The Design of Information

Fast Company magazine recently featured this beautiful rendition of the ocean’s currents on their blog. It was put together by the visualization geniuses at NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio and can be viewed in a variety of formats (including an iPad app).

It’s worth downloading one of the high resolution video formats from the NASA site.

I keep meaning to post about some recent data visualization work from Threestory Studio that formed an integral part of Santa Clara University’s President’s Report. The design firm Cuttriss & Hambleton did a great job with the overall design of the report while we focused on the infographic components.

The spread featured here highlights SCU’s global reach, showing the inflow of international students who study at the university and the outward reach of students who leave to study abroad during their time at SCU. A third layer of global connectivity shows the affiliated Jesuit institutions scattered across the world. It all serves to give you the sense that this is a place that is anything but provincial.

You can see the whole report in a handy PDF viewer (here’s a screenshot). Clicking on this image will show you a large scale version of the illustration itself.

In an age of ubiquitous Google Maps and navigation systems that will talk to you, I love the unique maps collected by the Hand Drawn Map Association. Reminds me of the maps my dad used to draw (and still does). I should start collecting those. Below is a nice example from the HDMA site.

Here’s one person’s list of the “12 Great Visualizations that Made History“. I’m in general agreement, although I think #11 (the gold plaque on the Pioneer 11 spacecraft) can’t count until we hear back from the aliens.

Reading the raw data, or even a well-written description, doesn’t have the same impact on understanding as an effective visualization. Like in this famous image of how to pack a slave ship (#2 on the list):

Source

We just returned from a family trip to Europe. I first visited London in 1999. I was impressed then, and again on this visit, by the well integrated, and cohesively branded, transportation system.

This was the first time I had seen the shared bicycle system in action. We wanted to try it out, but the bikes were too big for our 7 year old, so we contented ourselves with the double-decker buses, the overground, the river boats, and the tube instead.

I found myself wondering about the flow of the bicycles around town, wishing I could get my hands on the data to see what that looked like. Do they get stacked up in one location and require redistribution? Imagine my delight when I stumbled across this nice graphic created by Álvaro Valiño for National Geographic this morning.

And for an encore, I discovered that Sr. Valiño also created the graphic that accompanied the article on whaling that I read just this morning (also in National Geographic). Nice work Álvaro.

Just discovered LinkedIn InMaps today. A good example of interactive information graphics that can lead to discovery. Interesting to find the connections that bridge groups. Like the “I didn’t know Tony knew Larry!” moment.

This fact would have been discoverable just browsing through my connections on the standard LinkedIn site, but seeing the whole network mapped in one place removes a lot of barriers to this kind of discovery.

The zoomed-out view shows an accurate picture of my circles – the smaller clearly defined orange is a networking group I’ve been closely connected to for over a dozen years, the dense multicolored cluster opposite are my various church connections, with family mixed in. In between are various work and school connections that are scattered and less well-defined.

It’s not hard to create your own. Try it here. I’m curious to see what other people’s networks are shaped like.

With Hurricane Sandy wreaking devastation in the Northeast, I don’t know if it’s a good day or a bad day to blog about the wind, but I came across this living map of the wind created by hint.fm and was captivated.

You can also see a wind gallery of previous dates in recent history. Fascinating.

I posted about the wind map of the United States a while back. Now there’s a global wind map. Mesmerizing.

First impression: it’s a whole lot more windy over the oceans than it is over land. Intuitively obvious (even to the casual observer, as an old friend used to say), but the visualization drives the point home instantly. Now, what happens if we combine global wind data with ocean current data? It would be interesting to see how they interact.

Thanks to Andy Kirk at Visualising Data for pointing this out.