Week 3: Complex Simplicity- Big Data

Data Visualisation empowers audiences to understand highly complicated stories about social, political and cultural issues. It allows type designers the opportunity to work collaboratively and work across unfamiliar sectors such as philosophy, engineering, science, etc.

This week, I will analyse the effectiveness of 1 of the 5 historical and contemporary examples of information design, and present as a piece of editorial design.

SIDE PROJECT //

Luckies London: The call of The Chartologist: Due 19/02/21

The theme is Culture, which can mean anything from rap stars to football, cheese to literature. This could be any style, medium or concept.

Cartography-

The production of maps or charts. The one below has been produced by Matt Sewell, which includes the names of 45 birds that can be scratched off to record what has been seen or heard.

In contrast, 'night sky' was designed by the Luckies team and features a guide to the moon phases, which is a completely different concept but uses the scratch off feature to connect the whole collection and keep it interactive.

Types of Culture

Culture is a system of values and beliefs which gives us a sense of belongings or identity.

Knowledge of skills (software, transferable skills, etc.)
Typeface checklist
Guide to sustainability
Language (dyslexia)
Wellbeing habits such as types of meditation

Concept 1: How the Dyslexic Brain works

Concept 2: Inspirational Dyslexia

A timeline of famous Dyslexics with inspirational quotations underneath - their face can be covered with foil so consumers can interact with the poster. This reminds me of one of my undergraduate projects for international day of failure, encouraging people to not give in to imposter syndrome.

I could use the dyslexic font I researched last week! This would inclusive of my target audience.

List of inspirational dyslexics:

Poets - Philip Shultz, William Butler Yeats
Artists - Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci
Illustrators - Jerry Pinkney
Creators - Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs
Politics - George Washington, Anderson Cooper, Andrew Young
Actors - Whoopi Goldberg
Chiefs - Jamie Oliver
Film - Steven Spielberg, Henry Winkler, Roger Ross Williams
Business - Richard Branson, josh Almeida, Kevin O'Leary, Henry ford
Engineers - Paul MacCready
Doctors - Stuart Yudofsky, Karen Santucci
Scientists - Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Carol Greider, Jack Horner, Albert Einstein
Writers - Agatha Christie, Danny Glover

Chosen people:

Jack Horner, Paleontologist (first discovery of young dinosaur fossils) 1946 - present
Leonardo Da Vinci, artist / inventor 1452-1519
Albert Einstein, scientist 1879-1955
Richard Branson, Business 1950-present
Agatha Christie, writer 1890-1976
Andrew Young, Politician 1932-1996
Whoopi Goldberg, actress / author / comedian 1955-present
Danny Glover, actor / film director / political activist 1946-present

I have ordered the celebrities in a timeline with quotations describing their dyslexia because I wanted to motivate as well as inform viewers. To place more emphasis on the theme 'culture', I have made sure to have a mixed bag of people from past and present, gender, occupation, and ethnic group. Nearly all of the celebrities are people I have heard of before.

The layout and illustrations are unfinished, which according to the brief is okay for submission as long as the concept is clear. In order to improve this piece I would decrease the type size by 1pt, add a frame (background colour) onto each illustration and experiment more with the timeline layout. Maybe I could even frame them as photographs and tilt them at an angle?

I will come back to this after I finish the Big Fish competition next week.

I added a cream colour palette because some dyslexics find it easier to read with tinted backgrounds. I think this is very iconic in terms of its comic strip aesthetic, which would be suitable for children that need motivation after a hard day at school. The lists have been placed in the middle because the imagery had no sense of navigation when the lists were at the bottom - this adds space to the imagery as well as using hierarchy to categorise the imagery as past and present. I have taken away the timeline because it was putting too much control over the layout, so I made sure to keep the faces in the same order and grouped them to their quotations using a curved line.

In order to improve I would make the lists cleaner and more polished - maybe make it as a four column section and order the names so they are directly opposite the imagery (within the same column as the image).

Editing my Portfolio Website

After reflecting on last week's online event for dyslexics and creating a dyslexia poster, I have started my rebrand as a dyslexic designer! I haven't visually rebranded though due to how many other side projects I want to do, and I think I am still very attached to the story behind my current brand identity; it started as a campaign for student welfare and inclusivity president, which describes my current values.

LECTURE //

History

Cave paintings (Lascaux in France) - kept a record of hunting culture and animals

Bayeaux tapestry. Continual flow of the story. Audience was illiterate, so relied on imagery. This reminds me of opt-art due to the continual flow of movement.

Church-stained glass windows – craftmanship, colour and grandeur. Showed in a series of frames like a modern-day comic strip. Imagery had to work extra hard for their illiterate audience.

Egyptians – language of icons. A logogram is a written or pictorial symbol intended to represent a whole word and can be found in other cultures like China and Mayani. Modern day emojis are logograms! Signage systems such as the stop sign are part of logograms. I wonder if acronyms are part of a logogram due to how they represent a whole word: LOL, OMG, etc. The word logogram makes me think of a brand icon that can be recognised without the brand name attached, which makes me wonder whether the name originated from this concept. It also makes me think of last week when I talked about culturally learnt languages- obviously we are now disassociated with the Egyptian codes, but we have an idea of what the other codes mean.

What is the difference between hieroglyphics and logograms?

A logogram is categorised within hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphs are picturial writing systems to represent words or sounds. The origin of Hieroglyph comes from a Greek meaning of 'sacred carving' or 'god's words'.

One interesting theory I found was that Dyslexics may be better at learning Chinese rather than English because the Chinese language is filled with logograms that represent a whole word (visual patterns), whilst the English language needs to be broken down to its individual letters(phoneme processing). According to a Guardian article listed in the references, it is possible to be dyslexic in one language and a higher than average reader in another language. This makes me want to try to learn Chinese because I've found it difficult in the past to learn any other languages due to how the phonetics change. This reminds me of my discussion (theory) last week on how spelling is a cultural coding system!

Aicher’s hieroglyphics. Inspired by the angles of the new buildings designed for the Olympics and made a grid to base all the icons on. 1972
Harry Beck, 1931 – London Underground transport map. First week talked about how he disregarded the geographic accuracy. Changed from map to diagram, which has inspired other maps.

War Infographics

Charles Joseph Minard – infographic that showed the number of troops that set off from Poland and the number that made it to Moscow. His graphic shows the combination of loss of life, temperature geography, and historical context. For me, I am having trouble navigating this because the writing is too small and there is so much going on to the point where I don't know what is what.

Below is an earlier version by William Playfair in 1786. I prefer Playfair's infographic because it is simpler and easier to navigate - he uses the negative space to indicate what point the balance is in favour of England.

Florence Nightingale was famous for her contributions to medicine and invented the rose diagram, which enabled improved sanitation for soldiers on the battlefield. This diagram intrigued me because I am use to seeing circular diagrams that only represent one thing, for example, William Playfair would draw a circle graph for each month (he invented them).

Food infographics

Carl Kleiner, Cookbook infographics. I like the way he makes the ingredients look like a graph. It reminds me of when I was documenting and laying out all my ingredients in week 7 during the last module (writing about a special object), although, my documentation wasn’t as clean as his work.

Social Design

Can Graphic Design save your life? I lit-up when I heard that- it's an area I'm really interested! Because Ebola has 30 languages in the area, they used iconographic language to highlight the symptoms to help self-diagnose. Covid-19 comes to mind – have a look at the graphics.

John Snow, 1854- showed patterns. Documented the outbreak of cholera. Allowed him to theorise the cause of the illness was the water from a specific pump on Broad street.
The winner of 2018’s Design of the Year was an interesting blend of different fields in a visual manner, naming a new area called Forensic Architecture. The aim of this research group, based in London, is to share architectural evidence of humanitarian disasters, natural and man-made. It’s the evolution of the Minard map we looked at earlier, with more depth. They use the fact that we live in a world of data saturation, and harvest from that to create evidence of what really happened to people whose human rights have been violated.

Really love the animation used for Studio Greyworld in 2010. It reminds me of an infographic I did for the FH foundation. It would be interesting to explore animation in my work, or maybe I could develop my FH project further. I like how Greywood’s animation moves and leaves out some of the dots, so maybe I could use this technic to show the percentage of people with FH compared to the shown population.

RESEARCH //

Morton, Timothy (2013), Hyper objects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

Chapter 1: What Are Hyper objects?

Hyper objects- things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans. From what I understand, it is something that is seen as an object in its own right but without visual presence?
The purpose behind this book is to show how data can show what we cannot visually see. This brings me back to my FH foundation project. FH is a condition that is passed down to 50% offspring and causes heart related early deaths, which was an interesting project because this disease is invisible and data was the only way to spread awareness.

I honestly found most of this book to be gibberish due to how it seemed to waffle-on a bit, so I've collected a few pieces of visual data that interested me, which I think was what I'm supposed to do (based on this week's topic).

Figure 3 is from 2010's deepwater horizon oil spill, which shows the scale and location of the spill. Because this image was shown as greyscale in the book, I wasn't sure whether this was a radio-thermal image, but as far as my understanding goes, the oil spill is seen as white due to the sun's reflection and the lightness depends on the oil thickness.

I also found this comic interesting due to how it tries to be humorous with the intention of making people aware of the climate situation we are in without needing to include any facts, and I think this is due to how familiar this topic has become.

Chapter 2: The Time of Hyper objects

This Chapter refers to Global Warming as a hyper object that has now ruined our typical passive statements about the weather because we have entered an era where this hyper object has become widely acknowledged as a concern.

Below is an electric building that attracts pollution rather than redistributing it. I found this interesting because it makes me question whether the collection of pollution around the building acts as a form of visual data.In order to make this data easier to navigate, I think overlapping this photograph with the outline of the building and the thickness of the pollution.

Francois Roche is a French architect. The building is surrounded by electrically charged wired and statically attract dirt. The building was designed using a cad software and deformed from a computer virus, so in order to move away from safety regulations, Roche had to state the building as a form of art rather than a practical building.

A similar project used to collect pollution is Daan Roosegaarde’s Smog Free Diamond, which is used to repurpose and raise awareness about earth's environment. The rings are being sold as wedding rings, which I think is a beautiful symbol of protecting your partners future rather than going by old traditions of financial status or trading something precise for someone's hand in marriage.

The ring above represents 1000m3 what was once polluted air, which took 33 hours and 20 mins to collect using the Smog Free Tower. The Smog Free Tower is based in Beijing, the most polluted city in the world.

Information is Beautiful

David McCandless is a writer, visual data designer, art director, and runs the blog 'InformationIsBeautiful.net'. His recent project includes VizSweet, which is an internal tool for creating interactive data but currently invite only (doesn't have a sign-up request button). Below is a video that finishes as an Microsoft Office advertisement but I thought it would be a great introduction to Mr.McCandless and his passion for data visualisation.

McCandless, David (2008), Information is Beautiful.

I found the 'Death Spiral' very interesting due to how blunt it is, and I love how the diagram forms a spiral; it’s almost as if it is referring to a void of nothingness. It almost puts my old campaign project as pointless- why prevent one thing when something else is going to come for you?

Life Times- I found to insane how low ‘caring for others’ was, I was almost offended. It’s challenging me to object to this statement or to change my behaviour. I think this isn’t an accurate diagram because this varies depending on the job you have, for example, a social designer would have 24 years of ‘caring for others’ and 10 years of reading and 10 years of being on the computer.

However, this book was in 2008 and the social-change spectrum has increased dramatically since then.

TED Talk by David McCandless, 2010

The media panic timeline enables him to visualise the pattern of 2001 being the only year without any panic because the country was going through 'real' trouble (Im assuming he is referring to foot-mouth disease outbreak).

I was very interested in a collection of Covid-19 related queries that were shared on the ideas wall. I did think the navigation on the website was difficult though because it didn't say anything about needing to scroll down in order to receive the data.

The timeline clearly states the events taking place as the queries rise. I thought it was interesting how interactive this platform was because it allowed you to see the questions as you hover over the dots. One interesting concept that was mentioned in this week's tutorial was that data has become less human, which I disagree with because compared to the graph 'mountain out of molehills', this has more detailed and feels less alienating due to how it lets you give into your curiosity and explore. And the first graph doesn't tell you what the colours represent. One thing both of them have in common though is how they use literal language when presenting their data: Covid-19 looks like sneeze particles and the 'mountain out of mole-hills' are shaped like mountains.

I would say the chart shown below is a dot matrix chart, which uses colours to represent a category and enables people to gain a quick comparison between the proportions.

He also talks about being able to use data to represent his life on a CV, which has made me reflect about my own CV and how I could turn it into an infographic - I wonder why the shading is different on each block though.

This also reminds me of the CV workshop I took during Falmouth's Workshop Festival because one of the CVs on display had a page of visual data. This should be a fun side project, and will also demonstrate my skills as a designer.

Nicholas Felton – Transforming data into meaningful stories | The Conference 2015

Notes

BIG Data is usually characterised by Volume, variety and velocity. Photography can fit into these characteristics.
The decisive moment- error of photography. Today we embrace many moments. Techniques that allow you to combine a series of images into one. Google Auto Awesome combines best features from both photos and combines them. Can also combine old photo with new (college for example)
Newspapers are starting to embrace photos shared by people around the world rather than having one person travel to that event.
I found it interesting when he brought up the camera that takes 11 mins to capture a shot- only one person was stationary and everyone was moving too fast to be captured.

Nicholas Felton is a designer, entrepreneur and artist. He mainly focuses on making everyday data into meaningful objects and experiences. Below is Felton's Typecon, which isn't related to the 'big data' theme but I found it interesting because he used code to create a typographic identity that appears sketched. He mentions that he was focussing less on databases for this project and more on algorithms because he wanted to rely less on order and predictability.

Another (more relevant) piece that caught my eye was an editorial he produced to celebrate 10 years of Wikipedia because of how he managed to capture a lot of information in a beautiful and simple way. I've never seen a timeline presented without a straight line. I think it also clearly shows how the website has expanded through the years and the sphere expands with it- almost looks like a void or tsunami.

Interview with Felton by Wired Magazine

In 2006, Nicholas Felton started recording 10 years worth of personal data on his Notes app, which included emails, texts, music tracks, films, postcards, and the day he got his first grey hair. The final result was a 12-page report of visual data, annually. His 10th and last report featured data collected from commercially available apps and devices such as Fitbit, allowing him to add more health related infographics to his report such as heart rate, drinking habits and sleep patterns.

He mentions that he tries not to look at the data until January 1st because he worries it would unconsciously influence his behaviour, which is a good way to reflect on the new year and resolutions. One resolution included recalling people's names, which was the year he started recording conversations.

Felton developed an app called 'reporter', which measures the everyday through quick surveys and automatically visualises this data. It is an app that has been influenced by Felton's previous process of obsessive data collecting, making it easier for future collection. I don't know how I would feel about spending 76 hours a year collecting data - part of me wants to know how I could improve my routine but it's also counterproductive because you could be spending that 76 hours on the things that the app says you aren't doing.

This reminds me of a couple of apps. One would reward you for the time you spend away from your phone, whilst the other would record the time you spend on each app. The later is a more automatic approach to data collection and allows you to set yourself a weekly limit.

D & AD Awards

These projects caught my eye due to how interactive they are. I like how the The Copernicus Project uses the same shapes and rearranges to form imagery. The 'Most Dangerous Street' was a project I add a brief look at during my first module, which uses experiential data to form a really powerful and emotional response.

The Copernicus Project was shortlisted for D&AD's Data Visualisation 2020 and produced by the Design Agency 'Aggressive'. This project has however won the 2019 Communication Arts Award of Excellence. The purpose of this project was change the way food is seen, and to inform the public about how their diet's are presenting negative impact to the earth's biodiversity. The name of the project was inspired by Nicolaus Copernicus, who discovered that the earth isn't the centre of the universe in 1532 CE.

Most Dangerous Street has received D&AD's Graphite Pencil for Data Visualisation 2020. This installation focuses on Chicago's most dangerous street with the highest gun violence in America. Because Chicagoans have become immune to this violence, The Illinios Council Against Handgun Violence showed them the weekly gun violence data in a new light.

Looking at this project briefly in the last module, I didn't realise this data was only a week's collection of data.

WORKSHOP //

For this week's workshop, I have chosen Nightingale's rose diagram over the over 4 examples presented to me.

Nightingale describes her nursing as a response from God as he 'called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation', which proved to be both true and false; nursing was below her family rank and they subsequently disapproved, however, her rose chart made her known throughout history.

Chalres Dickens described the 'nurses' (untrained widows, ex-servants and paupers) as incompetent, corrupt, and more interested in gin than patient welfare. Religious orders served the sick only marginally better: their holy focus was to prepare souls for judgment, not effective medical reform.

Florence Nightingale's rose chart (also known as Coxcomb or polar are charts) shows the avoidable deaths of soldier's during the Crimean war. Unlike the pie chart, a single chart can represent all the months in the year, whilst a pie chart usually only represents a singular month. Each section is represented by angles with the length indicating its value, as you can see, the most deaths have been taken place in January. This chart is categorised as a proportion chart.

Using statistics was the only way her medical opinion could be heard since elite doctors and army officers only saw her as a woman. She published her work anonymously so her status as a woman would not blindsight the data.

William Farr was a data visualisation pioneer and helped Nightingale recognise the potential of the data being shown on the chart. It likely references André-Michel Guerry’s simpler 1829 cyclical plot of meteorological data.

It makes me wonder what 'other' causes of death were, but it also makes me shocked to see the amount of disease related deaths were preventable. I wonder what these shapes represent in digits? I also wonder why the November section has 2 of the same colour - was this a mistake in colour or a mismeasurement?

I have found an original diagram from Nightingale's medical notes, giving me an insight into the figures missing from the previous diagram. After comparing the table and diagram, I am having trouble making any sense of them because the numbers are completely on both table and diagram.

This reminds me of tree maps due to how the scaling has been used. Speaking of tree maps, I was looking at the 'Finding the Blank Spots in Big Data' reference from the ideas wall, which talked about how artists like Onuoha seeks out and highlights the absences in data. Wanting to find out more, I started researching the wrong Onuoha artist by accident, but seeing his artwork made me compare it to a tree map and made me question whether data could be presented in this way. Can diagrams be overlapped with imagery? Can it be shaded and toned with beautiful oil paint?

Below I have overlapped a tree chart from McCandle with imagery- it's just a mock-up of an idea. To develop this further, I would make my own collection of data and paint the chart on a canvas, overlap the digitalised painting with the facts and figures for better legibility. I think this is a longer process to make a chart, however, I think this will humanise the data and make viewers form a connection with the data.

Inspired by the Rose chart and taking into account how David McCandles developed infographics for his CV, I decided to adapt my own CV infographics. Each wedge represents a job, and the scale represents the length of time I was employed. Within these wedges will be a colour system of skills being used within each job, which has the opportunity to also indicate the most used skills through scale. The job titles will be labeled at the edge of each wedge and the colour system will be clearly listed at the side. Like the rose chart, the timeline will be clockwise, however, because it represents more than one year I will need to create a circular outline around the graph to mark the timeline.

Due to having some jobs overlapping each other in my timeline, maybe there is a way for me to animate this - the wedges will rearrange from its circle into an order to overlaps each other. But how would employers recieve this through an email? Unless I post it on my portfolio website? Maybe I could only slightly overlap some of the wedges so date can still be shown but also indicate a slight conflict in the timeline.

Looking at Nightingale was fascinating due to how she challenged hear role as a woman and made a difference. But it was also frustrating at the same time because I did a lot of research to find out the total death rates and got confused when comparing the bar chart with the original drawing of the chart (numbers didn't match); the chart is layered instead of stacked, making it impossible to find out. In hindsight, I probably should have found a higher quality of chart, which would have enabled me to read Nightingale's writing and I wouldn't have needed to do all the research. At least I now know why no statistics were shown and why some months didn't show any wound related deaths.

I wanted to demonstrate my understanding of the graph by reproducing the original and separating the layers.

A follow-up from my earlier experimentation of chart imagery, I used overlapped the first layer of Nightingale's chart with a disease symbol. In order to improve this I could have made it more suitable to the 19th century and use photos of people going through disease instead; this feels too modern and destroys the charm made by the pastel colours. Additionally, I don't feel that overlapping imagery would be suitable for the editorial because it is supposed to focus on Nightingale's work rather than an opportunity to improve the design.

My intentions were to use Caslon Egyptian type because it was the first san-serif typeface and it was used in Nightingale's infographic. To keep a sense of history, I have reverted to Bodini.

REFLECTION //

Hyper objects are issues or subjects that the public acknowledges as existing and already knows how it influences their way of living, which is way they are usually presented in pictorial format without the need for context. However, the Copernicus Project reflects on how food can have a negative influence, which touches on the hyper object 'global warming'. But food is newly associated to the environment and I think some of the public are still digesting whether this information is true, therefore, require more knowledge and data on the subject. After all, food is connected to many cultures, lifestyles and beliefs, so this is a very sensitive topic.

I found Felton's obsession with data a bit unsettling due to how in-depth and vast it is. The is a bit of contradiction with the app he developed (reported) because even though it allows you to analyse patterns in your routine, you could be spending the time it takes to record your data to do the things it says you are not doing. I also think having a survey at random times during the day would interrupt my workflow.

I wanted to place emphasis on how nightingale layers the chart, making it difficult to see whether there are any hidden layers or what the total number of deaths are. I want to experiment with tracing paper when I have time.

Typeface choice was an alternative to the Caslon Egyptian type being used in the original chart (costs too much), so I decided to stick to a similar timeline and chose Bodoni; Caslon was the first sans-serif type and unfortunately there were no others during the 1850s.