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SXSW Final day – Interactive Infographics

I got a little behind on my blog notes in the whirlwind of the last two days at SXSW and so this post is a bit of a catchup from the last few talks. A lot of the talks I attended in the last sessions were quite visual, and so rather than long notes I’ve tried to find links or videos where possible to illustrate some of what was covered.

Interactive Infographics.

This panel gave examples from some leading agencies producing infographics. Infographics involve the presentation of complex data in smart and beautiful ways.

The main concept I took from the panel was that effective visualisation is not about trying to tell a story around the data. It’s about allowing the data to tell it’s story.

Casey Capalowe of GOOD did a great talk running us through some of the fantastic data visualisations on the site. There’s a nice example above of some infographics produced for the Haiti relief effort, but the site is well worth a visit for full enjoyment.

Ben Fry used a great example to illustrate how effectively mapped data can really tell a story. The graphic above illustrated how water consumption trends were shaped during the Canadian olympic hockey final. Not the most beautiful, but certainly one of the most interesting examples of data telling it’s own story. There’s more here.

Ben also showed us this great example of how infographics can clearly illustrate a complex set of data when displayed correctly. The example above shows the entire growth of Darwin’s Origin of the Species from 150,000 words to 190,000. Using clear colour coding and some clever rendering, you can see establish in a few seconds where the revisions came in and in what order.

Next up was Shan Carter, part of the New York Times infographics department. They’ve done some fantastic work, but in particular I enjoyed the geo-mapping they’d done on the archived Twitter conversations during the recent superbowl. This tells a clear story of the game by displaying trends and themes and applying a weighting to volume of conversation. Again, this works best in it’s interactive guise, so head over to the site and click play.

Last on the panel was Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen who had about fifty things I’d like to put in to this blog! One really interesting example was some of the experiments they’d been doing mapping real time twitter trends using imagery to denote popularity. This gives an excellent insight in to chatter and seems a much more engaging way of displaying the data than some of the other tag cloud/wordle based systems I’ve seen on other sites. As well as the example above I highly recommend check out their site and blog for more.

SXSW Day 4 – Evan Williams Keynote

Luckily today I made it in to the Evan Williams keynote – I say lucky, because the queue was long and there was a LOT of people!!

Evan is one of the co-founders of Twitter.

Disclaimer: these notes were made in real time and published as the talk finished so apologies for any typos or brevity.

@anywhere

Evan started by announcing a new app platform for integrating Twitter in to websites called ‘at anywhere’. The platform enables sites to integrate the platform in a number of ways.

These were the main headline benefits that were covered:

• The app can be customised by sites adopting it to match their intended use.
• Allows user to Tweet from the embedded site itself
• Follow a user straight through the site without users needing to jump back to Twitter – improved discovery costs.
• For site owners it enables them to leverage more followers.
• Should enrich the experience allowing users to build a community around their sites more easily.

Evan described the app as aiming to ‘reduce friction’ in terms of integrating the Twitter experience more richly away from Twitter.com

You can read more here

‘Experimentation creates value’.

The process of building a business is all about experimentation. It was recommended that finding where you’re going wrong through experimentation was one of the keys to building a rapidly growing business.

Twitter aim to create the best experience for users and businesses, they wanted to create a market, then figure out who to get a commercial benefit later.

Evan’s main involvement on a day to day basis is experience and strategy. He focuses on how he can build culture internally. How can the company scale? He aims for an internal parallel between the service (openness and transparency) and the company. They’re trying to grow with this methodology through ‘autonomous teams’ who are able to develop and follow a specific service benefit without needing to think of Twitter as a single entity. There is no one monolithic team or code base – that isn’t scaleable.

‘Openness’

‘A window is transparent a door is open. Window allows users to ’see in’, but a door allows people to experiment and play.’ Evan used this sentence to illustrate their attitude to openness.

It was discussed wether openness gives away the ‘golden goose’ and can infact devalue a business. Twitter creates value by maximising the value in the eco-system and not necessarily in the ‘business’. The focus is on ‘How do we increase the value of the network? How do we give more value to users?’ not necessarily on ‘how do we build the value of Twitter’.

Businesses can be built around Twitter.

The third party developers using the Twitter API and building for Twitter create value for users and through proxy, for Twitter. Companies like Co-Tweet and Hoot Suite have improved the interface for a sub-audience within Twitter that Twitter couldn’t have reached with their all encompassing interface.

WIthin the eco-system Twitter has created there are opportunities for third party developers. Twitter need to balance managing the open-ness with managing the eco-system to keep it useful. This means they need to protect the main user base against things like spam projects built using the APi. The ecosystem needs ’shepherding’.

Open value – building a network which reaches the weakest signals.

It was discussed how Twitter are aiming to bring a positive social benefit. An example was provided from a Chilean citizen who had emailed Twitter after the earthquakes thanking them for connecting them in a way that could aid rescue and help reestablish real world connections. Twitter is aiming to reach and connect users who can humanly get value and benefit from the service in countries like Haiti, India, China and Iran.

How does Twitter define a ‘user’

There are many dormant accounts on Twitter. Evan considers anyone who gets value from the eco-system as a user. This isn’t about Tweeting, or even signing up, it’s about wether value can be found in the data pool of those active users who broadcast from the space.

The cookies are out of the Oven.

Evan mentioned that one of the principles of Twitter was to create an information network with meaningful outcomes. This may be something as simple as a tweet service which lets a business and customers know that cookies are ready, or something as powerful as Tweeting within countries where there are firewalls or barriers to information (China etc).

All in all an interesting keynote and a nice insight in to Twitter and its culture.

SXSW Day three – Valerie Casey Keynote

Yesterday I attended my first SXSW keynote, a talk by Valeire Casey of the Designers accord.

The Designers Accord is a movement around 2.5 yrs old which was started by Valerie. Valerie is an interaction designer of 15 years. She began the talk by discussing the importance of narrative in design. By looking at design narratives she expanded upon how all stories can be told simply in this way.

The beginning of the talk opened with a series of images. Valerie illustrated a number of distressing issues that have been communicated recently online.

This image illustrates the environmental toxins man has introduced in to eco systems. The photos of baby birds who’ve died through their parents feeding them plastics which were mistaken for food were taken by Chris Jordan.

The next graphic illustrated how political corruption can be communicated with the ‘why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?’ infographic. In the US, the agricultural industry funds 70% of the total pharmaceuticals market which all go in to animals. Because of the imbalance in the federal funding shown in the graphic there arises a  bizarre corruption in between health and politics which is clearly communicated in this design.

The next image was of the recently reported ‘burn pits’ in Iraq. This are pits which are setup by contractors such as Halliburton, The pits burn 24/7 and serve as garbage and disposal pits for workers. The pits burn human waste, animals, clothing and even vehicles and weapons which need to be disposed. As a consequence of the pits, its has been suggested that soldiers are now much more likely to die from the impact of being near the toxic pits, than the direct impacts of war.

Before and after shot taken from Google images

Finally, Valerie covered the disaster in Haiti and mentioned how there’s emerging evidence that natural disasters could often be man made and linked to climate change. Recent studies hypothesise that he polar ice cap ice keeps a constant pressure on the surface of the earths crust. As the ice melts the plates ease and start to move. This is providing evidence of the ‘human effect’ in both tsunamis and earthquakes.

So, all this doom and gloom may seem like the above message – ’save the planet, kill yourself’ is a reasonable response.  Valerie contended that it wasn’t and that interaction design can offer solutions.

Designers accord was started with a philosophy that by uniting the creative community designers could look at sustainability and the planet in a completely different way. The Designers Accord premise is comparable to a Kyoto Protocol for design.

One of it’s aims is for members to acknowledge a personal accountability in their jobs – this involves educating clients and employees, but also sharing stories not just about successes, but about failures and compromises. The Designers Accord organises meetups at locations across the globe so that interaction designers can come together to talk and ask questions of one another.

Additionally they produce toolkits for young designers to raise awareness of sustainable issues. The ‘School by design‘ pairs designers up so sustainability can be thought about more openly. There are many schools, corporations, and 6 continents all tackling sustainability together through the scheme.

Sustainability

Valerie then focused in depth on her views on sustainability. She covered how the media talks about sustainability very much from the ‘green’ angle. Magazines often feature ‘Eco-warriors’ or produce a ‘green issue’ – this is a bizzare narrative to talk about sustainability and doesn’t ‘mean’ anything tangible. Significantly, Valerie argued that material choice or recyclability completely misses the point of what sustainability should be about.

‘Systems thinking to solve problems’

Valerie then covered 7 key points of ’systems thinking’. This is the idea that any environment has two fixed points, whenever you move or affect one end, there’s reverberation through the system. Everything we do or don’t do has sustainability implications.

7 points:

1. A system is more than the sum of it’s parts:

Looking at the Hippo roller project, we looked at how product design can change a system. The Hippo Roller allows 200lbs of water to be rolled at an effective weight of just 20lbs. This allows more water to be carried in areas where previously buckets were utilised – freeing up time for communities to work and develop other projects, decreasing the risk of travelling and reducing the strain on collection for those making the journey.

However, as a single solution, this project still had problems.  For every 75 that came off the production line 125 were made – there’s was a quality problem. Shipping was also extremely expensive (because of their size). As such, a company called D2M redesigned it. They changed the product transportation in to 2 parts so they could be nested. This meant that for every one unit that was previously sent, three could now be fitted in to the same space. Additionally recycled plastic wasn’t robust enough for the product and as such was an ‘eco backlash’ from a few people who became so hung up on the products ‘green credentials’ they were in danger of missing the benefit. Valerie illustrated how within the system the point of the project was worth more than the sum of its parts.

2. Feedback Delays + Bounded rationality = design traps.

This idea is that a system takes a while to gain leverage. Bounded rationality is the idea that you can only make decisions on the information you have available to you. When these things come together they create a design trap – the results is that designers focus on the symptom, but miss the problem. Valerie illustrated how the Dell compact desktop meets all the ‘requirements’ of a sustainable project, but it misses the point that we shouldn’t be making more desktops in the first place. Sometimes when thinking about sustainability, legalism means we design by a checklist and trick ourselves in to thinking that less bad, is good. It isn’t!

3. There is no such thing as side effect:

In this fascinating example, we looked at a study called ‘global taco shed‘. In this project, the participants bought a single taco from a street vendor. Each person was then responsilbe for tracing an ingredient. It was found that 1 taco = 64,000 miles (roughly 2.5 times round the earth). At this point I was thinking ‘that’s shocking, and must be bad’.

Valerie explained that lots of people believe that ‘local’ is always better – there is a general agreement that food miles are bad. In this study however, they went a step further than just looking at the miles and analysed the embodied energy in each ingredient. This gave a measure to compare the embodied energy in tomatoes grown in a greenhouse locally, with those which were much higher but had been grown naturally farther away in other countries. The outcome gave another measure of system benefit and provided an alternative way of viewing the Taco. Another example given of mis-concenieved sustainability was the foil that had been used to package the Taco had been flown from new Zealand. On the surface this sounds bad, but the aluminum alloy used in the foil turned out to be indefinitely recyclable – a clear benefit over local products which may not have been reuseable. This example clearly illustrated that the new system took apart the theory that local was always good.

4. Creating the right measurements of success:

In this example, we looked at how we often use the wrong measure of ’success’. In the US, the most common measure is the effect on the GNP. It is assumed that if the GNP increases, the effect was good. However, this measure has nothing to do with health, well being or relationships and as such is a corporate measurement, but not necessarily a good one. An example illustrated that if there are more car crashes there are more medical bills, another car needs to be built and economic prosperity goes up. However, you’d struggle to find someone who could argue that a car crash is ever a good thing!

Designers can help challenge the way that we measure success. A project that was mentioned in India looks at ecological performance standards for the built environment – essentially, when a house is built, rather than seeking to use expensive ‘green’ products, they instead use a measurement which takes in to account the initial impact of the land they’re building on. By measuring in this way, land can be assessed in terms of filtration, soil erosion and establishing the ecological benefit of the land. When building, the measurement is to then build something which performs identically, so the land benefit is completely replaced. In this measurement rather than building something ‘less bad’, they can create a building which performs identically so there is no loss to the environment. This illustration emphasised that ‘less bad’ is a very short term approach to sustainability.

5. Selecting the correct lever for change:

This example focused on how often, designers can tend to identify the wrong thing to change when they’re trying to change something. Valerie illustrated this through an example from Romania in the 60’s. The government had realised that the birth rate was dropping significantly and wanted to remedy this. They decided to make contraception and abortions illegal for under 40s and figured this would sort things. Initially, there was a burst and increase in births, however it then leveled out. As a by-product of the new law the mortality rate of mothers had spiked – people were seeking illegal abortions behind closed doors. Similarly, loads of kids ended up in orphanages through unwanted births – another unforeseen, but significant impact. Clearly, selecting the incorrect lever for change had had an awful impact.

The example offered as having selected the correct lever for change was Naked Pizza. Naked Pizza are a small 500 sqft pizza outfit. Their mission is simple, they are attempting to make the worlds healthiest pizza. However, they also are restricting themselves to make it affordable, pitched at an identical price point to other competiors. Unlike expensive organic alternatives, their mission is framed with the correct lever for change – they have recognized that to reach the masses it must be affordable. By making it affordable, they can then invent the recipe and scale it – kind of a trojan horse in to the mass food industry. In this way they practically educate people about the benefits of nutritional health. Instead of being a whole foods activist which is prohibitively expensive, this idea is all about making people talk.  It’s more sustainability rich as there is a dialogue.  It’s not about recycling- in fact, adding loads of green rules would’ve put the price up so much it wouldn’t have achieved anything!

6. Enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between knowledge and behavior:

Valerie explained that for real change to occur, it’s not good enough just to have knowledge, but the behaviors in systems must change also. The analogy that was used was that with Obama, there was a huge wave of optimism upon his election, which has now disaptated. The changed he promised is unachievable in its fullest unless the governmental system itself, of which he is a part, also changes.

7. Finally we looked at the attention cycle and how the ‘degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive action’:

This is the phenomenon that when the public starts to get great attention or passion around a specific issue, the degree of productive action is inversely correlated at a certain point. Essentially, so many people get excited, but nothing actually happens. If you get thousands or millions of people interested in an issue it actually has a tranqulising effect – people start thinking ’someone else is doing it, so I don’t need too’. Valerie explained how This could fatigue the sustainability movement as people opt out due to the mass of attention – designers need to avoid the idea that ’someone else is looking after it’.

Concluding Notes

Loosely defined a system is: ‘a collection of elements and interconnections that are highly organised to achieve a purpose.’

The interactive community is missing a sustainable movement – but that’s ok. The last thing we need to do is create more green movements, but instead be the voices that are the connection between all these disciplines to create a constant dialogue for all the other movements.

Designers have a powerful role to play in information flow.  We are uniquely positined between many industries and responsbile for communicating issues to the masses. What would happen if our purpose was oriented towards sustainability rather than commerce? What if social media was about social impact?

Valerie encourage us to recognises systems thinking and be the connective tissue between all these different industries.

‘Every profession bears the responsibility to understand the circumstances that enable it’s existence’.

We need to lead and not sit on the sidelines. We understand the qualities of interactivity therefore we should make them work for positive change.

You can find out more on this talk and the designers accord on Twitter @designersaccord