Today I woke up at 5.30 and went to see the cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin. That was my thinking: “It’s good to go so early, because a) the sunrise will be beautiful and b) there will be very little people”. My thinking was wrong. The people were many and the sunrise …not worth mentioning.
The cherry blossom is a big deal in DC (there’s a whole festival around it), and that it IS such a big deal is interesting. Nobody would organize a festival for one single tree. And nobody would organize such a festival for so many trees if there were so many trees in every single city. But the exclusiveness of such a mass of trees makes it newsworthy festivalworthy.
I’m wildly fascinated by that also because US-Americans seem to like A LOT of something. The food servings here are huge. The candy packages are big. I have the (not well though through) theory that US-Americans get less bored by having “the same in one row”. The same food on their plate. The same candy. The same kind of cherry blossoms for the whole walk.
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Input? 3
Output? 1
Learnings?
Data Vis and information design can make you feel empowered. Data Vis breaks down the information to one quick visual experience, that promises to be accessible, easily understandable and to make sense. As a reader you don’t even need to read the information in the graphic. Just knowing that it’s out there makes you feel empowered and smarter already.
Self tracking (aka collecting data about your life and presenting it in a visual form like a map) lets you see your life in such an objectified and abstract way that it actually makes room for your imagination instead of being more “true”. The data certainly IS true, but useless without the imagination which is evoked in the observer of the data.
(These ideas come from a conversation with Raphaël, thanks!)
Questions?
Is the “empowerment feature” of data vis a good or a bad thing? When is it good, when bad? For who?
I sometimes come to a point in the data vis process where I’m stuck because a) I don’t understand the data or b) I don’t know how to represent it best or c) I don’t understand what’s most important for the story to communicate. Which set of questions could I build to get me out of the stuck-ness?