The Functional Art (Profile 7: Hans Rosling) - MariaAguilarV/JMM-622-Infographics-and-Data-Visualization GitHub Wiki

At the end of The Functional Art, Cairo includes some interviews with recognized people that played or are playing an important role in the data visualization world. One of them is the interview with Hans Rosling, co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation. Unfortunately, Rosling died in 2017, but I am glad that Cairo got to interview him and that he shared his insights with us. I was looking forward to reading this interview because in the first blog that I wrote for the Data Visualization class, I mentioned the TED video that I saw from Rosling (without knowing that he was a well-known person in the data visualization world) and I was immediately captivated, not only by his interactive visualizations but by the way he explained and talked in his presentation.

In this interview, Rosling talked about the different kinds of data and scales that exist. He talked about the microdata, which is available data that doesn’t have a meaning per se, there are tons of it all over the internet, it is available to anyone at any time, and there are even tools to filter it. But then, we have another level of information where the microdata is processed and presented in a way that makes sense. This second level is the most important, and this was precisely Rosling’s ideology, to transform complex data into information. The goal of the Gapminder Foundation is, not only to compile data from trustable sources but also to offer tools that arrange this data and allows to see patterns and have a better understanding of the world. Furthermore, Rosling shared that the way he liked to do his presentations was thinking on a football game, and this is, in my opinion, what made Hans Rosling a genius! Finally, he talked about how important is to have statisticians, engineers, and designers working together to achieve a higher degree of understanding.

One of Rosling’s goals was to share information with people about health, poverty and economic development in order to avoid people’s ignorance. This is why, when I saw this graph from the OurWorldInData website, I thought that it would be something that he would like to see. This chart addresses topics as poverty, education, democracy, and health in a simple way, by thinking of the world with 100 people. Although I think this is a good way to represent this information, since it is simple and allows the user to understand the change over the last two centuries, I think it could be improved. It didn’t catch my attention at the first time, I might say because of the chosen colors, their contrast and maybe the excessive gridlines, but once I started looking at it, I understood and got the message that the authors were trying to give. And I must say that the interactive version is awesome. See the full article here.