Form and Substance, Infographics 2010-03-05

By Rogier Brussee on 22 March 2010

Erik and I went to see the infographics 2010 congres in Zeist. This was fun, and it gave me the opportunity to meet some new colleagues from the HU this way which I probably would not have met so quickly otherwise.  The conference was all about design and journalism. Indeed it was jointly organized by BNO (Bond Nederlandse Ontwerpers, Association of Dutch Designers) and the NVJ (Nederlandse Vereniging for Journalisten, Dutch Journalists Society ) and it was my impression that the main audience of the conference (apart from HU colleagues and students) was designers and editors of journals.

Wikipedia defines an infographic as a visual representation of information or data. I like that definition (yes, I use Wikipedia too): it is to the point, and abstract enough that it shows that the field is ubiquitous, old, mundane and widely useful in commerce, science, politics, journalism, advertisement, education, etc.  Good examples are maps, charts, plots, trendlines technical drawings or the building instructions for IKEA furniture. The point about visual representation of information is the famous adagio a picture says more than a thousand words. In particular, people are notoriously bad at interpreting numbers and a well chosen visual representation may give a level of understanding (or a suggestion of understanding) that very few people will be able to gather from a mere table of numbers.

Making an infographic is very easy these days: just collect your expenses over the last half year, dividing them in categories put it in Excel and let it make a barchart. While that is likely to give you a better idea of where your money is spent (thereby showing the usefulness of visual representations), it is unlikely to get you a slot at infographics 2010.  . Clearly designers and journalists have quite different backgrounds, but in the case of infographics design is used to convey a story that may be more difficult, less impressive or more boring to tell through other means. Thus infographics are cross-media (or multi-media) at laboratory scale where we can see the interaction and competition between different media, in this case usually packed within a single medium like a journal or TV program.  I should say that even though this theme was (almost) absent from the conference we have a similar situation with the use of photojournalism, or the use of moving images rather than the written press.

I will not discuss all talks but focus on a what I think were the most interesting ones from this point of view.  The first speaker Charles Blow is an visual op-ed columnist for the new-york times and art director for national geographic. He started with a classic from the field: Charles Minards famous graph vividly depicting the annihilation of the ``Grande Armée’’ in Napoleons 1812 campaign to Russia by the vast and scarcely inhabited country, the Russian army and the weather. 

Figure 1 Charles Joseph Minard’s famous graph showing the decreasing size of the Grande Armée as it marches to Moscow and back . The size of the army equals the width of the line. Temperature is plotted on the lower graph for the return journey (1 R = 1.25 C)

The graph tells a story hidden in numbers, and tells it well using an aestetically pleasing design to make its point clear. But the aestetics are a case of form following function and is no goal by itself. That was mr. Blow’s point. Mr. Minard was a contemporary of Napoleon so we can safely assume that his graph was made without the use of computers. On the other hand according to Blow, many infographics designers have fallen for the lure of ``macintosh masturbation’’.  As a result, he said, many infographics departments at newspapers get closed down or reduced. His own work has definitively gravitated towards journalism and being an opinion editor (firmly in the left part of American political spectrum). It is therefore heavily oriented towards content rather design. Much of it involves statistical data, lots of polls and presented carefully they tell a story within a few square centimeters that is I think is often more convincing than an analysis by some self proclaimed political analysts. However his graphics are not particularly flashy, in fact I suspect it is largely generated using excel, and I think he sees himself more as a writer and journalist then as designer.  See for example this graph from one of his blogposts, on support for Obama’s health care reform.

Figure 2 Graph from Charles Blows weblog statistics and design showing support for Obama’s healthcare reform as a function of time.

The third speaker Liesbeth Melkert, the chief of the image department of the Amsterdam newspaper het Parool was clearly of a completely different opinion than the first speaker. Coming from a fashion background, she seemed to be more into design than into content. From her perspective the design part of the infographics seemed to be primarily meant to make the newspaper more visually attractive. She showed many examples of what she thought were great infographics. For example she really liked this one from Jonathan Harris:

Figure 3 A visual infographic from Joe Harris
I personally don’t particularly like this graphic. It looks great, but other than the number of people employed by than the US government and the unrelated fact that patent administrators and astronomers are pretty well paid, it is not very helpful for understanding the problem of red tape. If anything it is decorative. One of her examples that she praised for being nicely designed, actually got a comment from the audience for being unintelligible (and I agreed).  However she also showed some examples from ``het Parool’’ that were quite appealing, making the newspaper more attractive even if that means sacrificing textual articles or other forms of visual illustrations. One was on the Noord Zuid lijn the new underground line being build in Amsterdam. The one she showed was more visually oriented than the one below (which was also published in ``het Parool’’)  but I include it for Kees sake

Figure 4 The building of the North South line in Amsterdam and the spiraling cost. The red dot indicates when Kees’s house started to subside.

The next speaker, was Chris Cambell who works as a graphics designer for the international criminal court in the Hague. He has showed some beautiful interactive graphics to help the prosecutor make a case. He showed some examples from the Darfur conflict and the Rwandan genocide trials. It was clear that he took a lot of effort not to make things more sensationalist than necessary (using orange instead of red to indicate the location of incidents for example) which would not help the prosecutors case at all. In fact the cases are grueling enough by themselves. A good graphic presentation is used as a rhetoric device. According to him the prosecutor loves his work and the defense always objects. Both are probably a signs of the graphics effectiveness, but they are also a sign that a change in presentation gives a change in message and how it is perceived: the medium is the massage.

I am going to skip over the talk by Daniel Gross and Joris Maltha from catalogtree. They actually showed some clever data analysis and visualization but clearly work and see themselves as artists. Suffices to say,  they are way cool.

The final speaker was was Jim Grimwade. His (tongue in cheek) claim was that infographics will help us safe the world.  His point was that many of todays environmental problems are hard to understand and that a well chosen visualization can help getting to grips with them and hopefully getting us into action. For example he showed a graphic of the effects of eating meat (its bad: if Oscar Wilde had lived today he would have said that everything that’s good in life is both environmentally harmful and it makes you fat).  Here I want to focus on energy and the greenhouse effect.

Figure 5 A vidualisation from the Guardian Data blog showing the sources of greenhouse gases (source World Resources Institute)

The graph above shows rather clearly that we use energy and produce greenhouse gases in pretty much everything we do. Its certainly not just too many cars (although transport is certainly substantial especially if you consider all the cement we use for roads and bridges, the energy we use for the refineries, and the steel and aluminum we use for the transport sector of our economy). The other example I want to give is famous hockey stick curve. It plots the warming on the northern hemisphere as a function of time

Figure 6 The Mann Bradley Huges Northern Hemisphere Climate reconstruction data based on Wahl Amman (2007)

It is based on the so called Mann-Bradley-Hughes Nothern Hemisphere Climate Reconstruction data which tries to reconstruct the climate based on existing thermometer and indirect data like isotope ratios in ice cores, tree rings and historical data) It shows at a glance that something is going on while a mere list of numbers that changes in the first decimal and has a considerable amount of noise would probably not make any headline. As a result some people get very upset and start questioning the data. Now being critical about the data and the way you get a results is a very good scientific principle. Things like a paleo-climatic temperature reconstruction are definitively non trivial and there are all sort of reasons why there may be errors in this graph or similar graphs. However it is telling that most of the people crying that the whole thing is a scam use classic FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) tactics. First it is suggested that measures to reduce CO2 production are going to cost a lot of money (yes they will, energy preservation and alternative energy resources need big investments, but it is not as if its wasted money). It is openly suggested that scientists who produce the data are only looking after their grants and jobs thereby undermining their credibility. The more excited ones cry in addition that the scientists are evil socialists planning a world government. Finally it is suggested that there is no consensus in the scientific community by giving ample airtime to skeptical experts such as economists, self proclaimed ``blogscientists’’, novelists , or owners of the weather channel. This blog explains the perverse PR perspective rather better than I can.  In any case, I do not believe that a public debate is going to give a sensible answer to the reality of man made global warming. However I do believe that facing the political consequences and the willingness to take measures are crucially depended on minimal understanding of the problem. In particular I think it would greatly help if the basic mechanism of the greenhouse effect could be taken for granted. This graphic shows what is going on

Figure 7 A graphic showing the greenhouse effect:  visible sunlight passes through the atmosphere is reradiated as infrared which is absorbed by greenhouse gases like CO2 warming the earth atmosphere

Note by the way that if the sun is radiating a bit less energy, as it is doing the last three or 4 years since the sun is in a particularly deep solar minimum in its roughly 11 year cycle, the global temperature will tend to go down because there is simply less energy to trap even if that trapping is slightly more effective. A graphic may explain this, I still think that the most convincing argument is seeing it in action. Go see this little video from a BBC 2 documentary “Earth: The Climate Wars” which has a simple physics experiment but no infographic whatsoever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeYfl45X1wo

I wish they would perform such experiments on high schools. And you can, it is not at all difficult

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0kIaCKPlH4

Note that this video contains exactly the same graphics as the one above explaining global warming. There is no magic and no proof by intimidation, physics is cool and so is the young fellow in the video.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
Oscar Wilde

tagged with: climatechange, conference, visualisation., infographics

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