Infographics and Information Design

Introduction to Information Design

• 25 years of experience in working with data
• Importance of communication: encoding, transmission, and decoding of information

Historical Context

• Breakthroughs in Communication:
  • Oracy, literacy, and numeracy allowed encoding of ideas and quantities
  • Without communication, human progress would be stunted
• Proto-Writing:
  • Emerged 8,000 years ago
  • First proper writing systems developed 3,000 years later

Visual Data Representation

• Traditional forms: maps and diagrams have existed for centuries
• Quantitative Graphics:
  • 1786: William Playfair invented the first bar chart
  • 1801: Introduced pie and area charts
  • These charts remain popular today
• Notable Figures in Infographics:
  • Florence Nightingale: Created the coxcomb in 1857 to illustrate troop mortality
  • Charles Menard: Mapped Napoleon's march to show troop loss with a combined diagram of history and geography

Personal Insights on Data Visualization

• Excitement in working with data and creating interesting charts
• Example: Analyzing federal energy subsidies with a Sankey diagram to show energy flow and waste
• Mapping connections in Silicon Valley and inventors' collaborations
• Utilized diagrams for personal use (e.g., Scrabble word lists)

Techniques in Data Visualization

• Coding to generate graphics from large data sets
• Creation of interactive graphics for user engagement
• Importance of simplicity in design, as seen in a New York Times redesign of their market section in 2006
  • Use of simple dots to represent stock prices relative to their one-year range

Embracing Complexity

• Example: Visualization of presidential approval data covering six decades
  • 25,000 data points condensed into a single graphic
  • Graphic effectively shows trends in approval ratings and key events impacting them

Future of Graphicacy

• Graphicacy: Ability to read and write graphics is still developing
• Anticipation of new chart forms and dialects
• Graphics as tools to understand complex data efficiently
• Visual cortex's role in decoding information and pattern recognition

Conclusion

• Graphics can transmit large amounts of data effectively
• Emphasis on the potential of graphics for unlocking new discoveries and insights
• Thank you!