Dear friends, Alberto here.
Ask any experienced information designer about how they became who they are and it’s likely they’ll mention transformative epiphanies. Many of the conversations in The Art of Insight describe moments of sudden realization which change the soul at a fundamental level: taking an inspirational class, reading a great book, meeting the right person at the right time, and so on.
I’ve had many such moments of profound insight and joy. For instance, when meeting people I had looked up to for years, such as John Grimwade or Nigel Holmes at the Malofiej conference in the mid-2000’s; they’ve been role models and moral exemplars to me to this day. The proverb “never meet your heroes” doesn’t apply universally.
Also, around 2006, at a time when I was studying mapping on my own, the second edition of Terry Slocum’s et al. Thematic Cartography and Geovisualization enriched my understanding of information design. The discovery of this book was a pivotal point in my career, the gateway that took me from traditional news graphics (illustration-based explanations, mostly) to data visualization.
Finally, watching Hans Rosling’s first TED talk, The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen, in 2007 was an exhilarating experience. Rosling delivered it on February of 2006, so this year is its 20th anniversary; perfect opportunity to celebrate it and to honor Rosling who, unfortunately, passed nine years ago.
I remember watching Rosling’s talk in awe. Just a few minutes into his talk, something clicked in my brain; everything I had been reading about data cartography —all the little pieces of a mental puzzle I had been gathering for years— fell into the right place. This is what all this visualization stuff is about, I remember telling myself, this is how you do it —this is how you design data graphics that aren’t just truthful, but also make sense in the minds of caring and attentive readers.
I interviewed Rosling in 2011 for my first book, The Functional Art. I called him from Brazil, where I was living at the time; he was in Sweden. We spoke on the phone for nearly three hours. Rosling was a generous spirit in many ways, including with his time.
I remember asking Rosling about the origins of his presentation style; here’s what he told me, which I transcribed in the book with just minor edits:
I have seen too many academic classes that have been catastrophic from the communicative point of view—the seated lecturer reading a paper or the bullet points of his PowerPoint slides. How boring is that? I have tried to learn from the reactions of my public, from regular people as well as from students and managers of companies.
When I am on the scene, I do not remain quiet. I also use a lot of analogies and metaphors, and borrow voice modulation tricks from sports broadcasters. Notice that when I am describing a chart it seems that I am describing a football game.
Every semester I show Rosling’s first TED talk to my students, and use it as a starting point to discuss how to choose appropriate encodings and charts, how to build accurate and engaging data-driven narratives, how to pair seriousness with humor, and how to deal with the annotation layer. I also refer students to Rosling’s Gapminder foundation to find curated human development data sets and excellent data charts.
Rosling didn’t work alone, but was part of a creative triumvirate with his daughter-in-law, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and his son, Ola Rosling, the designers behind the interactive and animated charts that he showcased in his talks and in Gapminder’s website. Histories of visualization are often sequential accounts of heroes, but heroes are just the most visible individual faces of teams.
It’s hard for me not to notice historical parallels with other teams, such as Otto Neurath, Marie Reidemeister (later Marie Neurath), and Gerd Arntz. Together they created Isotype, which emerged from the utopian ideal of a universal picture language accessible to all humans.
(RJ Andrews has just launched a searchable database of Isotype Institute charts; don’t miss it.)
Like the Roslings, the Neuraths (plus Arntz) dreamed of a world brimming with understanding and knowledge-driven mercy, empathy and solidarity. Regardless of whether we think of dreams as theirs as realistic or, instead, as unachievable or even nonsensical, they are still dreams worth having and, as such, we owe them reverence.
We’re working on many new Open Visualization Academy courses —we’ll release Kae Petrin’s “Critical Data Exploration with Spreadsheets” next week,— and I’m making decent progress with the new book, so I’m in a cautiously bright mood. Paradoxically, the music that accompanies me these days is melancholic and a bit ominous, albeit also energetic; here’s Evergrey’s album Escape of the Phoenix, which has been on repeat for days:
