention, using interactivity to inject emotional force and encourage action.
FollowtheOilMoney is a prime example. Sponsored by lobbying group OilChange USA, this graphic tracks campaign donations to show how politicians are intertwined with oil interests. A politician’s face is connected by lines to oil-company logos; as donation-dollars add up, connective lines thicken, and the politician’s face gets larger and migrates toward the center. It’s illuminating to see how oil floated Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential bid; it’s alarming to see how George Bush’s face dwarfs his competition in both the 2004 and 2000 presidential campaigns. “The challenge is making something complex that’s still accessible, where you see this high-level interactive view, but you can drill all the way down to the SEC receipts,” says Skye Bender-deMoll, who designed FollowtheOilMoney with Greg Michalec.
Scott Stowell at the design studio OPEN translates this spirit of interactivity and data-as-narrative into print. OPEN’s infographics for GOOD magazine embody progressive politics, nudging readers toward greater awareness and activism. A pixilated female face reveals how few heads of state are women; snaking color-coded lines of antsy-looking people show the dearth of public toilets in cities worldwide. Sometimes the simplest renderings hit hardest: A two-page spread of penciled hash marks with the header “Innocent people have spent 1,125 years on death row” is a haiku to evaporated lives.
WE FEEL FINE: This site scans the web every 10 minutes for fresh mentions of the phrases “I feel” or “I am feeling” in blogs, social networks, Google and other sources. The data-collection engine grabs each new expression, matches it against 5000 pre-identified feelings and appends data about the writer that’s available on most blog profiles: age, gender and location … with the final factor being used to determine weather. The result is an applet swarming with colored dots, each capturing an individual’s feeling in one moment somewhere in the world. “I wish I had some excited feelings of him coming home, but I don’t,” admits a 22-year-old woman in Appleton, Wis., on a sunny day. Or a 32-year-old woman in Reykjavik, Iceland: “If I feel myself getting drawn in I buck like a crazy horse.” Explains Jonathan Harris, who created the site with Sep Kamvar, “I wanted to show both the small-scale human stories and the large-scale patterns into which these stories fit, and then to provide ways to move seamlessly between these two resolutions.”
OPEN and FollowtheOilMoney are harbingers of a wider-scale trend. The Tactical Technology Collective now offers a downloadable pamphlet, “Visualizing Data for Advocacy”. According to the U.K.-based nonprofit, since the pamphlet’s release in February 2008 it’s been distributed to 81,000 aspiring info-designers in 27 countries worldwide. time & interactivity—now in 4d & 5d Time and interactivity act as twin engines to pull audiences deeper into new infographics: Drawn by a graphic’s time-saving immediacy, interactivity lures viewers into spending more time with data than ever before. In other words, simplicity may hook them, but emotional richness and complexity make them linger.
Online archives like Information Aesthetics and Visual Complexity track the proliferating fronds of advanced infographics projects worldwide. Manuel Lima created Visual Complexity in 2005 as an outgrowth of his final MFA project at Parsons’ Design + Technology program. In Lima’s view, the rhizomic growth of data networks mirrors that of human social networks and ecosystems.
“What we need to learn from nature is how to represent these [man-made] systems in a simple, intuitive, and above all, insightful way,” he notes. Networks, whether social or natural, are “mutating, ever-changing organisms that can only be truly understood if we can explain how they change over time.”
THE ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT: This art/software project by David Small was commissioned for a contemporary art fair, Documenta 11, in 2002 in Kassel, Germany. Visitors entered a spartan room in which a blank, hand-bound book was displayed. On the pages of the book, blocks of text appeared, virtually “printed” by video projectors. As visitors touched or turned the book’s pages, their movements disturbed and rearranged text dynamically—a fitting motif for the text’s subject, Franklin Roosevelt’s speech on the four freedoms.
Jonathan Harris agrees. Harris created
We Feel Fine with Sep Kamvar in 2005 out of a belief that “it’s more interesting to make reflections of the world that evolve as the world evolves, as opposed to static images on a wall.” We Feel Fine scans the web every 10 minutes for fresh mentions of the phrases “I feel” or “I am feeling” in blogs, social networks, Google and other sources. The data-collection engine grabs each new expression, matches it against 5000 pre-identified feelings and appends data about the writer that’s available on most blog profiles: age, gender and location … with the final factor being used to determine weather. The result is an applet swarming with colored dots, each capturing an individual’s feeling at an instant on the globe. The applet lets users sort stats by location, age or gender, and provides constant feedback as to which feelings predominate worldwide.
STORYTELLING WITH DATA
Harris’ storytelling points to another differentiator for new style infographics: Words count as data as much as numbers do. “There’s a strong social component to using data visualizations,” says Martin Wattenberg of IBM’s Visual Commmunication Lab (VCL). His colleague Fernanda Viégas had her epiphany while visualizing users’ e-mail archives as a student at MIT’s Media Lab. Even though she assured participants she would keep their visualizations private, “the very first thing people wanted to do was share their visualizations with others,” Viégas recalls. “People naturally used these scientific visualization tools for collective sense making, for storytelling” about their pasts.
Shortly after founding VCL in 2004, Wattenberg and his team launched Many Eyes, a tool for ordinary people to make and discuss data visualizations. Users choose from existing data sets or upload their own, pick a visualization template, and publish the results instantly. Although Many Eyes initially supported only numbers-based data, “people kept trying to upload text—they wanted to make sense of that visually,” Viégas comments. “We thought, ‘Huh, people are telling us something here.’” The Many Eyes team responded by developing visualization templates geared toward text, including Wordle by Jonathan Feinberg, a highly customizable tag cloud, and Word Tree.
Like Harris, Wattenberg and Viégas, David Small is drawn to visualizing words, opening them up to more nuanced narrative forms. As his doctoral project at MIT’s Media Lab in 1999, Small visualized the Talmud, the central text of Jewish rabbinical law consisting of both the original oral law, the Mishnah, surrounded by the Gemara, layers of scholarly commentary. “You’re never supposed to read the Talmud by yourself,” says Small. “It’s a discussion guide; built into it is the idea of argument and debate.” Users can read a core Talmudic text on-screen and then navigate, in a 3D environment, to a related reference in another text block. Small’s goal for information design aptly describes other successful projects from this new era: “Can we create experiences interacting with information that feel like the same processes you use when you’re just thinking about something?”
MANY EYES: Creators Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas say their site draws everyone from scientists preparing results of experiments for publication to political bloggers scrutinizing government reports. It employs both data and visualization templates; examples of the latter are Wordle and Word Tree. An application of the latter is obtained by Googling Alberto Gonzalez and Word Tree to view the uploaded transcript of one day’s Senate testimony by the former Attorney General. The Word Tree begins with “I don’t …” and branches into the various ways Gonzalez completed that phrase that day: “recall,” “know,” “believe.” Users can zoom into a branch of testimony or search for keywords to refocus the tree. Word Tree is “a flexible way to navigate lots of text really quickly, and unlike tag clouds, it keeps the meaning intact,” Viégas notes.
THE SKEPTIC’S EYE
The new infographics unlock facts and start conversations, but they also enable—and demand—new forms of skepticism by viewers. In many ways, these infographics recall the Enlightenment motto articulated by philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784: “Sapere Aude! Dare to know! Have courage to use your own understanding!” IBM’s Wattenberg acknowledges that persuasive data pictures can manipulate viewers despite their seemingly objective nature. “Just as every written story has a point-of-view and embodies its version of truth, so do infographics,” he notes. Like many others in data-visualization, Wattenberg believes transparency is best served by making raw data available in the graphic, so naysayers can crunch the data themselves.
Ben Fry runs into doubters constantly. Author of the book Visualizing Data (published by O’Reilly Media), inventor of the data-visualization programming language Processing, and visualizer on several human genome projects, Fry is no longer surprised by how scientists “perceive my work as ‘pretty,’ which for them is an indicator that it’s not useful. Words can be misleading in an identical fashion, but images get the most scrutiny,” Fry notes. “The sad thing is that these questions get asked because the quality of visual images [in scientific circles] is so incredibly low.” Recalling all the bad graphics he’s seen presented by great scientists, Fry contends, “Far more is lost due to miscommunication in poorly designed graphics than will ever be obscured by intentionally slanted pictures.”
Like most web 2.0 trends, infographics are prey to another dark side—as corroders of privacy. When asked what areas might benefit from more data visualization, Fry responds, “Security and privacy are two I think about a lot. … What happens when someone else has all my photos? Is it OK for a software algorithm to be reading all my e-mail?”
THE NEW YORK TIMES: The influence of The New York Times’ use of infographics is ubiquitous. Part of the reason may be that the expertise of designers there has benefited from their online experiences. Graphics director Steve Duenes says, “A couple of years ago, our executive editor Bill Keller declared that the newsroom needed to get as involved with the website as it always had been with the newspaper. We took that pretty seriously and got started on interactive graphics. About half our staff had a fair amount of web experience, so it wasn’t too difficult to get going. But it’s important to note that the thinking behind our interactive pieces does not differ substantively from the approach we take in print. It’s really very similar. In terms of milestones, there are probably a couple. One is the process diagram we did to cover the plane crash into an apartment building on the Upper East Side. It was our first serious response to breaking news on the web. Other milestones are probably the early politics pieces we’ve done. Matt Ericson, the deputy on the desk, has done a lot to shepherd many of our data-driven graphics. An early example has to be the map of candidate travels that was done during the primary season this year.”
VISUALIZING INTO THE FUTURE
What’s next for infographics? Small thinks a common terminology is in order. “Graphic designers already have a language for talking about typefaces and point sizes,” he notes. “We’ll develop a new vocabulary for infographics, not just to make something but to talk about it on a higher level.”
Fernanda Viégas wants the future to bring cleaner data: “Even when government agencies make their data available, it’s in PDF or other formats that no one can use.” She laughs. “Having beautiful, standardized, accessible repositories of data, that’d be great.” Infographics’ future spans from modest goals like these to entirely bigger fish. It’s perhaps telling that many infographics pioneers are engaged in projects that blur the lines between computer, data and human environments. In 2007 Harris documented an Eskimo whale hunt with a camera automatically snapping photographs every five minutes. “I wanted to subject myself to the same sort of incessant, automated data collection that I usually write computer programs to conduct,” Harris writes on his website, www.number27.org. “I was interested in reaching some degree of empathy with the computer.”
In fall 2008 Dave Small joined MIT’s faculty to research “Design Ecology”—how technological objects can learn to sense each others’ presence in environments they share. “We’re throwing more and more data-filled devices into our lives—screens in elevators, TVs, cars with built-in computers,” Small explains, “yet each thing is designed by a different corporation and doesn’t react to other things in its environment. We want all those things to adapt to their own ecological niches.” Infographics may represent a new language—and a nascent common ground—between humans and computers. As data pours unseen into the air, humans soon will not be the only minds destined to understand it.
[TOP:] FOLLOW THE OIL MONEY: This nonprofit site explores the linkages between politicians and oil industry campaign support. Click on any face or oil-company logo to see a list of donations; click on a donation to see a PDF of an SEC filing for it. This screen is for the 2004 presidential campaign. Design by Skye Bender-deMoll and Greg Michalec.
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