A few months ago I was watching Hans Roling's fabulous talk "new insights on poverty", in which he again cleverly mixes information visualization – more precisely animated, interactive bubble charts – with his ability to tell great stories. He uses Gapminder to create his presentations, so I headed over there and tried it. I got bored after five minutes and wondered why I couldn't get myself to use this tool, to compare countries with stats on things like the correlation of co2 emissions to the literacy rates of adult females, and not come up with anything exciting. Rosling is a professor on global health at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, so I guess he knows better which factors can tell which stories in his field. But still, I was wondering, how could you then make data and information as easy to grasp and as exciting as Hans Rosling does in his talks?
The answer, of course, is storytelling. Nico Luchsinger, a friend of mine, wrote about this from a slightly different angle on the Sandbox Network blog:
Emplotment is the act of giving something a plot, of putting it within a narrative structure. It’s what authors do when they tell stories, but it’s also what historians do when they write reports. They don’t just report the facts - they create a narrative, a story in an attempt to give their data meaning. Creating a plot for something inevitably means leaving some things out and emphasizing others. Emplotment is not primarily about reporting what has happened - it is about explaining why.
Stories create meaning. Including a bit of information or not is a problem facing many professions, from the historian and authors Nico talks about to designers, artists, statisticians, managers and so on. And of course all people explaining the current, confusing, fast-paced world to us. And today, as Nico writes, is the time of storytelling.
Stories are able to create meaning in information visualization too. Tufte wrote in detail about how comparing and multi-variant information visualization are two pillars of analytical design as he calls it. Which brings us to the much-discussed information visualization about the french invasion of Russia under Napoleon 1912 – created by Charles Joseph Minard in 1869.
Take a while to analyze it. It includes a map, a flow chart and a line chart. The map spans from parts of Poland all the way to Moscow. The sand-colored flow chart shows the french army entering Russia and it's strength in men, the black one the returning forces. While the surviving were walking back from Moscow, they had to fight temperatures of about -30°C. Now have a look at the army crossing the river Berezina on their way back, soon after the soldiers from the north join the main army. Have a look at this painting by Felician Myrbach too.
The river was halfway frozen but apparently the ice wasn't thick or widespread enough for the heavy french army with it's supplies, carriages and so on. The few bridges were narrow and order was lacking throughout the desperate ranks. When Napoleon tried to cross, the soldiers didn't stop trying to cross in front of them and some of those were slaughtered by their own men.
M. Minard's famous graphic depicts the march ingeniously by showing the size of the advancing army, overlaid on a rough map, as well as the retreating soldiers together with temperatures recorded (as much as 30 below zero celsius) on their return. The numbers on this chart have 422,000 crossing the Neman with Napoleon, 22,000 taking a side trip in the beginning, 100,000 surviving the battles en route to Moscow, and of the 100,000 departing Moscow, only 4,000 surviving joined up by 6,000 that survived that initial 22,000 in the feint attack northward, to leave only 10,000 crossing back to France out of the initial 422,000. Whatever the accurate number, it is generally accepted that the overwhelming majority of this grand army, French and allied, remained, in one condition or another, inside Russia.
Some of this story is included in the large caption of Minard's visualization and together with what is shown in the graphic itself, the viewer can tell the story through analyzing and reading. But can we go further? Think about the iPad and other tablets coming out soon. And then read Craig Mod's excellent post Books in the Age of the iPad. Formless content can be and is being transformed to the screen. But what about definite content like magazines or books with a meaningful layout mixing type and images?
First of all, I will say that content in definite form is easier to grasp and makes it more exciting to understand the underlying information, data included. And secondly, that the screen is even more suited to this type of content than printed books. Take a history text book for the iPad. If you're not a history major, there's really not much use in knowing which part of the German army fought in Verdun in 1916. If you know it was a trench war and it involved chemical weapons and futile deaths of many, that's generaly enough. If you ever need the details you can look it up instantly.
I read about 40hrs worth of history books and Wikipedia to prepare for my fifteen minutes long final oral high-school history exam, and in the end I got a B+ mainly because I didn't know which which German troops first attacked in the battle of Verdun, and similar meaningless questions. The important part is to learn about the decisive bits, and showing those visually is a great way to do so. Through animated, annoated, overlaid maps, decision networks of each army – showing which path inside each army lead to which decisions, and so on, the kids of tomorrow can get the big picture much faster than we did.
And understanding the bigger picture is becoming more and more important across many professions. But up until a few years ago, while there was talk about data visualization, chart junk induced by PowerPoint and other things, storytelling in information visualization was not a topic broadly discussed. And if I'm not mistaken, it still isn't. But of course the military was in place to innovate the ways in which we humans kill each other again. Take this article by two researchers of DARPA, the US army research organization that brought us ARPANET, a predecessor of the internet (try loading the article while surfing at an education facility, my university allows access to it). In it the authors argue that storytelling meeting information visualization can be crucial to command posts in the future so that leaders can decide quicker what the right reaction is while soldiers are fighting on the battlefield.
They create the vision of a kind of rendered and annotated animation showing the topological information and superimposed symbols explaining the situation with camera-drives over the area. Then, a sped up animation of the past hours is played with for example small burts of color showing fire from different positions.
But I believe that storytelling can go much further. In my bachelor thesis at the University of the Arts Bern, Switzerland, I am working on the transformation of an article on immigration to the US by The Economist into a complex information visualization. This transformation can be compared with translating books. While in Russian there may be 10 different words for a thing, in English there may only be four. And the other way around. So a translator has to find the true find meaning in what he translates, should know other writings by an author or publication, how the respective language was used in that time, and so on. Translating written content to the visual sphere is very similar. Only that in an animated, interactive information visualization, you can go much, much further than simply translating it. You can show different aspects in different view modes, for example allowing the user to view the content from the perspective of one specific person or in a geographicaly oriented mode showing where events occured and how the location mattered. And so on. Aside from showing multi-variate data, this allows us to show the data in multiple ways. Jonathan Harris' The Whale Hunt is an excellent example of showing data in multiple ways. Take a while and use the filtering tools to look at different angles of the story.
To round this post up, let's take a look into the future.
Believe me, there will still be some text, maybe as audio, but it will be there in most mass media. If you don't think so, tell me how to visualize the sentence "America, a Ponzi scheme that works", as the The Economistarticle I am working on is titled. I say you can either have no title, change the title into something you are able to visualize with metaphors, or you should keep it as written text. If you translate this sentence to German you can see why. In German, a Ponzi scheme is called Snowball-System or Pyramid-System. The founder sits on the top, and the further down you are the shittier a situation you are in. Something that can be visualized perfectly. In English this is not possible. So aside from all the other factors, this content will not be understandable to all people on earth like Otto Neurath had hoped. But everybody, including the iliterate, will be able to understand more of our world than ever before.
Journalists and authors in general need to have good writing and good storywriting skills, and probably other skills depending on what they write about. I think in the future they may well need to be good graphic designers too. Or maybe they will work intensively with designers. And data analysts. And developers. And user interaction specialists. To create more meaningful, more inspiring content for everybody. I know that I would read it it. Or should I say view it?
The 17 year old book, film script and play author Helene Hegemann from Berlin is in for quite a ride. Her first novel became a best-seller and is nominated for an important book price in Germany. A week ago, a blogger reported about whole pages of her book being copied from another author. Ms Hegemann does not deny this, but instead replied with the above quote. Which is the most interesting part in that article. Before you read the rest of this post, let me say that I haven't read her book and thus will not take a position in this specific debate. I'm just using her case to make my point.
Helene Hegemann. This is a Retweet. An animation of random photos of Helene Hegemann. But putting it next to the animation below is an act of remixing, because it shows the difference between this young author and a worldwide media phenomenon.
Paris Hilton. This is a Remix in itself. It shows how her appearance in the media is planned and how she uses one facial expression over and over. In this sense, it is an informational graphic, a sort of information visualisation.
Originality and Authenticity
Originality means the ability to create something new and surprising. Authenticity, in this context, is meant to say something about the way the unoriginal content was brought into the book (apprently, says the article, in an interesting and artistic way). Everything has been done before, people say. I'm not sure if this is necessarily true, or that no unchartered territory is left for my generation.
New technologies create new possible solutions. And problems change with their surroundings and all moving parts that influence them from within or outside. And often, a fresh point of view is already helpful to frame a problem in a new way that helps driving new solutions. I am talking about problems in the sense of things that can be solved or made better. So, in short, many things. A rice cooker, world hunger, climate change, the layout of a poster or a newspaper. Not only new problems, but also new dynamics in the surroundings can allow for new solutions to be used. The web has not changed the way business is done in itself. The architecture of the web has functioned as a platform for entrepreneurs and offline businesses to do business in a more efficient, online way. This change is original. It has not happened in exactly this way in human history ever before. And the next such change, some day in the future, will look different again, change our world and allow us to find new solutions.
But for now, we live with an online world that is constantly evolving. This is great. Each day, someone can come up with new ways to use this technology. Change parts of the technology itself. Or just add his bit of content in a way that was invented by someone else. Instead of lamenting the status quo, each of us should act on it and find solutions himself. Let's find or apply fitting solutions to the problems at hand. Which is how we create art or even informational content.
Remixes and Retweets.
A remix takes multiple sources and mashes them together in an interesting, new, artistic way. A retweet is a mere sign of knowledge of a source and its communication to your own network. Retweets can be great but their potential is limited. A remix on the other hand has the inherent opportunity to be great – if the creator of the remix actually thinks about his sources. Which brings me to Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome in the New York Times. The work of a journalist working for a good newspaper basically comes down to remixing. I don't mean this to be understood in a condescending way. Too often this is still the difference between Traditional and Media Social Media. Without the first the latter cannot exist yet. Creating actual content, a piece of information the reader can interact with and learn from, takes work. Lots of work. We designers should know this best, we work with information provided by clients every day which we then have to clean up, rework and remix in a compelling way.
This year, I want to do more remixing – but not necessarily less retweeting. Both have their place in our communication culture today. I want us to think more about which one is suitable in a certain situation. And then act on it.
It's the same as the "choose two: good / fast / cheap" saying. You can have either of it, innovation or a proven solution, but not both at the same time. Now let me say that I have enjoyed working with some very awesome clients. My best moments with clients happen when they clearly want either of those two things, not both. Either it is fairly earned money for something the client just wants to get done with, or the client is on a discovery tour with me. My dear clients: you really can't have both at the same time.
Following Michael Bierut's talk at the last CreativeMornings Session organized by swissmiss, I decided to care more about my clients. Especially those that make me happy. The clients that make me happy should have a reason to be happy after working with me, too. And if they are indeed happy with my performance, I will find more clients that make me happy in turn.
