So I'm gonna do some sorta like, role playing here today.
So I'm gonna treat you guys as the board members
of the World Values Survey Association.
It's a nonprofit association seated in Stockholm,
Sweden, so you're all in Sweden now.
All right, now before I, go dive straight into my presentation and
would you, would you hazard a guess, what, what is this?
>> [INAUDIBLE].
>> Nice, good guess, bingo.
It is the tip of an iceberg.
Now, imagine yourself at sea one day, and you're navigating through unfamiliar
waters and you come across, this, what is really the tip of an iceberg.
Now, you really do want to avoid a Titanic crash so, but
what, how do you steer your ship, around this iceberg?
Now, how you steer your ship is gonna depend on what you know,
about this iceberg.
In many ways, culture is like this iceberg.
There are aspects of it that are observable, but much of it is invisible.
But for the past 30 years, your Association has been trying to go
beneath this cultural water line, by finding out what people truly value.
Values change the world, and
we want to know, how the spirit of our time is, is defined.
And that brings me to this presentation.
We want to visualize world values survey, a rich trove of data set,
that your association has provided for the world.
Today, I'm gonna urge for a rethinking of how we're gonna use this data set,
by running through data, our audience.
Research a design problem, a design purpose and our design strategies.
Now, when we talk about values, we always think of values as a little bit iffy.
How do you define values?
Right?
For the longest time it has eva, evaded statistical definition.
How do we even measure values?
Where do we even begin?
Your association has changed that, by providing for
us an empirical data on people's values.
For the past 30 years, you have been collecting lots of data from across
the world, with regards to what people really value.
And your results have been cited by thousands of publications,
from Wall Street Journal to The Economist to JSTOR Publications.
And this has changed the way we see society, we understand culture and
ultimately ourselves.
But distilling the spirit of our time, takes more than expertise.
It shouldn't be the sole domain or exclusive domain of social scientists and
experts.
I say that distilling the spirit of our time takes perspectives.
Now the more perspectives we have, the more lenses through which we can see and
navigate our complex cultural terrain.
And that is why it makes sense to cater to the average information consumer.
You know, your man on the street, people who don't necessarily want to
parse through huge amounts of data, just to understand something, right?
We want to cater to the average information consumer,
who might not know how to do, you know, figure out data.
But nevertheless have something to take away from the [UNKNOWN] survey data set.
So what is the design problem here?
Now, we live in an age of big data.
The problem is no longer, the fact that we don't have enough data or information,
the problem is that we have too much of it.
And how we make sense of data depends on, how we present it and
how we visualized it.
So your association has provided for us a rich trove of data online and
it's available on an online data analysis platform.
But a closer look at this platform reveals several design issue.
Firstly, the layout is far from exciting.
There's lots of clutter, clutter on the page and people,
well, users can hardly navigate through these buttons.
And, look at the density of information presented in these
traditional Excel charts.
Not only are they visually discouraging, they're simply uninformative.
So the problem here is that we have a gulf of evaluation, and that is
a cognitive gap that we have to cross, before we can understand these graphics.
This is the problem, we are trying to solve.
We want to make the data comprehensible.
We want to make data, easy to understand, and but
we don't want to compromise the complexity of our data.
So how, what do, what are we trying to do here?
We want to make data accessible and make exploration social.
So easy that even my 80 year old grandmother can understand data,
without knowing Excel.
How do we do this?
Part of the answer lies in I think interactivity.
Interactively allows us to do real time analysis by allowing users to ask,
explore, and find questions of interest.
Personalization.
Remember the last time you looked at a group photo of yourself of let's say,
a friend's party, what's the first thing you usually do?
You look for yourself, right, in the photograph.
And I guess, we're all kind of,
vain that way, but, the same applies with data exploration.
When you look at data, users are usually interested in finding out how their
home countries perform or do with respect to other countries.
Interactivity makes that possible by making numbers have more,
greater emotional relevance.
Thirdly, we want to make data go social and how do we do that.
We want to be able to do data exploration that
allows people to share their findings and interpret graphics in different ways.
And that leads to father, the new hypothesis and stories.
We're also guided by this design principle,
very simply articulated by Edward Tufte, and that is graphical elegance,
is often found in simplicity of design and complexity of data.
Beautiful graphics do not traffic with the trivial.
We want to reveal the complex through the simple.
So what have we got here?
I think you've probably had enough of my ramblings about design principles and
design strategies.
We want to go from this, to this.
Our designer team over the past couple months, has come up with
the World Visualizer, an interactive social data exploratory platform.
What does this do?
So as you can see, this is a much more minimistic, minimalistic design,
as compared to the traditional XL charts.
So by totaling through this different options, users can easily navigate and
find the questions of interest.
So lets say, we are interested in finding out what people think about work.
So man have more right to a job than a woman?
Now, our survey data shows, interestingly sort of East West divide.
People in the west tend to think that men should not have more right to
a job than women.
And people in the East tend to think that,
well maybe men should have more right to a job than women, interesting finding.
And what this program also allows you to do, is to resize these squares.
So that it reflects GDP instead of population.
So here, here we see a correlation between income.
As you can see these, these countries that are richer with higher GDP,
also coincide with a more liberal worldview or
a kind of liberal worldview with regards to gender issues.
How about politics?
That's even interesting, politics and society.
We want to find out what people think about, political systems.
Is it important to have a Democratic political system?
Let's resize this to population.
Now, unanimously, countries think that it is important to have a Democratic
political system, but which country most strongly expressed this preference?
And if we look more closely, we see it's Egypt.
What's interesting about this data set is that,
this data set came from a 2008 world values survey data set.
Three full years before the Arab Spring.
Might we have better anticipated or
predicted, the Arab Spring if we have looked more closely at the data.
It's something for us all to think about.
So, we think that this word visualizer that our team has designed is much,
caters much more to the average web consumer.
It allows people to easily toggle through different options to get
to the questions that they're interested in.
Allow me to now move on, to the second in thew report that we have.
It's an infrographic hook, that seeks to provoke thought and seek questions.
What does this do?
So, some people have never heard of the World Values Survey.
We want to tell them what World Values Survey is about and
a few through succinct points.
Also, this info graphic sees, how to teach people about cultural proximity of
different countries by laying all of the countries in a culture map of the world.
And finally we want to invite end users to use our world visualizer so
they can explore visual world value survey data on their own.
So, using beautiful graphics and bold colors, we hope to capture
what World Values Survey is for the general public who has never heard of it.
So we have come pretty far down to, through our presentation.
We have gone through data and why it's meaningful for
the average web consumer to be concerned, with World Values Survey data.
We looked at the design problem,
the gulf of evaluation that has to be crossed to interpret graphics.
And we argued that, we want to make data accessible and exploration social.
We hope that our final deliverables, ha, will go some way to helping people
understand, something as complex as human values.
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So before the end of my presentation, I'd just like to share one insight
that I think, one of my favorite philosophers have spoke of.
Mahatma Ghandi, whom I believe needs no more introduction.
And he once said that, your beliefs become your thoughts.
Your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions.
You actions become your habits, your habits become your values,
and your values become your destiny.
Is the world destined, for
the clash of civilizations that Samuel Hamilton once prophesied years ago?
Or can we transcend differences in human values and belief systems.
All these questions lead us time and
again, back to this enormous iceberg we all try to understand.
As social scientists scratch beneath that cultural waterline that we see here.
Why not invite more people to explore data,
to interpret World Value Survey data through multiple perspectives.
We believe that, this will lead us to a more comprehensive understanding to what
it means to be living in today's time.
The spirit of our time.
After all, the spirit of our time is for all of us to define.
Thank you.
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