Information is beautiful

by | Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Anybody who knows me (and/or reads this blog) will know of my love of issues related to representation (see all postings under that category). So I am always looking out for new and interesting representations. An lovely example sent to me by Patrick Dickson is website titled Information is beautiful. This site, and much of the work showcased there is the creation of David McCandless, a free-lance information designer. He describes his interests as being in “how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath.”

For instance check out If Twitter was a community of 100 people
Twitter were 100 people

An example of how just visualizing and representing data can change one’s prior conception of a idea can be found at How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (sort of).

The one that made the best connection to me personally was Caffeine & Calories.

Enjoy.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

The process of design: A quote

The process of design: A quote

I have been a huge fan of Bill Atkinson, creator of MacPaint, one of the key players in developing the GUI for the original Macintosh including coming up with things as the double-click, the menu bar, marquee selection and lots of interface ideas we...

Mobile Technology in Teacher Education

I was recently invited to keynote The First International Conference on Mobile Technology in Teacher Education (MiTE 2015). The conference was organized by the School of Education, National University of Ireland, Galway. Kudos to the organizers (main point of contact...

2001, 40 years after

Musings on local newspaper headlines, 2001 A Space Odyssey, media and creativity, and ending with some thoughts on the meaning of life... a lot to fit into one blog post but again I had the weekend to work on this. I read our local newspaper, the Lansing State Journal...

Google ranking, a self defeating approach

Matt Koehler has an interesting post (Keeping track of the Koehlers) about his attempts to rise in Google's rankings for searches on his last name. In the last few months he seems to have had some success judging that he has moved from page 25 to somewhere in the 3-4...

Celebrating Euler’s birthday

Google has a new doodle out today (the 15th of April) to celebrate the 306th birth anniversary of Leonhard Euler, the Swiss mathematician and physicist. This prompted some reflection on his work (and some mathematical poetry)... At the bottom right of the doodle above...

Unpacking Design & Creativity @ Purdue

The presentation Unpacking Design and creativity: What I think I know, and what I (quite certainly) don't is done, and it went well (I think). You can read the abstract here or view the presentation below Or see it full screen, by clicking here. After the presentation...

Tech as tool, medium & network

I just discovered (through the serendipitous connectibility of Google Alerts) about Teaching Thursdays a blog from the University of North Dakota. It is a collaborative venture between Anne Kelsh (Office of Instructional Development) and Bill Caraher (Department of...

Unconscious competence, continuing the dialogue

Ken Friedman, whose article I had used as the basis of my previous posting, From incompetence to mastery, the stages dropped me an email in response to my critique. To provide some context, (you can read my full post here) I had suggested in my posting that it may be...

Funny TPACK mashups, the Aussie way

TPACK is huge in Australia (for instance see this note TPACK underpins Aussie Teacher Ed Restructuring). I am hopeful that one of these days this interest will translate into a trip down-under... It would be great to travel around the continent, giving talks, meeting...

1 Comment

  1. Bob Reuter

    There’s a very subtle omission in the visual representation… or I’m getting something wrong… Who or what are the grey people?

    Reply

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