Monthly Archives: April 2009

Dear Gretchen

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In the book project Dear Gretchen, artist and designer Gretchen Nash found a wonderful way to explain part of her childhood. Here’s the concept in Nash’s words:

An extensive book that investigates letters that I have kept inside a luggage case since my childhood. The process of the book included finding the word and phrase frequency of the letters, categorizing them by sender, by date, and finally writing personal reflections about each of the senders. Graphs were constructed to reveal the word frequency and each of the 187 letters were thoroughly documented inside of the book.

Most of the charts are sculptural, which creates a wonderful contrast of warm craftiness and hard data.



[via ffffound]

Why Stop Signs Should Mean Yield…

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… for bike riders in Oregon, that is. I really like this simple animated video by Spencer Boomhower that explains the rationale behind a proposed law to allow bike riders to execute a “rolling stop” in certain situations.



Bicycles, Rolling Stops, and the Idaho Stop from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.

Wouldn’t it be great to have this sort of elegant explanation for all the propositions that end up on ballots every November? In my explainist utopia, they would be playing in a continuous loop at polling places.

[via Nutintuit Studio]

Know Your Street Vendors

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Dave came across this remarkable piece of explanation from the Street Vendor Project (SVP). As part of their mission to champion and empower New York’s 10,000+ vendors, SVP members teamed up with designer Candy Chang and The Center for Urban Pedagogy to create a series of infographic-heavy brochures that demystify regulations and other challenges for New York vendors.





Many street vendors aren’t fluent English speakers, so it’s essential the imagery in these brochures does the heavy explanation lifting. This is work from the front lines of infographics.



The full brochures aren’t available, but you can download two PDF samples from the Street Vendor Project Web site.

[via information aesthetics]

These Tumors are… Beautiful?

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I’m not sure how else to describe these animated videos on tumor angiogenesis, the formation of blood vessels leading to a tumor. The biotechnology company Amgen put the stunning mini-site together to explain new approaches to Cancer treatment.







While the animation and interface are wonderful, the site doesn’t do a great job explaining what’s actually going on, at least not for a general audience. In fact, the caliber of the animation actually makes it harder to absorb any details. Show me beautiful imagery set to soothing space music, and it’s nearly impossible not to tune out a British narrator spouting 10-syllable terminology.

[via Neatorama]

“The Secret Life of Magnetic Fields”

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How do you explain something that’s invisible? Making it visible seems obvious in retrospect, but I’ve never seen any representation of electromagnetic fields remotely like this before:



Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

This is the work of of Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor Films, commissioned for Britain’s Channel 4. The shapes are based on actual electromagnetic activity:

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF [very low frequency] audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons .

[via Boing Boing]

It Takes a Village of 100

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Over the past few years, I’ve run into several articles and email forwards presenting a hypothetical village of 100 as a stand-in for the entire world population. For example, “if the world population were a village of 100 people, 61 people would be Asian, 15 would be malnourished, 20 would be overweight, etc.” Apparently this idea dates back to a 1990 piece by Dartmouth professor Donella Meadows. Snopes cautions that some versions in circulation are inaccurate.

Miniature-Earth.com features this short movie version:



This is a neat trick, as it accomplishes a few impressive explainist feats instantly:

  • It makes very big numbers comprehensible.
  • It lifts you out of your local/religious/ethnic perspective to consider the composition of human race as a whole.
  • It makes you imagine other people in the abstract as actual people that you live with (which they are).

We’re just not wired to imagine 6.7 billion people, but 100 is well within our grasp.

Illustrator/designer/photographer Toby Ng ran with the idea and created a series of village-of-100 posters.



The posters are sharp, but the metaphors within a metaphor are a little mind-bending (“if the human population were a village of 100 people, which comprised slices of a pizza…”). Is it too obvious of me to picture posters showing the hypothetical villagers themselves?

[via FlowingData]