UN Global Pulse, an initiative by the United Nations and Visualizing.org have teamed up to challenge you to visualize the voices of vulnerable populations in times of global crisis. Based on survey results from UN Global Pulse’s 2010 Mobile Survey, they are looking for clear, informative, and creative visualizations that tackle one or more of the following questions: How do people in different nations describe their quality of life? What types of changes do people make in order to cope with economic uncertainty? How do individuals perceive their future outlook? The data consists of answers to five questions focusing on economic perceptions by people from India, Iraq, Mexico, Uganda, and Ukraine.

The competition opens on Wednesday June 8, 2011 and runs through July 25, 2011. Winners will be announced in August and the winning designer will receive an all-expense paid trip to the United Nations in New York and $2000 cash prize. You can submit your works directly on Visualizing.org. Best of luck to all participants!

Earlier this year, Visualizing.org and Eyeo made an open call for designers and developers to create an interactive portrait of America by visualizing the 2010 census data. Jan Willem Tulp, a freelance information visualizer based in The Netherlands has recently published his submission for the competition called Ghost Counties. The visualization, developed in Processing, analyzes the numbers of homes and vacant homes in proportion to the population of all counties in the United States of America.

The data itself was not very complex, but rather big, and the biggest challenge was to find a creative approach to visualize this data, but without using a map (which would be rather obvious since it’s about locations).

The counties are represented by two concentric circles and the size of the outer bubble represents the total number of homes, the size of the inner bubble represents the number of vacant homes. The y-axis shows the population size on a logarithmic scale and the x-axis of the bubbles shows the number of vacant homes per population. Furthermore, each bubble is connected with a line to another axis that shows the population/home ratio. The exact numbers for the selected county are shown on the top right.

The visualization achieves to clearly show exceptional states of counties. For example, when a county has more vacant homes that citizen the bubble is shown in red and on the far right with a line connected across the scale to the far left. One thing that isn’t as straight forward is the duplicated use of the x-axis. The missing label of the x-axis for the bubbles (represents the number of vacant homes per population) made me go back to the description multiple times. Also a clickable navigation to switch between states (maybe two small arrows beside the state name?) would prevent the user switching between mouse and keyboard. That said, I really enjoy the visual aesthetic of the visualization and how Jan experimented with alternative visualization methods.

For GE, Lisa Strausfeld from Pentagram shows with the CFO Outlook Survey how financial executives view the world today and their outlook for the months ahead. The visualization illustrates the opinions of CFOs from middle-market companies with revenue between $50 million and $1 billion about Food, healthcare, Manufactoring, Metals, Retail, Technology and Transportation.

With a vertical area chart the answers to a series of questions are ranked from pessimistic on the left to optimistic on the right. Layering the different industries shows specific spikes that differ significantly from the average. This may not be the most precise method to show the results as we can’t clearly compare the values. I like the drill down aspect of the visualizations — you don’t see the question itself in the overview but get an idea about the general topic.

In the current financial climate, the FTSE 100 is regularly in the media, and is the most widely used indicator of economic prosperity in the United Kingdom. Despite this, many of us have no idea what it is, why it is important, or how it is useful. In response to this, Jeremy Christopher developed these three A1 information visualizations to explain the history, worth, and importance of the FTSE 100 on a basic level in order to build a simple knowledge base of the index.

The work “A 26 Year History” visualizes the base rate (first value of the index) and the index’s value over the 26 year period. It also shows how the number of businesses form each of the 10 industry sectors has changed and developed over time.

On its trail to organize the world’s information, Google has just added a new experimental product to their Lab. The Public Data Explorer makes “large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate”. It is designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations.

The Explorer uses Google’s ability of syndicating public datasets previously introduced in their search results. The visualizations are built on top of their Visualization API and the animated charts are based on the Trendalyzer technology Google acquired from the Gapminder Foundation. It has previously been available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets.

Creating a visualization is straight forward and a matter of minutes. A user can chose the data and how to visually represent it. Additional data can then be applied to different attributes of the visualization. The created views can be shared via permalink or embedded in any webpage.

The data

Google selected the data sets by analyzing anonymous search logs to find patterns in the kinds of searches people are doing. This way they can cover a majority of the demand for statistical data with a limited amount of different data providers and data sets. Here’s a list of the currently available data sets:

The World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the California Department of Education, Eurostat, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Conclusion

In my opinion Google is in a strong position to evangelize the advantages of transparency in information distribution. Let’s hope this encourages more insitutions to open acces to their data sets. I am also happy to see a user friendly addition to the solutions already available for developers to access public data programmatically. It makes it really easy to create and share visualizations based on public data. As a note: If you’re looking to display your own data, I recommend having a look at the recently launched Tableau Public.

What do you think? Are the available data sources sufficient enough to be real value to the average user? If not, what would you like to see added to the list? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

With graphical cleverness resembling the early posters by Paul Rand (remember eye-bee-m?), IBM has produced a series of short animated infographics explaining the ideas behind their Smarter Planet initiative. The distinct look and the simplicity make the microsite a joyful visit.

Visit the IBM – Smarter Planet Website

(Sorry for the poor quality of images. If you have access to higher quality ones, please let me know.)

The Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland will take place this weekend from January 27th to 31st. To examine some of the most important topics in advance the WEF website hosts the interactive application Risks Interconnection Map 2010. The RIM 2010 is a network visualization weighting the most important global risks and their connections.

The risks are grouped in Economics, Geopolitics, Environment, Society and Technology (Personally, I am dissappointed by the evanescent of focus on the Environment). The interaction model is very limited and reduced to selecting risks and viewing more details about the selected interconnections. With the underlying dataset, I could imagine a more powerful tool to reveal formerly invisible interconnections.

Visit the WEF Risks Interconnection Map 2010

To clearly illustrate the differences, the graph doesn’t simply gets highlighted. Instead the selected graph moves and changes its shape, thus making it easier to see the actuall movement. If a curve with abnormal values, higher or lower than the majority, is selected the grid adapts and scales down or up.

Excellent piece of work on the interaction model as well as on the visual aesthetics.

The data is organized in a table with the years from 1942–2009 as column headers and the months of the year are shown as the rows. The cells are filled with a color scheme ranging from red (high jobless rate) to green (low jobless rate). This gives an easy to understand heatmap-like overview. The interaction model is very basic and only provides a tooltip functionality and some additional filter for recessions. It would have been nice to implement some information with higher granularity. But the overall visual design is clean and easy to read.

View the interactive table on The Wall Street Journal

Zago’s project desciption:

We were honored to lead the design of this year’s report. Our challenge was to create a engaging experience while keeping the document’s academic and policy nature intact. We created a design that supports the topic of migration and human mobility, simplified the nature of the information design and reworked the report’s overall template to prepare it for the next 10 years of use.

The 230 pages strong publication is lovely designed and the data is made understandable by clean and usable information graphics. While appreciating the overall look & feel we must specifically salute Zago for the quality of the maps, charts and table design.

Human Development Report 2009 | United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).