Professor Hans Rosling and his Gapminder foundation are making very visual presentations of what the fact and figures actually tell us on a larger scale and in the longer perspective. Hans Rosling is using big data to help us understand and explain the complex situation with Syria and the refugees.
In many ways, data is the new oil or the new soil – from it we can cultivate and grow understanding and progress. However, data needs to be presented in a way that we can comprehend and process. Data design is solving that information problem; take a look at some interesting examples from David McCandless.
When we think of data design we immediately think of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are amazing tools, although they have their limitations, as the more data you collect, the harder it gets to interpret and to communicate the data from the spreadsheet to others. Fortunately with today’s technology we have more tools and options beside spreadsheets. With the continued growth of the computer gaming generation we now expect instructions and information to be provided to us clearly and intuitively.
We all use our senses to grasp the world around us, whether it is visually or aurally and as we are getting bombarded with information every day it takes a lot of effort to extrapolate the information that is useful to you. Let’s look at the music industry as an example. Set your mind back and remember how in the early eighties music videos where simplistic in their approach, with bands or artists simply playing their instruments to their latest hit single with no meaning behind the video. However, the tools (movies and commercials) to make more have always been there. It took a while to unite music and video but it happened and now a hit song is frequently accompanied by a video that is not just about the music or the artist behind it; it is selling a lifestyle and an attitude, telling a story and conveying so much more than just lyrics. This is similar with big data today – there is already a convergence taking place. We have the tools; we now just need to find out how to use them.
If you are selling knowledge in the form of data, increasing the amount of data does not automatically make the product better. Data needs to be presented right for us to understand how to use it. Being spreadsheet-literate helps, but we still need to be able to communicate around the data to make it useful, and that means transforming big data into something we can all understand. If you are buying big data, make sure your supplier has the necessary tools to help you harvest the produce of what is planted in that soil or you might end up with just data and lots of it!
Just data is not information, and just information is not necessarily communication.
