Fanatic Heart

Gapminder is a Swedish company that builds infovis tools to graphically illustrate world development trends, based on WHO and UN data. I remember when they first made the blogging rounds a couple of years ago — most of the people I worked with at the time (at an infovis company) admired Gapminder’s resolve and choice of subject matter, but were somewhat dismissive of their technique.

Gapminder breaks a lot of design rules commonly accepted by the infovis community. They overload their plots with datapoints, they map quantitative parameters (like population) directly to point size, they use inconsistent scaling within an axis to make a prettier picture, etc. I’ve no love lost for Tufte and his silly insistence on absolutist design morality. But frankly, in order for a visualization to be really useful for analysis, there are some basic ethics you need to apply in your design. Establishing trust in a visualization, especially when you’re dealing with analysts who already have a deep understanding of the data, is difficult. You need to avoid any semblance of “lying”, distorting your design away from the basic expectations established by the human brain’s spatial reasoning. So I found Gapminder’s tools to be pretty, but not exactly highly functional.

This past week I had a chance to see Gapminder’s Anna Rosling Rönnlund speak at Georgia Tech. It was a stellar lecture, with demonstrations of Dollar Street and World Health Chart. Dollar Street is a non-traditional viz that provides a navigation paradigm for virtual tours of homes, arranged by their owners’ incomes (from less than $1 to more than $100 per day). World Health Chart is an animated scatter plot that correlates real incomes with various health statistics over the past 100 years. When incorporated into a lecture, the tools really shined. They were vivid illustrations of Anna’s points, serving not as a means of discovery, but rather as a means of rapidly conveying statistical evidence in a convincing way.

For a long time, I’ve thought of infovis primarily as an analytical tool. Gapminder is a vivid reminder that for the most part, the true utility of infovis in the world is as a communication multiplier. Visualizations that have little analytical utility can be invaluable for education and demonstration. Heck, I think Dollar Street should be a mandatory part of the curriculum in every junior high school in the country.

So, what is Gapminder’s goal, exactly? They’re not overtly political, and in fact their statistics ought to give a lot of the more knee-jerk American leftists pause (turns out that despite all the horrible things America’s been doing, most developing countries have seen quite a lot of improvement over the past thirty years). Anna explained that her company’s principal motivation was, well, geekishness.

The WHO and the UN have been generating reams of data over the past two decades, and it seems that nobody uses it or cares. Gapminder is an attempt to publicize that data, create awareness of its implications and stimulate its usage in formulating public policy. In other words, they’re working for the truth, before anything else.

The Gap between rich and poor is a tricky thing. People on both sides of it resent its existence, some more unconsciously than others. They apply the term “social justice” to mean anything from feeding the homeless to full-on communism. We try to fix the Gap by giving money to MSF, by openly revolting in the streets and shooting rich people, or by writing dissertations on political economies. Unfortunately, when discussing the Gap, few of us seem to be focused on facts rather than opinions and assumptions.

Facts help us understand the Gap, and give us the means to fight its depredations. Facts are the first step towards social justice, whatever your definition. Facts, and the objective truth they reflect, are the seeds of reason and a just society. In their focus on facts, Gapminder shows us the true calling of infovis and of science in general: true progress through the understanding of our world.