World Statistical Visualisation Tool: Gapminder
Gapminder Example
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I do love visualisations. I think what sparked my interest when I was a student was the Winamp plug-in 'Geiss', which is still the no.1 plug-in download today, almost 10 years later (!). I created my own audio toys as part of my experimentation back then, and visualisations are my inspiration to learn design patterns in AS3 today.
I seem to want to create order out of apparent mess, and graphically representing data sets does just that, for those who cannot 'see' through the numbers (we're not all Neo after all).
Gapminder, which was bought by Google, is a truely eye-opening example of great visualisation. It uses what must be one of the world's biggest datasets as it's variables; the world's statistics on health, economy, income, the environment, and more are added all the time. Any one of these statistics can be graphed against another and displayed in a way understandable to anyone. The project is lead by Hans Rosling, an inspirational character who can be seen giving a lecture about the tool here on TED.
Tagged as design, statistics, TED, visualisation + Categorized as Blog