"A good diagram isn't necessarily meant to be taken in at a glance. We should read a good diagram as seriously as we might read two or three paragraphs or even a couple of thousand words of text."
"It starts with Patient One, and that gives insiders some important information; because of course these charts usually start with Patient Zero. What happened was, the Chinese government suppressed information, so Patient Zero can't be traced. So the chart pointedly starts with Patient One in Hong Kong.
"An important principle is not just to concentrate on descriptions but also their relationships. Show causality.
"We have evidence at the molecular level, the clinical level, the human level, the patient level, because of the detective work. Finally there's some public health information. The evidence exists at multiple levels. And that's one of the important principles of evidence: whatever it takes.
"Most people show material that they're good at, that happens to be convenient, that happens to be inexpensive... but the evidence should be at multiple levels. From molecules up to the nation state. Whatever it takes.
"Notice that the linking lines are annotated. Look at an organization chart with a few names at the top and an increasing number in the mighty pyramid. The nouns are quite important, but the linking lines - I can't believe it! - are all the same. Think what that says: that every pairwise relationship in this organization is exactly the same as every other. That simply cannot be the case.
"So how can we give those linking lines some texture? Put some words on them. Put some numbers on them. We have intense specificity in the nouns. Let's add some specificity to the linking lines. Look at Patient 2C. That's probably how the virus got to Vietnam. That's the mechanism. Or look at 2E. Travel to Singapore. Or Patient 2D. Travel to Canada. Instead of just information that tries to tell us the bad news about the epidemic, this shows the flow of causation. So tha we can try to intervene.
"This texture of annotation on the linking lines and on the nouns helps the credibility of this diagram a great deal. It shows off the hard work of the investigators. This stuff is not overload or clutter. In general, there is no such thing as information overload. There is only bad design. Don't blame the victim. Don't blame the audience for being stupid. Blame the design.
"We don't go around a city complaining about information overload, and that's because we have a very powerful perceptual system. We perceive in 16-bit colour, three dimensions, all day every day. That's massive bitflow. One of the things we are trying to do with information design, here, is to bring it up to the routine capacity of the human perceptual system!"
Twenty minutes in and I am IN LOVE.
"A map is a wonderful metaphor. Cartography has done it mostly right. Hold up a paper map next to a computer screen, see how you're doing compared to a map. How come my diagram's not operating at the same perceptual level as a map?
"If on the other hand your display looks like a knockoff from a corporate chart or a powerpoint pitch... START OVER.
"Everything you do should provide reasons to believe. The audience is trying to figure out what your story is and can they believe you? What are the reasons to believe the graphic on page 78? We've already heard some. The texture of detail. The annotation of many patients. There's a coherent story. Diverse data. They're talking about causality. Who's endorsed this material? It was published in the Lancet, one of the top five or ten medical journals in the world.
"In real science, every statement about evidence comes with that parenthetical remark at the end... 'At least until better evidence comes along.' Now this doesn't mean that if we're giving a report on astronomy, we're leaving the door open for astrology. The alternative explanation has to play in the same league as the original explanation."
He looks a bit like Bill Murray.
"We want an open mind but not an empty head. We don’t want to be stupid about admitting alternative ideas to the realm of credible evidence. Also from the consumer side - when you're attending a presentation you have to explicitly judge their credibility. You have to figure out what the story is and whether you can believe it.
"Here is a flow diagram that illustrates the history of popular music. Those of us of a certain age can remember with a certain amount of nostalgia, regret, amusement, the songs we listened to... I'm sure that in this room there are some fans of the Monkees. Yes. There's one. Stand up and tell us your name. No, please don't. For those of you that don't get this chart, show it to your mom and dad. They'll understand.
"This has an information density about 23% of the textual density of a telephone book... Hello? No one's listening to me. You're all looking for Emmy Lou Harris. This is genuinely interactive material... we're all looking at the same thing but we're all extracting different things from it. You're not thinking about where did they get that nice hand lettering. If someone says where'd you get that purple? That's a chart that's in trouble. Try to always evoke a content response.
"This is a super graphic. And if you can get a super graphic like this for your presentation, you can dine out on that graphic for several years."
"Remember the cancer maps? For men and women for three types of cancer for three thousand counties in the United States. You weren't thinking about all the numbers. You were thinking about cancer. You were thinking about your home, your parents' home, hot spots. You were wandering through five-dimensional space thinking about cancer, not worrying about the ten thousand variables.
"I love showing high-resolution pictures of the places where people live. I babble on about how we mosaic the photos together and no one's listening, they're all thinking there's the park, and I wish this guy would shut up with his mosaicing... those are intensely dense infographics and no one's complaining, they're all revisiting their own paths.
"To clarify something, add detail. Imagine if it were only a few counties... how boring, how uninteresting! Three thousand counties... now everyone's tracking their stories, on the cancer map, on the rock and roll chart, the aerial photograph. It’s because the information is so well designed, the user is completely unaware of the design.
A medical bill, 26 days in the ICU. "A hostile, cryptic, barbwire table of numbers. Now look at the annotation along the side - this is a very powerful technique - that unveils that table of numbers." (Nearly one percent of the gross national product. ICU psychosis - lack of sleep, noise, toxic drugs, pain.) "The key design here is the linking line, linking the annotation to the data. Tying the explanation to the information - that’s at the heart of what we’re trying to do here. So the principle should probably be, annotate everything.
"Notice that that linking line doesn't flash on and off. Doesn't have a drop shadow. Imagine that, no drop shadow. It's not even black, it's grey. It doesn't do its job any better if it's flashing on and off, in fact it does its job worse. If it were black, the negative space would activate and make the text bouncy. Avoid optical clutter by reducing the figure/ground contrast. So push it back, grey the line down, avoid the edge of the type getting bouncy and active. Boxes activate the whitespace between the text and the box. So take the box away.
"Annotate everything. Well, what if you print this out for your audience and they read it before you have a chance to explain it. If they read it, you're already a success! We want to get out of this mentality where the audience only gets it when you read it off the bullet. That’s an exercise in information denial.
"It's no accident it's called Power Pointing; it's setting up a dominance relationship between the presenter and the audience. The only thing worse is when they combine that with the dreaded ... slow ... reveal. Who do they think they're talking to? It's utterly contemptuous of you in the audience.
"You should be honoured that they're looking at your stuff. And you shouldn't be so controlling about how they look at it. Also, people can read three times faster than you can talk. Much information higher density. 'Well, you read my thing on the ICU? OK that's it, meeting's over.'" Much laughter. "Wouldn’t it be wonderful if meetings were a third shorter? Let's magnify information transmittal. Meetings are incredibly low resolution. Exactly why are we having this meeting again? Boost up information throughput: shorter meetings! That’s an enormous information gain!"
Posted by rachel at January 28, 2008 09:35 PM