Design + Data = Power: Webinar Recap and Resource List
In this webinar, moderator Callie Neylan (center) led a discussion about data visualization and analytics with Jared Waxman of Adobe (left) and Angela Shen-Hsieh of GroupVisual.io (right). AIGA members can log in to
watch the archive here.
One
of the most challenging and rewarding design projects I ever worked on was a
data visualization project for Microsoft when I worked at Gensler, an
architecture and planning firm. The problem? How to shuffle 50,000 employees
across 26 buildings on Microsoft's Redmond campus over a three-year period
while new buildings came available and old buildings were taken offline.
Microsoft's offices were sorely overcrowded and it was affecting productivity.
Workers were double- and sometimes triple-spaced, crammed into offices, nooks,
and crannies. A sign that business was good, but to keep it that way, workers
needed to be happy.
Our
team started with empty maps and raw data. Lots and lots of raw data. Spreadsheets
full of it. With one piece of data looking as generic and bereft of meaning as
the next piece. Our job (the design team consisted of three space planners, two
designers, and one Excel programmer) was to find meaning in this data. Our job
was to visualize the story of how Microsoft's managers were going to handle the
monumental task of moving thousands of employees over time, some of them two or
three times by the time it was all finished.
The
story was there, we just didn't know it yet. And didn't know it until we'd
spent a few months analyzing the data, following pattern threads that looked
like they were telling us something, but then led to dead ends. So we explored
more, finally discovering the story revealed through patterns disclosed in maps
and management trees and color codes across time.
For
large Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, inefficient, poorly planned
staff relocations could lead to unacceptable downtime, costing a fortune in
lost productivity and decreased employee morale.
For
me, this was a crash course in business intelligence. For Microsoft, it led to
valuable business insights that allowed the company to effectively plan and
manage its workforce and office spaces through a period of rapid yet sustained
growth and change.
Without
good visual design principles, it wouldn't have happened. Lucky for Microsoft,
the project manager who hired me knew visual communication design was crucial
to the success of this project. We were able to provide valuable insight around
change management by using the design elements of metaphor, scale, perspective,
color and visual hierarchy—which Angela Shen-Hsieh made a point of demonstrating
in last week’s webinar, “Designing with the Power of Data.”
In
our fifth “Breakthroughs” webinar, Angela, along with Jared Waxman from Adobe.com,
also mentioned the importance of teasing the right narrative and approaching
data visualization from a human-centered design perspective. Good data
visualization is knowing what story to tell and how to tell it in such a way
that humans understand and relate to it.
Today's
corporations have access to more data than they know what to do with. It often
comes in raw form, or poorly presented via simple, flat, pie charts and
spreadsheets. Which is unfortunate, because within many data sets there lives a
story to be told, a narrative to be followed, an insight to be realized. The
best way to discover these hidden narratives is by combining data with design. Here
are some resources to help you do that. Tell us in the comments if there are others that you find valuable.
Books
and Articles on Data Visualization
- Information Visualization: Perception for Design (Morgan Kaufmann) by Colin Ware
- Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data Through the Eyes of Experts (O’Reilly) by Noah Iliinsky, ed. Julie Steele
- Designing Data Visualizations by Noah Iliinsky, ed. Julie Steele
- Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics (Wiley)
by Nathan Yau
- Stephen Few books
- Edward Tufte books
- “When the Data Struts Its Stuff,” The New York
Times, April 2, 2011 (also see this follow-up post on the Learning Network blog)
- “Google Announces New Data Visualization Tools for Analytics,” Bits blog, October 19, 2011
More Reading
Recommendations
Technologists/Data Visualization Groups to Follow
Software
Join Us Next Time...
In our next “Breakthoughs” webinar, on December 7, we’ll be talking about web typography with guest presenter Tim Brown of Typekit. AIGA members, you won’t want to miss it!
About the Author: Callie Neylan is an Assistant Professor of design at UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) in Baltimore, Maryland.
She is interested in interaction design, the urban space, and designing for the disabled. She writes about design and technology for AIGA and NPR.org and tweets via @neylano.