I love infographics as an information
designer I've worked with all sorts of
data over the past 25 years I have a few
insights to share but first a little
history communication is the encoding
transmission and decoding of information
breakthroughs in communication mark
turning points in human culture or see
literacy and numeracy were great
developments in communication they allow
us to encode ideas into words and
quantities into numbers without
communication we'd still be stuck in the
stone Age's although humans have been
around for quarter million years it was
only 8000 years ago that proto writings
began to surface nearly 3,000 years
later the first proper writing systems
took shape maps have been around for
millennia and diagrams for hundreds of
years but representing quantities
through graphics is a relatively new
development wasn't until 1786 that
William Playfair invented the first bar
chart giving birth to visual display of
quantitative information fifteen years
later he introduced the first pie and
area charts his inventions are still the
most common leaves chart forms today
Florence Nightingale invented the
cockscomb in 1857 for a presentation to
Queen Victoria on troop mortality
highlighted in blue she showed how most
troops deaths could have been prevented
shortly after Charles Minard charted
Napoleon's march on Moscow illustrating
how an army of 422,000 dwindled to just
10,000 as battles geography and freezing
temperatures took their toll he combined
a Sankey diagram with cartography and a
line chart for temperature I get excited
when I get lots of data to play with
especially when it yields an interesting
chart form here nightingales coxcomb
was the inspiration to organize data on
thousands of federal energy subsidies
scrutinizing the lack of investment in
renewables over fossil fuels this Sankey
diagram illustrates the flow of energy
through the US economy emphasizing how
nearly half of the energy used is lost
as waste heat I love it when data can be
sculpted into beautiful shapes here the
personal and professional connections of
the women of Silicon Valley can be woven
into arcs same as the collaboration of
inventors birthing patents across the
globe can be mapped I've even made
charts for me I'm a numbers person so I
rarely want at Scrabble
I made this diagram to remember all the
two and three letter words in the
official scrabble dictionary knowing
these 1168 words certainly is a game
changer sometimes i produce code to
quickly generate graphics from thousands
of data points coding also enables me to
produce interactive graphics now we can
navigate information on our own terms
exotic chart forms certainly look cool
but something as simple as a little dot
may be all you need to solve a
particular thinking task in 2006 the New
York Times redesigned their markets
section cutting it down from 8 pages of
stock listings to just one and a half
pages of essential market data we listed
performance metrics for the most common
stocks but I wanted to help investors
see how the stocks are doing so I had a
simple little dot to show the current
price relative to its 1-year range at a
glance value investors can pick out
stocks trading near their lows by
looking for dots to the left momentum
investors can find stocks on an upward
trajectory via dots to the right shortly
after the Wall Street Journal copied the
design simplicity is often the goal for
most graphics but sometimes we need to
embrace complexity and show large data
sets and their full glory
alik Gallup the former chairman of the
Gallup Organization once handed me a
very thick book it was his family's
legacy hundreds of pages covering six
decades of presidential approval data I
told the entire book could be graphed on
a single page impossible he said and
here it is 25 thousand data points on a
single page at a glance
once he's that most presidents start
with a high approval rating but few keep
it events like Wars initially boost
approval scandals triggered declines
these major events were annotated in the
graphic but not in the book point is
graphics can transmit data with
incredible efficiency grafica see the
ability to read and write graphics is
still in its infancy new chart forms
will emerge and specialized dialects
will evolve graphics that help us think
faster or see a books worth of
information on a single page or the key
to unlocking new discoveries our visual
cortex was built to decode complex
information and is a master at pattern
recognition grafica C enables us to
harness our built-in GPU to process
mountains of data and find the veins of
gold hiding within thank you
[Applause]
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