Category Archives: The Wicked Viz

The Wicked Viz

Warming Stripes: Data Viz in Action

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https://www.climatecentral.org/showyourstripes
Credit: Ed Hawkins

“Warming Stripes” may be one of the most impactful visualizations of climate change. The colors reflect the scientific truth of warming, and are from the same palette as the American flag (red, white and blue), communicating the political imperative to act. What I especially appreciate about “Warming Stripes” is how, in the fine print, the methodology for collecting (and excluding) data is clearly disclosed. And, sadly, the movement to deny climate change has produced a counterfeit version of this visualization by only selecting the data points that support their opinion.

The Wicked Viz

Funnels and Clusters: Vaccine Visualizations

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Data on ways to avoid illness on an airplanes is very welcome this time of year….and good news about vaccines makes me feel even better (assuming people decide to get inoculated). Below are two visualizations from Beautiful News….The funnel graph illustrating reduced mortality rates is one of the more effective I’ve seen, although it’s not entirely clear whether the reduction is 100% attributable to vaccination or other factors. I was also surprised at the effectiveness of the bubble chart. Clustering by vaccine type, and the use of a single color of varying transparency, give a good general sense of which illness is receiving attention and how much relative progress has been made.

Tons of New Vaccines Are in the Pipeline
Millions of lives have been saved by vaccines in the last 25 years
The Wicked Viz

Visualizing Energy Efficiency

Like many in New England, I live in an older home that would benefit from any improvement in energy efficiency. I’ve started to explore the world of solar panels, new windows, insulation and energy audits. And it’s…confusing. The average homeowner now has to contend with different energy efficiency standards on top of an explosion of financial and technical options to choose from.

The Cost of Renewables Is Falling Fast
Replacing All Your Lightbulbs With LEDs Saves Energy and Money

I appreciate the simplicity of these visualizations from Beautiful News. At first, “The Cost of Renewables Is Falling Fast” (top left) made me pause and reach for a book by Tufte. Then I counted all of the little lines and realized that the graph does consistently measure the Y-axis in 1% increments…it just transposes the Y-axis labels where one expects the X-axis, flips expectations about up/down and green/red and positive/negative numbers. This is a visualization that bends “the rules” in support of the visual story.

The second visualization, “Replacing All of Your Lightbulbs with LEDs..” (top right), feels more balanced to me. I appreciate how the cost per year and lifetime data are arranged for easy comparison between the different bulb types. And the benefits of LED are made extraordinarily clear.

The electric company has started to share comparisons of energy consumption in my immediate neighborhood. Using data visualization to raise awareness of energy efficiency may be the missing step connecting homeowners with social programs and financial incentives.

Now let me review my water bill…

The Wicked Viz

This curious Beautiful News page…

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The other day Jesse drew my attention to this curious Beautiful News page. While the effort to focus on positive news and uplifting trends is greatly appreciated, some visualization might benefit from a little “Tuftefying” to better adhere to Tufte’s design principles for good visual information representation. An effective visualization should focus on the content by minimizing distracting architecture and maximizing the data-ink ratio, establish credibility by citing detailed sources, and avoid comparisons of areas of circles or other non-standard figures as well as unconventional directions for temporal data.