Response to Rosling and GapCast#1

Tout d’abord, merci de tout coeur d’etre venu sur mon blog Dr Rosling!

How neat that someone, let alone Dr Rosling himself, should take the time to view my first “attempts” at blogging!

After viewing the brief but informative Gapcast#1, I again found the disconnection between health and economic growth interesting. Where academia was awarded between 1953-82 in Sweden for its research and discovery, it appears the public did not directly benefit, at least physically. Or perhaps this period took time to produce results that could be implemented to the masses? In any case, I still think this trend, again, leads us to a need to coerce our priorities to shift away from economics to quality of living. Maybe we are deceiving ourselves in measuring our progress in number of awards or amount of funds for research. I hear more and more often our education system is failing us, our obesity rate is climbing, and every time I turn on the TV there’s a new ad for a new ailment whose cure will “bring back your life.” All our cures and quick fixes don’t suggest we’re a healthier happier, and more powerful nation, but the opposite.

Gapminder’s visualizations, like IBM’s ManyEyes, have great power to catalyze conversation by getting straight to the point. The graphics almost fall into a new category, combining kinetic typography and information architecture into a compelling animation, rich in data, but not as overwhelming as a complicated, static chart can be. They embody all of the principles of good design that has a real purpose. I am inundated with comical, frivolous flash animations so often, that it is refreshing to see data used in a similar simple, format to create such an effective, narrative visualization.

Response to Rosling at TED

Hans Rosling presented quite an impressive multivariate, relational information graphic. (The sword swallowing wasn’t bad either!!)

The first trend I found interesting was that despite our economic growth, the United States falls short of less developed countries socially and in overall health. This reflects our country’s trend of valuing money and material success before everything else, including our own well-being. Rosling’s chart may be further proof that money can’t buy happiness. I wonder, too, though, if his “y” axis representing “mortality rate” is directly proportional to overall health of a nation? Or is this perhaps just his conjecture based on the new available data from the UN? His following personalization of the data with family names made it a little more clear and, of course, refreshed my memory of who in my family might have been affected during the time period he was discussing.

Rosling revisits the idea that money should not be a goal of a developing country in his final powerpoint slide, claiming culture supersedes all other factors, being the “value of living.”  I would like to hear him elaborate on this idea, which I feel was an important theme in our recent Design Dialogues lectures. That is, the idea that responsible design is going in a direction towards serving others and improving upon existing conditions rather than creating more “junk” just for the sake of producing something new. I felt Rosling’s message also to be one of empowerment, telling his colleagues that is within our means to share our knowledge with others and make the world more equal. I would also like to hear Rosling’s proposed solutions to help developing countries, being that the overall tone of his talk was very hopeful for the future. Was he commending Africa, for example, for coming as far as they have in the past fifty years by having the will to overcome great hardships, or because of all the humanitarian efforts that have not been in vain.  Perhaps he sees a combination of the two, which has been a good start and needs more momentum, awareness, and above all action to continue.

chp5 & 7

Morville’s mapping in Chapter 5 of a homepage as a series of either push or pull sections reminds me of the student work Dan Boyarski shared in his design dialogue lecture. This abstract piece revealed with a series of radiating lines that one homepage offered 8 paths to “escape” the site altogether, either through related links or other advertisements. This confusion also can also lead to information overload as Morville later discusses on p.165, deterring a user from even trying to decide where to go next. If I wanted to buy a house, but the neighborhood was in disarray with trash and dilapidated structures surrounding it, I’d keep looking. If I come across a messy, out-dated website, advertising things I don’t care for or about, I will also keep looking.
It seems Jeff Hawkins’s memory-prediction framework is a similar metaphor that reiterates we learn what to trust and how to respond through what we already know to be safe and reliable. And in a time when no one seems to trust the government or any large corporation anymore, I guess I’m not too surprised about Steven Levitt’s discovery that abortion might be the real reason behind lower crime rates. Perhaps there is almost too much going on in the world for the news to keep up with and they are pressured by speed and quantity of information rather that quality. I often find the same thing paraphrased ten different ways if I search for a particular news story, telling me everyone is assuming the first and most frequented site has reported the correct information. Under this media pressure, web designers have to be responsible in choosing who they are representing and if the information they make “findable” is truly helpful. I think Morville sums up his message nicely in stating “information that’s hard to find is information that’s hardly found.”