Food, Rice, Data, Understanding

I needed to show you two more examples of how information is conveyed visually to open eyes, minds, and hearts. Take a moment to check out both of these sites and think about how you share information with your audience(s).

The first is What We Eat, a photo essay from Relevant Magazine. A simple chart of food expenditures per person in different countries around the world is interesting -- there's one in the article comments you can use as a comparison table -- but the photos tell the story with much more vibrancy.

The second is from the Information Aesthetics blog, which I've mentioned before (and linked to in the left-hand column -- a must-read, in my opinion, for their way of showing how data visualization could be so much more than we usually do it.) The article is called Rice Population Demographics, and it has photos from a museum exhibition using grains of rice to physically demonstrate different population demographics. See a video here using this concept.

From infosthetics: [This is] a physical visualization of the world population demographics, by mapping 1 grain of rice to represent 1 human being. in the "of all the people in all the world" installation, population statistics are separated out in different piles to juxtapose compelling social phenomena, such as the comparison of all the prisoners in the world versus all the people in gated communities (roughly equal).

Check it out.