Visualising Health And Disease

Posted on November 26, 2010 by admin

One of my favourite sub­jects of visu­al­i­sa­tions are those that deal with health and dis­ease. At some point or another we’ll all need med­ical help, whether in an emer­gency sit­u­a­tion or ongo­ing care and treat­ment as we age. What fas­ci­nates me is being able to see which coun­tries offer the best med­ical ser­vices and their pol­i­tics towards this care.

Also, track­ing dis­ease is another of my favourite forms of visu­al­i­sa­tion, and it’s been used for hun­dreds of years. I’m not going to men­tion John Snow here, but if you don’t know about his inves­ti­ga­tion into a cholera out­break in 19th cen­tury Lon­don then you should go and read about it.

Con­ta­gion

Ori­gin of dis­eases — Haisem Hussein

This beau­ti­ful map charts the ori­gins of dis­ease, where that dis­ease was car­ried to and the drop off of the con­ta­gions over dis­tance carried.

The Cost of Health

Cost of health­care — Good Magazine

A lovely info­graphic from Good Mag­a­zine shows the cost of health care per capita and their life expectancy across a range of countries.

Every coun­try in the world approaches health care dif­fer­ently, but the end goal is the same: Keep cit­i­zens as healthy as pos­si­ble at the low­est cost. Some coun­tries spend a lot on health care, but see don’t see great ben­e­fits for those expen­di­tures among their cit­i­zens. Oth­ers, at least by the met­rics below, are find­ing ways to reach both goals. This info­graphic is a look at 12 coun­tries around the world that exam­ines how far the money they spend on health care goes toward affect­ing the health of their citizens.

Health Map

Inter­ac­tive world health map — HealthMap.org

This neat lit­tle appli­ca­tion mon­i­tors and tracks out­breaks of dis­ease across the globe and plots them on a map.

NYTimes Swine Flu Cases

Track­ing Swine Flu — The New York Times

More than a year old now but at the height of the swine flu out­break this inter­ac­tive info­graphic from the NYTimes allowed you to quickly see the fre­quency of out­breaks being reported plot­ted sim­ply on a world map.

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Futuristic Interfaces

Posted on November 7, 2010 by admin

I’m a big film fan, espe­cially of sci-fi that’s set in the near future. Films of this genre can have alot of future tech­nolo­gies on dis­play and almost all of them usu­ally require some sort of amaz­ing inter­face to these tech­nolo­gies. What I like the most about these inter­faces is their inspi­ra­tional abil­ity to trig­ger ideas.

007 Quan­tum Of Solace

Mis­sion brief­ing screen — Quan­tum of Solace

Instead of just a file full of doc­u­ments, James Bond in the Quan­tum of Solace gets his mis­sion brief­ings by holo­graphic display.

Pass­port pre­view — Quan­tum of Solace

Inter­ac­tive brief­ing table — Quan­tum of Solace

Avatar

Mil­i­tary way­points — Avatar

In Avatar Jake Sully briefs Col. Quar­itch on the habi­tat of the Navi, with holo­graphic way­points to mark pri­or­ity areas in the 3D projection.

Glass mon­i­tors — Avatar

Exca­va­tion map — Avatar

Dis­trict 9

Moth­er­ship flight con­trols — Dis­trict 9

Tank con­trols — Dis­trict 9

Inter­ac­tive atlas — Dis­trict 9

Iron Man 2

HUD show­ing dam­age taken — Iron Man 2

Inside the Iron Man suit Tony stark gets a heads up dis­play on the sta­tus of the suit and a heat map like indi­ca­tor of where the suit is tak­ing the most damage.

Heart sta­tus — Iron Man 2

Enemy’s his­tory — Iron Man 2

Minor­ity Report

Dig­i­tal build­ing search — Minor­ity Report

Video time­line com­puter — Minor­ity Report

In Minor­ity Report, Tom Cruise tries to stop future crimes by piec­ing together glimpses of the future on a holo­graphic time­line inter­face. His hand ges­tures that con­trol this inter­face are really some­thing to watch.

Video time­line com­puter — Minor­ity Report

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OneDotZero — Protein Forum

Posted on November 6, 2010 by admin

Next week at the One­DotZero fes­ti­val and Inter­net Week Europe I’ve been asked to be a part of an edu­ca­tional panel on data visu­al­i­sa­tion. Along with David McCan­d­less, Andrew Shoben and Peter Crnokrak I’ll be shar­ing a lit­tle of my lat­est work and talk­ing through some of my expe­ri­ences work­ing with data.

One­DotZero

The ses­sion is all sold out now, but if you’ve got tick­ets then come say hello. I’ll be knock­ing about after­wards for a chat.

Prote.in Forum 7 Invite

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How big is the USA?

Posted on March 5, 2010 by admin

The first draft of this visu­al­i­sa­tion was cre­ated in about 8 hours before the dead­line for USA by Design­ers expired, on the day before I had to move out of my house and before I’d started any pack­ing! So, to say I was rushed, stressed, and clock watch­ing is a HUGE understatement.

What’s shown below is the updated graphic with about half hours more work on it since the sub­mit­ted ver­sion for the com­pe­ti­tion. The orig­i­nal idea I had was to do about four visu­al­i­sa­tions look­ing at wealth, qual­ity of life, cul­ture, and size. I’d already spent time gath­er­ing and com­pil­ing the data a cou­ple of weeks before­hand from var­i­ous sources, but then other projects took pri­or­ity (again) and my time lines got screwed (again!). So here’s just one: size.

How big is the USA poster

It’s a visu­al­i­sa­tion focused on show­ing the size of the USA com­pared to other coun­tries in the world.

The process and older drafts

This is the first draft that was com­pleted with only 5 min­utes to spare before the dead­line ended, using an auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated colour palette.

This is the sec­ond draft after I decided I hated the colours, and decided to go with a mono­chro­matic green vari­ant to rep­re­sent the land.

This is the third draft after I decided to try and colour code every­thing by the dom­i­nant country’s flag colour, then gave up halfway through as I realised I was going backwards.

This is the final draft you see above. I’ve taken out the block colours and used a stronger line weight to pick out the more impor­tant areas of the visu­al­i­sa­tion. As it’s a focus on the USA, I’ve brought out the USA’s area on the pie with their cus­tom­ary red, white and blue colours.

…and I did try an inverted ver­sion but never really fan­cied it.

Now I’ll have to wait to see if my entry gets picked up by the project, and try and be cheeky and ask the organ­is­ers if they’d be so kind as to accept the updated ver­sion. I couldn’t leave it after the sec­ond draft any­how, it just wasn’t up to spec.

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Buzz Tracker

Posted on February 19, 2010 by admin

This week I’ve been work­ing on a sweet new data visu­al­i­sa­tion that aggre­gates opin­ion from twit­ter for a specfic event or set of top­ics. All week it’s been evolv­ing, grow­ing in abil­ity and scope and I think it’s about time it deserved a lit­tle men­tion on DTN.

I’m not going into too much detail right now until I put a lit­tle video together of how it works, but if you’re in Lon­don and you’re free tonight (Feb­ru­ary 19th 2010) then you should come along to Design Over­time at the Design Museum on the Thames. It’s going to be a great night with full open access to all the exhibits, plus the design­ers in res­i­dence (that includes me) will be tak­ing over the museum. What this means I’m not sure, but my visu­al­i­sa­tion will be track­ing every­thing, and if the weather holds out then this vis will be pro­jected onto the out­side wall of the DesMus for all to see. Should be pretty darn cool.

I’ll have plenty of pic­tures, video, and screen­cast on this after the week­end, so tell your friends! — and if you are in Lon­don and you want to come down then I have a few tick­ets going beg­ging. Let me know on twit­ter, @davebowker or @designingnews, and you should fol­low me too. I like to think I’m funny. :)

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Plans

Posted on January 23, 2010 by admin

So lately I’ve been think­ing about just what I want Design­ing The News to be and I had a Jerry Maguire moment — an epiphany. There are alot of data visu­al­i­sa­tion blogs out there that con­sis­tently post great exam­ples of data visu­al­i­sa­tion, and for me putting together last weeks post wasn’t fun. If felt like a chore. I have alot of respect for these authors who take the time to put together a qual­ity arti­cle, but I’ve decided I’m not going to do that any more.

DTN’s pri­mary focus now is to cre­ate orig­i­nal info­graph­ics and data visu­al­i­sa­tions. If you like see­ing great exam­ples of data visu­al­i­sa­tion then you should fol­low @designingnews on twit­ter for reg­u­lar updates on fan­tas­tic data related stuff I find around the web, but I will no longer be post­ing these on the blog. I find twit­ter updates to be pas­sive, and great for this sort of content.

So there you go. Hope you enjoy orig­i­nal con­tent as much as I do. :)

Announc­ing the next visu­al­i­sa­tion project

For those who haven’t heard already HUG United have launched their sec­ond open project, USA by Design­ers, for design­ers to cre­ate art­work around the sub­ject “USA”. Have had this on my radar for the last cou­ple of weeks and since wrap­ping up the last of my free­lance jobs just a cou­ple of hours ago I’ve decided to enter the contest.

Design­ers, illus­tra­tors, pho­tog­ra­phers, design stu­dios, collectives/crews, agen­cies, stu­dents, visual artists… you are wel­come to sub­mit an inno­v­a­tive, cre­ative, excit­ing, per­sonal and exper­i­men­tal art­work inspired by the theme: “WHAT DOES USA MEAN TO YOU?“
We are expect­ing diver­sity and freestyle: all styles of out­stand­ing visual media are wel­come. Selected works will be fea­tured through online exhibit and book (more infor­ma­tion soon).

With the fan­tas­tic data resource Data.Gov I’m sure there’ll be some inter­est­ing stuff to make some really cool visu­als from. Stay tuned.

And another…

Also, for those who haven’t seen the work of the amaz­ingly tal­ented Mike Deal, his data visu­al­i­sa­tions for the Chart­ing The Bea­t­les project are great exam­ples of clean, colour­ful data visu­al­i­sa­tion and his series of posters have inspired me to cre­ate some­thing too. More to come. Lots more.

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Educational food and drink infographics

Posted on January 16, 2010 by admin

In the past cou­ple of weeks I’ve been notic­ing an increase in info­graph­ics about food and drink, whether these are brand new pro­duc­tions or just old con­tent being resur­faced I thought I’d start col­lect­ing them as and when they cropped up.

What fol­lows are 20 exam­ples of food and drink info­graph­ics, rang­ing from high-end com­mis­sions for Wired or GOOD mag­a­zines, to the hob­by­ist just try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate data.

Lokesh Dhakars Illus­trated Cof­fee Guide
Beau­ti­ful sim­ple and strong illus­tra­tions makes this cof­fee info­graphic really stand out.

The Caf­feine Poster
Not graph­i­cally the strongest, but very inter­est­ing to see caf­feine lev­els of every­day drinks.

Wine Info­graph­ics
The high con­trast colour scheme and strong sim­ple line illus­tra­tions really make this one stand out.

How Clean Is Your Tap Water

Sugar Stacks
Sim­ple ever­day foods and drinks are sim­ply phot­graphed next to how much sugar they con­tain. Some pow­er­ful, and inter­est­ing images on this site.

The Story Of Beer
A ver­tial time­line of beer, lit­tered with nuggets of his­tor­i­cal and inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion.

The Best Beer In Amer­ica
A great style to this graphic, almost car­toon like and beau­ti­fully illus­trated by Mike Wirth.

Star­bucks And McDon­alds

Iria Cas­tro Poster

Food For All Sea­sons
Another one from Good Mag­a­zine, the colours on this graphic really stand out.

Sea­sonal Food Chart

Which Coun­tries Eat The Most Meat

Wired Mag­a­zine: The Future Of Food
An excel­lent series of info­graph­ics with a huge vari­ety of graphs, charts, and pic­tograms to illus­trate this thought pro­vok­ing food report.

Ensur­ing The Future Of Food

Gra­ham Meyer’s Esti­mated Food Con­sump­tion
A sim­ple, colour­ful and beau­ti­ful info­graphic illus­tra­tion of what Gra­ham Meyer ate over the course of a month.

Lunch Break

Dig­i­tal Podge
Thsi beau­ti­ful info­graphic web­site has been doing the rounds recently, and for good rea­son. Go take a look!

Processed food: A Silent Assas­sin

Fast Food Calo­ries Per Dol­lar

Hellmann’s — It’s Time for Real
A fan­tas­tic video with ani­mated info­graphic good­ness make this video about eat­ing local food really shout it’s mes­sage.

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Resolution

Posted on January 8, 2010 by admin

Out of the three res­o­lu­tions I made this new year this is the only one I’ve not bro­ken yet. Sad but true. 8 days in I’ve already had a beer and cut my hair. Re-launching, writ­ing, and design­ing for this site is the only one that remains, and with the con­stant chal­lenge of Anton’s Project52 bear­ing down upon me I intend to keep it.

The basic idea is to write 1 post every week, 52 posts for 2010. This is num­ber 1. Hello.

Now this first post is a bit of a copout, and it’s for the same excuse I’ve been using for the past year — I’ve had no time. But, I have been get­ting my act together. I’ve been busy. I could have posted screen­shots of the new design (oh yea!), writ­ten about the upcom­ing news brows­ing visu­al­i­sa­tion I’ve been work­ing on at my dayjob, or even doc­u­mented all the un-used ideas, mock­ups, and files for the orig­i­nal DTN series. How­ever, it being after 2am on the last day of entry for the first #p52 of the year — I haven’t.

Next week will be bet­ter. Promise. Until then here’s a lit­tle promo video I made a while ago which I’ve been mean­ing to post for bloody ages.

I know, the resolution’s crappy and my video edit­ing sucks. I’ve used the pro­gram maybe twice!

For those of you on twit­ter who are so inclined, I’m post­ing reg­u­lar updates on data visu­al­i­sa­tion and info­graphic stuff on the DTN twit­ter account. I’m plan­ning a sweet visu­al­i­sa­tion of my twit­ter fol­low­ers at some point, so if you want to be immor­talised in print you should really fol­low me!

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SXSW Panel — Please vote for the DTN talk

Posted on August 20, 2009 by admin

It’s been over a year last month since I posted any­thing on this site — too long by any stretch. I know most of you read­ing this in feed read­ers will be pretty sur­prised (prob­a­bly hav­ing for­got­ten all about it), but I have a favour to ask.

Like me, those of you vis­it­ing this site are look­ing for great exam­ples of every­day data visu­al­i­sa­tion and info­graph­ics. Some for inspi­ra­tion, and some in order to solve the prob­lem of mas­sive data over­load. I’d like to tell peo­ple more about data visu­al­i­sa­tion and how it can be used in order to solve sim­ple every­day user inter­ac­tions on the web. I need you to help me do that, by vot­ing for my panel at the SXSW panel picker web­site.

Not only will you be help­ing me out, you’ll also be help­ing to cre­ate more great con­tent for the next ver­sion of this site, ver­sion 2, due for relaunch this Octo­ber. Yes. Design­ing The News is com­ing back, big­ger, bet­ter, with more posts and more great orig­i­nal content.

I’m also look­ing for guest authors as well, so if you’re inter­ested email me at dave (@) design­ingth­e­news (dot) com.

Once again, if you could, I’d really appre­ci­ate you vot­ing for my panel at SXSW. There’s only a hand­ful of data visu­al­i­sa­tion related stuff on there — let’s tell peo­ple about it. Get them involved, and get them inspired!

Thanks. You should fol­low me on twit­ter to stay up on how it’s going. http://twitter.com/davebowker and http://twitter.com/designingnews.

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Quick update

Posted on July 23, 2008 by admin

I men­tioned a while back that I’ll be post­ing some­thing on the rejected designs and the process I went through to cre­ate some of the visu­al­i­sa­tions. That’s still on my to do list, and hope­fully in the next cou­ple of weeks I’ll get that out. Infact it may be a 2 parter as I’m imag­in­ing it to be a pretty big post, with lots of sam­ples of styles and designs, and why I rejected them over the pub­lished ones.

Any­ways, the rea­son there hasn’t been an update in so long is because I’m in the process of mov­ing down to Lon­don. Actu­ally I’m in Lon­don at the moment, with­out a com­puter and with­out the inter­net, which is why I’m in an inter­net cafe at the moment with 9 min­utes remain­ing on my time try­ing to write this update pretty damn fast.

Hope­fully I’ll have a new lap­top by the end of next week, and will crank out some more stuff soon.

New job!

Also, I’ve accepted a new job at a com­pany in Lon­don deal­ing with search tech­nol­ogy, news, and data visu­al­i­sa­tion, and I’m just wait­ing to sign the con­tracts. Hope­fully the paper­work will be done some­time this week, or early next, and I can let you know who that lucky bunch are!

The good thing about this is that in alot of respects, Design­ingTh­e­News will become my day job. Bonus! Which means in areas where the work isn’t sub­ject to NDA, I can share some of the things I’m work­ing on right here. With you. Before any­one else. :)

Stay tuned! And thanks to every­one who’s emailed me want­ing posters. At this rate if inter­est keeps up I may have to do another run!

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