Transcriber: Gabriel Galera Reviewer: Ozay Ozaydin
So.
That’s me. (Giggles)
Let's imagine. Two million years ago in the Stone Age,
we are sitting in our caves looking at the sky and after a while. We see this.
This is what we probably would have called a problem.
However, if you were to look out of our windows today,
what you see is probably the oddest now,
and this is definitely not because we don't have any problems anymore.
It is because most of the threats affecting us today are invisible to us.
There's no way we can see or understand them.
Why aren’t we looking out of our windows any longer?
So climate change, political polarization, refugees drowning in the sea,
the dying bees and insects, everything invisible.
Our problems are either too big,
too complex or too far away to really grasp them.
Sometimes even too small, the problem that has kept the world in alarm
for well over a year now has an average diameter of 0.15 millimeters only
and even at this tiny size,
it's already the largest in his family.
But this is not the only challenge we have to deal with these days.
Our lives and problems are also changing much faster than in earlier times.
I once really realized that whilst visiting
an exhibition of Romanesque statues.
It was a huge exhibition with what seemed like infinite rooms,
each room filled from floor to ceiling with stone figures from over 400 years
of Romanesque art and looking at all those statues,
I got the impression that they literally didn’t change at all over all those years.
And to be honest, at first I assumed the exhibition to be a bit boring.
But in the end, this led me to an interesting insight.
I mean, just imagine 400 years, that means about 14 generations,
14 generations of Romanesque stone mansions have seemingly repeated
the work and most probably also the lives of their parents
and grandparents. Almost exactly.
What's a striking difference to our lives compared to
the lives of our parents only?
My mum still remembers as she was a child when one of her neighbors got
the first television in the city. Television.
And only a few years earlier, in 1946
the head of the film company 20th Century Fox, Darryl Zanuck,
still believed this is a quote.
The television will not establish itself in the market
because people will get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.
And I mean, I’m not even talking about internet.
I’m talking about the television.
So...
Not only has our problems become more complex,
they also are changing much faster than before.
And this is why I believe that if we still want to understand
the things that affect us today, we will need all the help we can get.
And as I am an infographic designer, of course,
I believe that a visual representation can help us with that.
So, but how do infographics actually help us to understand the world?
Infographics help us to understand the world
by reducing and simplifying information.
And if we take a closer look at this,
we notice something special: Cause.
Actually, we feel closest to the truth
If we know as much as possible about a topic, right?
But why this is not always useful is explained best using the example of a map,
cause imagine a map in which everything is displayed,
so every detail on a landscape is shown.
This makes map scaled one to one.
And if I were to stand in front of the Brandenburg Gate, for example,
this is what my map would look like
And this would be obviously quite annoying
because it blocks my beautiful view to the gate.
And if I want to go to Neukölln later, another important part of Berlin,
I would definitely need a map that filters out certain details.
And of course, depending on my holiday destination,
even a much bigger reduction would make sense.
So instinctively, we assume that
the largest amount of information is necessary to approach a clear view.
But in the example of the map,
you can see that sometimes the exact opposite is the case.
A certain reduction of the facts in the map is not only feasible,
but essential to our understanding.
And this is what I want to call the anomaly of infographics.
So and how important reduction can be can also be clearly seen on a project
I once worked on, as you heard before,
it was called the Panama Papers and it was an investigative project
and published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
I was in charge for illustration and infographics that times
and the Panama Papers were an investigative project in which
the so-called whistleblower leaked secret information to the Süddeutche
and uncovered a massive case of tax evasion and money fraud,
including companies, politicians and celebrities all over the world.
And at 11.5 million documents and
a total of 2.6 terabytes of data,
it is still the biggest leak in newspaper history.
And at that magnitude, it quickly became clear that it could not have been made
accessible for the public without reduction.
And of course, all this analysis and reduction costs us
a lot of sleepless nights, paper waste and bad meals
in the end as you can remember.
But again, compared, for example, WikiLeaks,
the leak with which Julian Assange became famous with 1.7 gigabytes of data.
Opposed to the 2.6 terabytes of the Panama Papers,
WikiLeaks was significantly smaller.
And, only with the help of the ICIJ and over 100 media organizations all over
the world, we could finally prove to some people that they were involved in the data
people like Vladimir Putin,
Silvio Berlusconi and also the former prime minister of Iceland,
Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, who finally,
he eventually stepped down after the publication in 2016.
So this was an example of reduction.
How else do infographics help us to understand the world?
Infographics also help us to understand the world by classification.
The British data journalist David McCandless used to say
“You always need comparative figures to understand something”, and that’s true.
I found a lovely example of juxtaposition.
I want to show you today, I want to share with you.
It's called the world of the others,
and it was published in a newspaper made by (x).
And as you can see, it's the worldwide distribution of biomass on Earth,
on the various forms of life and the biomass.
And he has measured in carbon
as all living organisms are made up of organic carbon as its basic compound.
And back to the classification, as we can see in here as a stand alone figure,
for example, 70 gigatons of bacteria worldwide, it doesn't tell me a lot,
but compared to the sum of all mammals,
which by the way, includes us humans.
Things start to look differently.
And then,
And if we move on to the mammals.
There are even more mind blowing comparisons.
For example, the sum of all humans.
Sadly compared to all of the remaining wild living animals
and the big animals, the little triangle over there
and compared even more mind blowing to all of our farm animals.
It's nearly twice than we are.
But for me, the real surprise I guess in this chart are
the so-called arthropods,
which with one gigaton of carbon occur more than 16 times as often as we humans
and as far as the arthropods include spiders,
that’s maybe bad news for all the people in the audience
who already got the impression that spiders are everywhere.
However.
Numbers cannot always be trusted.
I remember as I was a child that my father used to say that he gets twice
as much ice cream as me because I was only half his size.
But when it came to lettuce,
I got twice as much as him because I still had to grow double.
You see, numbers can be quite convincing at first sight.
And I for sure, certainly will remember that argument for my little baby girl.
But they should follow some rules, at least in a good infographic.
I found it quite misleading infographic on climate change.
Which I want to share with you.
It's called average global temperature
and all you need to know about climate change. And as you can see.
Looking at this figure, it seems as literally nothing had changed in
the last 140 years. So let's take a closer look.
Let’s take a look at the source, the source is the Nasa,
so this sounds like a good source of it comes of two dates of temperature.
Then let's check the x axis. That's the time period.
This also sounds good if it comes to the question of man made climate change.
It's the period back to the pre-industrial age. So, so.
But even if it's hard to see in this chart,
there is still an increase of temperature of point eighty six point eight degrees.
And as we all remember, scientists all over the world agreed that
an increase of more than 1.5 degrees will cause catastrophic
and uncontrollable consequences for mankind.
And in addition, even if the temperature only drops by zero point six degrees,
the science, already speak of a small ice age?
So just to show you how small the range in which we actually feel comfortable?
So the y axis in here seems to be, it seems,
and here to be a bit out of shape and this would probably
a more appropriate scaling would look like.
So this was a problem of reduction
can emerge a problem out of classification as well.
Yes, of course, there is a problem emerged out of classification as well.
There’s even a name for it.
It's called a spurious correlation or a spurious relationship,
and it means if two or more events are associated with each other,
but not causally related.
And sometimes even an interesting story emerges out of that.
Like in this example I found for you the way you can see
a magical correlation between breeding stocks and baby births in Germany.
So let’s remember, what do we need, for a good infographic.
We need a appropriate scale,
a reliable source and suitable comparison for the respective topic.
And once all the work is done wickedly, the real work begins.
Cause even if you have real good information and a real good infographic,
we still do not necessarily have a real understanding tool.
And even if we have a real understanding,
we are still a long way from applying it.
And this is what was probably also meant by Amitav Ghosh when he said
the climate crisis, for example, is above all
A crisis of imagination.
And if, for example, you really want to stop climate change.
Then we will need some really good infographics.
OK, besides all that, brilliant scientists, brave children
and visionary countries on top,
but also some really good infographics that help us not only to understand
things but also touch us. And how do infographics touch us?
I believe that infographics touch us the best to their visual form.
And for that, I want to show you an illustration I once made on
a topic that not necessarily had to affect everyone.
It was the time when Lucasfilm, the film company who brought out Star Wars,
we had that today already and was sold to its great opponent, Disney.
And I remember we didn't have a picture back then
and only this pie chart of recent sales from Lucas by divisions.
So does this affect you in any way? Does it touch you?
This is why I came up with this idea in the end.
So and what I'm doing here is actually quite mean because, strictly speaking,
I'm doing just three standard infographics on
a boring sales topic with quite little of effort.
The one who's doing all the work here is actually you.
You illustrate that story with your imagination.
And it is also only your imagination that in the end really touches you.
And it is only by being really touched by information
that we find and change something.
Thank you for that.
(Applause)