I’ve talked about Hans Rosling’s presentation at TedTalks before, but given my recent post on IBM’s new data visualization site and my newfound ability to embed video on my blog, I’m going to promote this amazing talk once again.
Rosling talks about world health, but in the process gives a master class on data visualization. You’ll never look at Excel’s chart plotting function the same way again.
At one point (around the 13–minutes into the video), Rosling is displaying five dimensional data on a two-dimensional figure by using the x- and y-axis, data symbol size, data symbol color, and a trail that shows how the data changes over time. Wow.
Rosling has been invited back to speak at this year’s TedTalks. Another speaker of interest to readers of this blog is MIT Media Lab’s design simplicity guru John Maeda. I’ll see you all there (kidding). Any TedTalks speakers who would like to speak at a research center in Berkeley, e-mail me (not kidding, although not delusionally optimistic either).