Since about 2013, when I lived alone in Manchester during my placement year, I've kinda been bored of simply having dinner - While cooking I'd watch something, and I'd need to be doing something while eating too. Sometimes I Skyped back home or my friends, other times I watched TV shows, Movies, YouTube docs and a lot of TED Talks.
This theme has continued when I have dinner alone (as in, when I get home too late for my family to wait) (which is sadly, fairly regular) - And this evening I watched this talk by David McCandless.
Among citing Hans Rosling as his master, there was a lot of great stuff in this 17 minute talk. The thing I love about TED Talks, is I see how great presenters present - and more importantly, how presenters best convey their information in an engaging way. Ensuring information is engaging was one of the prevalent points to McCandless's (I'm going to refer to him as DM now - sorry David!) talk. One of my favourite lines is, "visualisation allows you to compress lots of information down into one clear picture." And that's exactly what it does! The data obtaining process, the cleaning, the exploration and then the final presentation - This is what designers do.
On the subject of designers - DM mentions he has no professional design experience - and makes the point, that given the volume of information around us, and the way we're presented it [be it on the web, print media, advertisement..] we all have this inherent design sense. When something looks right or looks wrong, or colours which match or don't match. The rest comes through practice and refinement.
Above is a graphic from the presentation by, I believe, a Scandinavian physicist who shared the relative impact our senses had, or rather the volume of information that our senses understood. As you can see (ha!) sight is the highest, with touch, hearing/small followed by taste. The white box in the bottom right? That's how much we're aware of.
This just highlights the huge importance that data visualisation has on helping us consume content - And another key point DM made was the importance of relative context, and how the picture is the beginning, and that words help to refine and define the meaning of a visualisation.
During our training at the Data School, we were taught largely functional "best practices" and guidelines - and through my own personal development, working with clients, engaging in discussions... I'm beginning to move towards a McCandless view of thinking. Beautiful visualisations draw us in, and when presented, they are massively impactful. It all comes down to the medium and the way that we're consuming. Is there supporting text, is it clear when explained, what is the desired impact?
This is where I think our community is great at nurturing and challenging what we think we know - and where we get to the post-school rebellious teenage years followed by, well. Experimentation.
I'd love to hear people's thoughts, either on the TED talk or any of the points I've discussed above.
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