Visual.ly Blog

Art Beyond the Map

Rani Molla — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:00:57 +0000

We all know that data, rendered effectively, can be art. Art is usually less empirical, so what it tells you about a person or place can’t always be measured. No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, which ended its run at the Guggenheim this week, attempts to convey information about those regions beyond the sheer numbers of its history.

Vincent Leong Keeping Up With the Abdullahs 1, 2012 Digital chromogenic print in artist's frame, 65 x 99 cm, edition 2/8 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund © Vincent Leong Photo: Kristopher McKay © Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

In the Guggenheim’s first UBS MAP Global Art Initiative exhibition, artists from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam deliver nuanced approaches to their complicated histories and contemporary realities.

Shilpa Gupta’s “1:14.9″ perhaps best illustrates the strange joining of data and art. The work is a hand-wound ball made of 79.55 miles of thread, which represents, in a 1:14.9 ratio, the 1185-mile fenced border between India and Pakistan. It’s an abstracted number wound into something meaningful: a reminder of the families split and borders created after British rule, as well as the continual divisiveness of a line.

Poklong Anading Counter Acts, 2004 (production detail) Chromogenic transparency in light box, 228.6 x 365.8 cm, edition 3/3 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund © Poklong Anading Photo: Courtesy the artist

Having been colonized by both the United States and Spain, as well as tracing ancestry from around the region, The Philippines have a varied population with complicated identities. “Counter Acts,” by Poklong Anading, highlights Filipinos’ search for identity amid varied backgrounds and allegiances by having his subjects obscure their identities with circular mirrors placed in front of their faces. The viewer is less sure than the viewed, making identity severely personal.

Navin Rawanchaikul Places of Rebirth, 2009 Acrylic on canvas, 220 x 720 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund © Navin Rawanchaikul and Navin Production Co. Ltd. Photo: Courtesy the artist

Navin Rawanchaikul investigates Pakistan, the birthplace of the Thai artist’s ancestors, in “Places of Rebirth,” a mural that looks Bollywood-type movie poster. It humorously examines about the politics that made his family leave as well as the historical and present relationship between the Pakistan and Thailand.

Television Commercial For Communism – The Commercial from TPG on Vimeo.

The Propeller Group Television Commercial for Communism, 2011-12 Color video, with sound, 1 min., edition 1/5 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund © The Propeller Group

In a fanciful, yet believable, take on how communism could look, The Propeller Group had an advertising company create a TV commercial to rebrand communism among the remaining five communist nations. It’s an idealic view of a much-maligned governance and certainly a departure from old perceptions.

The entire exhibition, through its very personal and divergent expressions by South and Southeast Asian artists, is a reminder that there is much more to history than its numbers. Data tells a story, but it’s only a vehicle to understanding a more human one. Behind every statistic is a person affected, and every border, a person who has to cross.

The exhibition will show again in Hong Kong this fall.

No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia
Asia Society Hong Kong Center
October 2013-February 2014

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter.

Journalists, Designers, and Clients: Best Practices for Working as a Team

Anni Murray — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:00:04 +0000

Visual.ly has a vibrant, dynamic marketplace full of clients from a staggering variety of industries. As a result, journalists and designers have to be versatile above all else: able to craft a narrative image that perfectly meets the expectations of the clients.

Here is a user’s guide for the Visual.ly journalist or designer – a how-to for successfully navigating the marketplace to deliver excellent client experiences alongside excellent visualizations.

Articulating the Vision

Every project is an exercise in vision actualization. Each client has a vision. Sometimes it is very specific, which makes writing and designing the infographic relatively easy. And sometimes it’s nebulous, based on a slippery concept or set of criteria that are only vaguely defined. In every case, it’s the journalist or designer’s first job to understand the vision. When the vision is clear, understanding involves doing good research: reading the creative brief, researching the company, and asking clarifying questions. When the vision is murky, understanding requires something more.

Use your research to suggest specific ideas that the client can accept or reject. This helps you narrow down the field of expectations, to hone in on something actionable. If the client continues to waffle, it’s okay to explain why it’s important to have clear parameters before launching the outline or design. This protects you, the designer or journalist. Since the Visual.ly process has two revision cycles each for outlines and design, it’s imperative that the first one get you more than halfway towards your goal.

Constant, Clear Communication

Any collaborative project requires clear communication, and Visual.ly projects are no exception. The more articulate you are when describing your intentions, explaining your creative vision, and asking questions, the more likely you are to create something that satisfies the client’s needs. Pay particular attention to grammar and punctuation. This is a professional communication and, since it’s mostly text-based, how you write directly impacts your reputation with the client and in the marketplace (for obvious reasons, this is doubly true for journalists).

Attentiveness

Sometimes clients are prompt. They answer questions right away and post feedback immediately after an outline is uploaded. But sometimes they delay the project for days or even weeks while they find additional data, schedule internal meetings, or just get swamped with other company business. Consistent, periodic, polite “checking in” posts remind the client that you’re still there, ready to proceed (once every few days is sufficient). If you don’t hear anything in a week, alert your project manager.

As frustrating as it can be to wait for a client, it’s never acceptable to make a client wait for you. As a freelancer, your currency is your attentiveness and reliability. Being available is one of the easiest ways to demonstrate your seriousness, and one of the best ways to get hired for future projects. When you are available, your client can’t complain about deadlines. This is another practice that protects you and your reputation. It also increases the likelihood that your client will make your project a priority and that you will meet the deadlines on your timeline.

Define Your Role

In many cases, clients aren’t familiar with how the Visual.ly workflow typically proceeds. They don’t necessarily understand that the journalist’s outline comes first, the design second. They may ask the journalist design questions, or come to the designer with concerns about the copy.

When a journalist is assigned to a project, she is assigned for a reason. Typically the copy is complex, the vision is multifaceted, or extensive research is needed. If you are a journalist, make sure you respond to every copy-related question, regardless of to whom the question is posed. On the flip side, if you’re asked a design question, defer that question to the designer. Hazarding an answer may only confuse the client, adding a layer of obfuscation to an already complicated process.

In order to keep roles carefully defined, you must constantly monitor all project communications. Don’t ignore client messages because they happen to be directed to other members of the team. Read everything and respond promptly whenever it is appropriate to do so. Remember also to respect the people you’re working with. Stepping on toes sparks hard feelings even between the most professional freelancers.

Handling Problems: Offer Multiple Solutions

Since the Visual.ly design process is tightly scheduled, it’s important to handle problems quickly. If the client is unhappy with a paragraph of copy or with a particular graphic, offer two or three alternatives rather than just one. You can use the project center to float ideas before you upload a complete draft. Clients appreciate having options, and are more likely to articulate their preferences when they see multiple possible solutions.

Anni Murray is a writer, editor, multimedia artist, amateur mycologist, and biology student. She is currently working on Prism, a speculative science fiction story cycle. All opinions expressed in this article are her own. Follow her on Twitter.

“Creative” Things Designers Do: Map Edition

Drew Skau — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:00:54 +0000

In the past few weeks, we’ve been running a series on the tweaks that designers do to charts to make them fit the aesthetics of the graphics they are creating. So far, we showed you some of the ways designers get creative with pie charts, bar charts, line charts, and area based encodings.

Maps are not immune to designer’s creative experiments, and they offer some of the most widely varying techniques for adjusting aesthetics. Some of these techniques are just stylizations, and they can result in beautiful maps, but sometimes they severely damage the communication of the map data. Let’s take a look at five of the ways designers tweak maps and dissect if and how they are harming the communication of the data.

Choropleth Maps are in shaky territory. We are so accustomed to seeing them that we know what to expect from them, but they have serious issues with disproportionate area representation. The balance between familiar and ideal is hard to measure here, but it’s probably safe to use them.

Proportional Symbol Maps are a great technique. They solve the problem of some areas being disproportionately large, while still providing a geographical reference. Combined with a bit of collision detection and force direction, they don’t even have occlusion problems. Don’t hesitate to use this technique.

3D Symbol Maps, unlike their 2D counterpart, are often a bad technique. They can have issues with occlusion and problems with perspective distortion. A good question to ask before making one of these is: “If one of these symbols was a single chart, would it be a good idea?”

3D Height Maps are not a good technique. They look extremely dramatic, but they have severe problems with occlusion and disproportionate areas. Never do this to represent data.

Transit Maps can be great for showing transit type stuff, but their format is often misused. They are great for transit lines because they keep relative positions of the stations, but the data for the paths in-between is simplified. The lines still mean there is a connection between the points, though. And the style is often copied for no apparent reason. Randomly adding lines to a map of points doesn’t accomplish anything. If you use these, think about whether the lines actually show anything meaningful.

There are many other types of maps, and they can be a great way to show data. Maps are one of the most common and useful forms of data visualization. They can be both beautiful and powerful, but they need to be used carefully in order to communicate effectively.

(Map regions from wikimedia commons.)

Drew Skau is Visualization Architect at Visual.ly and a PhD Computer Science Visualization student at UNCC with an undergraduate degree in Architecture. You can follow him on twitter @SeeingStructure

Data Visualization for Tablets and Touch Screens

Nick Diakopoulos — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:00:51 +0000

At the end of 2012, comScore estimated there were 52.4 million tablet owners in the U.S.; Apple sold another 19.5 million iPads in the first three months of 2013 alone. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some companies, such as Roambi, Tableau, and Bloomberg are starting to offer mobile, touch-aware data visualization apps.

But dropping your desktop user interface onto a tablet doesn’t really take the best advantage of all of those touches and gestures now, does it?

Consider Bloomberg’s iPad app. By most standards, it’s a superbly designed interface for browsing and visualizing stock information:

But, for instance, adding and removing comparative measures to graphs still requires pecking through menus, with a finger that sometimes feels just a little too obese for the job. With the exception of zooming in / out on a graph with a pinch, the app largely misses a chance to rethink the entire experience in the presence of things like accelerometers, multi-touch, and gestures.

It’s a worthwhile challenge: How can we design more natural tablet-native interactions and metaphors for data visualizations?

Thankfully there’s been more and more research oriented toward figuring out how to do data visualization on tablets and touch surfaces in a way that acknowledges the challenges, but also takes advantage of these devices’ unique interaction affordances.

One project at Carnegie Mellon is exploring how physical models can enable the exploration of multivariate data using multi-touch. In the video below, researcher Jeff Rzeszotarski shows off the prototype on an iPad.

He introduces tools like the razor, attractor and lens, which allow the user to filter and arrange points in a scatter plot in different ways. The razor tool is particularly interesting: As you run it across the data (using two fingers to define the end points of it, and then swiping it across), it separates some points out of a scatter plot depending on its filter parameters. Shaking the iPad makes sure all the points have been passed through the sieve. Other interactions are even more physically grounded, such as tilting the display to sort points by “gravity”, and “throwing” points by swiping the razor quickly across the data. Though I haven’t tried the prototype myself, these interactions do seem like they would make the user feel “closer” or more connected to the data — interacting with it more directly. Exploratory visualization could benefit a lot from this. Check out the video of the demonstration below. (And even more detail is available in a recently published abstract.)

Another example comes to us from Microsoft Research, where researcher Steven Drucker and colleagues built a tablet and gesture-enabled visualization interface called FLUID and compared it to a more traditional desktop WIMP interface running on a tablet. They designed the interface for interacting with our familiar friend, the bar chart.

In their CHI paper the authors write, “Our goal is to understand whether, and how, the fluid touch-based gesture interaction offers subjective or performance advantages over the current WIMP approach to data exploration on touch surfaces.”

First they developed a set of semantic actions, things you might want to do to data, such as choosing categories to be represented, filtering irrelevant data, or ordering and navigating. Then they mapped these operations to gestures that they group-brainstormed. For instance, flicking down on a bar in a bar chart filters it out and ordering a set of bars is achieved by swiping in either direction along the axis. (For more design inspiration on gestures for data visualization, see Dominukus Baur’s video on TouchWave).

The comparison of FLUID to the WIMP interface showed that it was more accurate and faster for the given tasks, and that most users (13 of 17) thought it was subjectively easier to use and learn. Almost all users in the study commented that the interface would be helpful when presenting data, since the gestures would be apparent to an audience. One of the drawbacks to the FLUID interface was that not all of the options were always visible or available on screen, and so it couldn’t leverage the common “recognition over recall” UI design principle. Ultimately though, having some functionality tucked away in menus will still be necessary, since not all operations can be encoded into distinct gestures and some amount of interface chrome will still be needed.

There are plenty of open design questions to work out for touchable data visualization: How to make intuitive gestures that are easy to discover and remember, whether touch may have advantages in data storytelling interfaces, and how to blend gestures into more traditional UI designs, among others. And deep research questions are also waiting to be resolved. Petra Isenberg, a researcher at INRIA in France, published a paper on data visualization on interactive surfaces that stipulates some key questions: “[We] don’t fully understand how touching virtual data affects comprehension or memorability of information,” she writes.

So whether you’re a practitioner or a researcher, there is a lot to work on here. Not only will tablet usage continue to grow, but other opportunities for museum installations, kiosks, and large-format presentation systems offer plenty of use-contexts to explore data visualization that takes advantage of the full interaction bandwidth afforded by these new displays and devices.

Nick Diakopoulos is a NYC-based consultant specializing in the research, design, and development of computational media applications. His expertise spans data visualization, social media analytics, and interaction design. Follow him on Twitter.

The Art of Data Visualization

Drew Skau — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:54:56 +0000

PBS digital studios recently released a short video on data visualization. It does a great job of explaining what visualization is, and touches on the origins of our capacity to process visual information. It goes on to examine data visualization’s position in our modern culture, and muses about the future role of visualizing data in our society.

Some of the industry’s most respected scholars are interviewed and offer us valuable and insightful knowledge. Edward Tufte, for example, talks about the history of visualization, and what it has meant in the past:

“The history of visualizing data is very substantially a history of science.” -Edward Tufte

Julie Steele talks about what issues are involved in creating data visualizations, and some of why visual information is so easily processed by humans:

“We had to recognize those patterns right away and make snap decisions on them, in order to survive.” -Julie Steele

Josh Smith covers addresses the process of creating successful infographics. He emphasizes the importance of telling the story that is in the data, and spending time with the data to find that story:

“When you look at a piece, it’s successful when it translates data from something complicated to something simple.” -Josh Smith

Jer Thorp talks about how the scale of data is expanding far beyond anything that people are capable of comprehending. His passion lies in finding nuggets of useful information that can be aggregated into comprehension:

“There’s another purpose of data visualization. There’s revelation — which is — show us something that we’ve never seen before.” -Jer Thorp

The video showcases some beautiful graphics, and is definitely worth your time.

Drew Skau is Visualization Architect at Visual.ly and a PhD Computer Science Visualization student at UNCC with an undergraduate degree in Architecture. You can follow him on twitter @SeeingStructure

Visually Marketplace Designer Spotlight: ChartGirl

Visually — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:00:57 +0000

Visually’s Marketplace connects thousands of designers with clients seeking to commission infographics and data visualizations. Every week, we feature a member of our designer community here, on the blog. If you are interested in participating, please contact us at blog[at]visual.ly.

Name: Hilary Sargent
Age: Old enough to have not had email in high school.
On Visually: Chartgirl
Investigative Experience: 10 years

1. Tell us a bit about yourself: how did you get into design, and how long have you been doing it?
I think calling myself a ‘designer’ is a bit of a stretch. (Designers nod in unison.) I do ‘design’ my charts, but my background is really in investigating things. I’ve done everything from newspaper reporting and competitive intelligence to political opposition research, private investigations and litigation support. My website — CHARTGIRL.COM — was really born out of a need to understand and explain complicated things I was investigating.

2. In 7 words or less, describe your style.
I guess I hope my charts are: smart, helpful, funny, thought-provoking, interesting and timely.

3. If you could take a seminar with one designer or artist, dead or living, who would that be? Why?
Mark Lombardi. Hands down, no question. I did do Ed Tufte’s seminar a month or so ago and found it fascinating, but my dream would be to bring Mark Lombardi back to life and ask him a million questions. (Lombardi was an artist and researcher who made diagrams of political corruption scandals and the like.)

4. What’s your favorite color? Why?
I don’t have a favorite color. I like stripes.

5. What is the biggest mistake you’ve made in your work and what did you learn from it?
Spending almost four years working at an incredibly depressing place. Steer clear of law firms and other places where people lack a sense of humor and an imagination, or both.

6. What about your biggest achievement? Tell us about the project you are most proud of in your career so far.
I guess having ChartGirl making TIME’s 50 Best Websites of 2013 would be the highlight.

7. Who should we feature in this space next?
Sam Bradd.

The Future of Museums in an Online World

Rani Molla — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:00:18 +0000

With the likes of Google Art Project and the cooperation of museums worldwide, entire art collections are headed online to be perused in ways that are more comfortable, more accessible and sometimes more interesting than they can be in real life. These programs pose a severe warning to traditional museums to become more relevant. People now can view world’s art from home, so museums can no longer simply rest on their laurels. Like print, movies and other media, museums have to make a good case for why one should care to see their exhibitions instead of the digital alternatives.

After the Museum: The Home Front 2013, an exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design, raises many questions about the future of the museum industrial complex, but stops short of declaring definite solutions.

“Permanent Loan” by Project Projects displays famous artworks that have been replicated as black-and-white reproductions or as 3-D printed objects. This exercise suggests the democratization of once singular objects wherein famous pieces aren’t bound to the museums in which the originals reside. Similarly, Keetra Dean Dixon and JK Keller’s “Museum As Manufacturer,” a tiny mass production line that would recreate art objects, wonders about a time in which authenticity is no longer necessary.

“On Display,” by Superscript, HAO and Neil Donnelly, is an evolving presentation of people’s comments on architecture and design. It questions how far the interactivity between artist and viewer will go. “Cavity” had Charlie O’Geen carve a hole into the museum’s wall, exploring the museum’s history but, more importantly, meditating on the museum space itself. Does the wall make the museum? How does that space contribute to one’s viewing of art?

Snarkitecture’s “Bend,” winding foam and vinyl furniture on which one is actually allowed to sit, suggests that museums of the future will be a lot less stuffy. (The title wall for the whole show encourages photography, which most museum guards don’t usually meet with approval.)

After the Museum raises the above issues because they’ll likely be a part of the conversation about the future of museums. The challenge is to present artwork in ways that makes museumgoers go to the museum and not just stay home.

Heretofore, many efforts by museums to become more like interactive playplaces has seemed like an afterthought, too little too late. In the future, museum curators will need to make their exhibitions as fun and interesting as a BuzzFeed list — and ultimately (hopefully), more rewarding. They will need seamless mobile interactivity and compelling multimedia that is considered during the development of the exhibition, not after. They will also need to focus on the museum as an experience — one that can’t be duplicated with jpegs.

Fortunately for museums they have a number of things the internet lacks: centralized governance, institutional backing (read: money), the bona fide art itself, and many smart people who know everything about it. They also have physical space in which the art can be explored, in its true scale and unpixelated glory. It’s time to capitalize on what can’t be found elsewhere.

After the Museum: The Home Front 2013
Museum of Art and Design
Through June 9

Photos by Rani Molla.

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter.

5 Useful How-To Infographics: Turn Your Hobby into a Business, Learn to Focus and More

Anni Murray — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:52:25 +0000

Learning how to do things used to mean pouring over instruction manuals and textbooks, many of them lengthy treatises with confusing diagrams and boring text blocks. These how-to documents are notorious for stopping the casual hobbyist, dabbler, or total novice in her tracks. Like with other types of infographics, the name of the game for a how-to is accessibility. When a complex task is clearly laid out, explained and illustrated, even the inexperienced feel like anything’s possible. Here are some helpful, hilarious, and unexpected how-to infographics.

How to Focus

In the digital age, distractions abound. A workday is spent fielding communications from every direction: text messages, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, Skype video chats, and emails. It’s a wonder anything gets done, ever. But it does. Human beings are adaptable creatures. Still, the endless data stream gets the best of almost everyone now and then. Some seek medication to help hone focus. Others turn to self-help books on meditation or breath awareness. The “How to Focus Mind Map” (below) suggests drug-free habits and rituals for managing an overwhelming life of distraction.

How to Focus infographic

How To Turn Your Hobby Into a Business

Millions of people spend their days daydreaming. They imagine time spent farming, making model airplanes, skydiving, or traveling. For many of these unfulfilled workers, a career doing what they love is possible, with some focused hard work. The infographic below suggests 10 steps for researching, preparing, and launching a viable business. Forbes estimates the total number of U.S. entrepreneurs at 11.5 million. Why not make it 11.5 million and one?

How to turn your hobby into a business infographic by CarlaJuniper.

How to Build a Chicken Coop

The market for locally-grown, free-range, antibiotic-free, organic food is booming. Not only that, but many people are deciding to take healthy nutrition into their own hands, feeding their families the old-fashioned way: with gardens and animals. This trend isn’t just a phenomenon of the rural countryside with its open space and fertile soil, it’s happening in many densely populated urban areas too.

When it comes to animals, chickens are particularly popular. They’re small, cheap to feed and don’t require much in the way of space. But those interested in raising them face an engineering hurdle: building a coop in their backyard. The handy infographic below illustrates an easy $300, 3-4 day coop-building project from start to finish. It’s clearly laid out and illustrated, and short enough to keep nervous first-timers interested.

How to Build A Chicken Coop infographic by TimothySanders.

How to Spot a Hidden Handgun

In the movies, the bad guys are always carrying guns. In real life, there are increasing numbers of law-abiding, licensed gun owners with permits to carry. Identifying a gun carrier when you see one might help you avoid trouble, make you feel safer… or prompt you to get as far from the gun owner as possible. In any event, here’s an infographic that teaches you how to spot a hidden gun.

How to Spot a Hidden Handgun infographic

How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse

From Night of the Living Dead to The Walking Dead, zombies have been thrilling and terrifying the movie going and television watching public for decades. There’s something about that undead craving for brains that just makes for compelling entertainment. It’s the age-old struggle for survival; for protecting that precious thing the undead lose: their humanity. Just for the fun of it, imagine zombies are real. A viral outbreak brings on World War Z and you’re holed up in a second floor apartment with a baseball bat. What do you do? Where do you go? Here are some essential tips for the zombie apocalypse. Don’t forget the duct tape.

How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse infographic

Anni Murray is a writer, editor, multimedia artist, amateur mycologist, and biology student. She is currently working on Prism, a speculative science fiction story cycle. All opinions expressed in this article are her own. Follow her on Twitter.

5 Art and Design Themes that Aren’t Going Away

Rani Molla — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:00:10 +0000

The New Museum‘s second biennial Ideas City Streetfest inundated New York City’s Bowery area with educational booths, innovative ideas and community projects. It was part of a four-day exploration of the future of cities and this year’s theme, “untapped capital.” But really, it recycled a lot of old ideas — good ones. Many revolved around similar themes — space, environmentalism, mobility, community and price accessibility (free) — and these same issues will likely remain the center of our public meditations on the future. See how they were addressed at the Ideas City Streetfest below.

Rethinking Space

As residents of New York City (and many other large, densely-populated cities) are acutely aware, space is a luxury continually diminishing in quantity and increasing in price. These constraints require revisiting how we define and create space. Pop-up shops, mobile exhibits and, in fact, the Streetfest as a whole, were a temporary way to take back space from bustling lower Manhattan. Just as moving from the suburbs to the city requires a change in one’s conception of personal space, new building will also require a change in how we delineate space in the first place. Storefront for Art and Architecture commissioned the Spacebuster — a box truck that emits a giant inhabitable bubble out of its back doors — as a location for discussions and presentations throughout the day. It was big, bright and temporary way to create space.

Green Art

Like architects and builders, artists and designers can no longer ignore the environmental repercussions of their work. Terraform One addressed waste by reporposing the Styrofoam used in just one hour in NYC into a community art project. Festivalgoers made art on unlikely surfaces (faces, for example) and out of old clothing. A number of exhbitions also took this as a way to reintroduce greenery back into urban lives. Plant-In City demonstrated how terrariums could be both aesthetic appealing and environmentally useful—not to mention compact enough to fit in a tiny apartment.

Mobility

Many of the ideas at the Streetfest were literally carried by vehicles. Art Cart NYC showcased artist Hellbent’s Mix Tape series as a way to widen the ways in which people consider exhibiting and viewing art. Bus Roots toted plants around on a van’s green roof, using them as a means of artistic and environmental communication. Even foodtrucks were out in full force. The point is agility: the ability to go where there is need instead of expecting those in need to find you. Mobile units can also be a lot cheaper than their stationary counterparts.

Community

Many of the projects required working together in order to come up with community art, ideas and solutions. Alexander Gorlin Architects with Community Solutions showcased how they wanted to revitalize the Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn by adding mixed use attachments to prexisting buildings in order to create storefronts and community spaces and, by extension, a more inviting community. For them, community means a better quality of life. OpenUrban.com solicited people to add to its worldwide urban development wiki, so that users could better understand how their areas are being developed, and act accordingly.

Price accessibility (free)

The real point of “free” is that the lack of a price barrier makes things inherently more inclusive than their paid counterparts. In honor of the event, small little libraries were placed around the area, where people were encouraged to “Take a book, return a book.” Ad company Sub Rosa set up a sustainable, collaborate play space in which festivalgoers were allowed to design play structures, free of charge and free of rules. Numerous exhibitors set up art and design projects in which passersby could partake. They were free, but worth a lot more.

Photos by Rani Molla.

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter.

Medical Information Literacy: Pamphlets or Infographics, What Works Best?

Anni Murray — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:00:56 +0000

Medical pamphlets or posters have been doctor’s office mainstays for many decades. They promote healthy habits, like good nutrition or exercise; explain the risks of unhealthy habits, like smoking or drinking alcohol to excess; and educate about specific medical conditions, like high cholesterol or diabetes. Most include a call to action (write to this address, call this number, or visit this website for more information); all are intended to help the public understand important scientific data.

In recent years, medical infographics have taken up the mantle, delivering similar sorts of information online to a worldwide audience. (While the traditional poster is certainly an example of an infographic, here we’ll distinguish between those you see on the screen and those you find in analog form in a doctor’s office.) So, is the new way (online infographics) better than the old (pamphlets and posters)? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each? Going forward, how might the medical community best educate the public about medical issues?

Information Density

There is probably some ratio out there for the optimum number of words per image for a pamphlet and an infographic, respectively. It does seem logical that a pamphlet can get away with more text than a single-page image. Readers expect to flip through a pamphlet, digesting each page separately. They don’t feel overwhelmed by the total word count because they encounter the words in small packets, bit by bit. This affords the author some freedom to get wordier – to include extra reference information that might otherwise go unread. And then there’s the venue to consider: even if they’re otherwise busy from sun-up to sundown, in a doctor’s waiting room most patients have a few minutes to sit and read.

Below are a few pages from a pamphlet created for pregnant women in Nigeria. This is a good example of the wordiness typical of this medium. There is a lot of actionable information included in a relatively small amount of space. (Click on the image to view a larger version).

Source: Spring Nutrition

And here is an infographic on nutrition in pregnancy. It’s undoubtedly flashier, but still contains important information and is in a form viewers can easily share online. It lacks minute detail, but provides an overview of the most important elements to be acted upon. For example: unless you’re eating 22 tins of tuna every day, you should probably be taking an iodine supplement during pregnancy. Ask your doctor for advice.

Interesting Facts on Pregnancy Nutrition infographic

Attractiveness: Making Medical Information Palatable

Pamphlets and infographics can both be done well, or done poorly. Both provide an opportunity for graphic flair – that artful balance of text and image – so design is clearly important in both mediums. But it’s the infographic that benefits most from clever, decisive, crisp graphics. When your goal is to catch the attention of an Internet user – that busy, distractable multitasker – aesthetics are often just as important as content.

But beautiful graphics do more than hold interest and encourage sharing online. They can also help to make a difficult subject matter a little bit less daunting. For example, the infographic below “Cancer Anyone?” provides a scientific explanation of the disease, something any cancer patient should understand, without too much doom and gloom. It’s simple, attractive, easy to read, and ends on a hopeful note about prevention. Compare this with the lengthy 12-page pamphlet on cancer from the American Institute for Cancer Research. This pamphlet is packed with information but it’s visually lackluster. Without some pizazz, all that heavy text could easily overwhelm a preoccupied patient.

Cancer, Anyone? infographic by dn23.

Legitimacy: Taking Information Seriously

The doctor’s office pamphlet or poster may have a leg-up on infographics in this category. When it comes to medical information, where you read is just as important as what you’re reading. A doctor’s office carries a palpable gravitas while the Internet is notorious for bad information. So, pamphlets and posters can afford to be less clinical, though they don’t often capitalize on this fact. When they do, they pack a powerful punch: less clinical means more accessible, and accessibility is the name of the game in medical information literacy. Here is an example of a light, readable pamphlet on headaches with casual visuals. (Click on the image to view a larger version).

But medical infographics can compensate with good design, excellent writing, and a comprehensive source list. A logo stamp from a recognizable hospital or research institution doesn’t hurt either. The infographic below on headaches is from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. It’s well laid-out, informative, and full of information. This is an example of an effective infographic with medical legitimacy that doesn’t skimp on words.

Headache: Everything you Need to Know infographic by MountSinaiNYC.

Accessibility: Sharing Online

Patients are encouraged to take pamphlets home and use them as reference, but keeping track of loose papers isn’t everyone’s forté. Online infographics, on the other hand, are available anytime, and circulate widely among connected friends and acquaintances.

But this all raises a much larger issue, namely: how do people learn best?

Perhaps it is more useful to look at the larger issue of medical information literacy. There is clearly a need for the hand-held reference, and for the widely shared, informative infographic. Infographics aren’t going to replace the doctor’s office literature any time soon, and they shouldn’t. These two mediums, along with many others, contribute to a culture of medical information sharing.

Anni Murray is a writer, editor, multimedia artist, amateur mycologist, and biology student. She is currently working on Prism, a speculative science fiction story cycle. All opinions expressed in this article are her own. Follow her on Twitter.