I have already written about Areva's and EDF's TV campaigns, using animation and cool music to explain what they do. For the past 2 weeks Areva's TV ad has been back on air, and Suez launched its new campaign, with a little sense of "dejà vu" …
All energy giants are facing similar challenges in terms of communication :
Energy can not be seen
Energy sources are critical assets for the future
Energy production and consumption is often associated with pollution
A quick analysis of French energy ads points to only 2 choices to help clients understand what they do, and both use visual tricks :
Animation : they chose to show us what energy can power, and how it is produced and distributed, and since reality can be too harsh, too complex, or on a scale too large to understand, they went for animation.
EDF (Electricité de France), issued that "SimCity"-like campaign a few years ago, blending reality and animation :
Suez (Lyonnaise des Eaux, Electrabel, …), recently aired a similar ad :
Areva (Framatome, …), went for full animation :
Allegories : they chose to represent the reality of energy in a figurative mode, in the every day or the founding moments of life. Allegories are often used in communication and advertising
Gaz de France is showing us a birth :
Total is accompanying us at every moment of the day :
Those advertising strategies are seductive, but straying too far away from reality can be deceptive, especially when those strategies are not in par with companies operations and actions. In a globalized world where they are no longer in a monopole, creating a brand identity in the end-consumers' mind is a challenge for French energy companies.
Vous y trouverez une bio de tous les intervenants et une synthèse de leurs interventions. Pour ma part je participe à la table-ronde "Cartographie et débats" de 13h45 à 15h15 avec Alain Garnier et Thomaso Venturini, et j'y parlerai du sujet "Les interfaces de navigation pour les sites d'information" (cf mon précédent article dans ce blog).
Pour tous les “visual thinkers”, les “information designers” et les designers des connaissances ça se passait à San Francisco les 27, 28 et 29 janvier dernier … et j’y étais
J’ai rédigé un compte-rendu (pour une fois en français) qui est disponible sur ce blog : http://blog.fabernovel.com/goingout/
Bonne lecture … et à bientôt pour un post sur les labels, les sceaux et autres marques de confiance.
Just a quick post to share with you some info you may already be aware of … or not.
I am happy to be leaving this week-end for the VizThink conference in San Francisco, where I will have the opportunity to meet and exchange with some leading advocates of knowledge design such as Dave Gray of XPlane (co-host of this event, see his blog), Cliff Atkinson (author of the book Beyond Bullet Points on PowerPoint, featured in my Amazon wishlist … and already in my library ), Nigel Holmes (former Graphics Director at Time Magazine and author of numerous books), Harlan Hugh (CEO and co-founder of TheBrain, probably the first company that create a visual information management system to search and categorize data), some graphic facilitators (Dan Rose, Christine Valenza, …) and some other keynote speakers. I will take some pictures and jot some notes to be shared with you.
Another conference, this time in France, is scheduled for April 3rd 2008. It is Carto2.0, a conference on information cartography hosted by the ESIEE engineering school in the East of Paris. Papers can be submitted before Jan 25th (see more here). Keynote speakers will include Frédéric LeBihan (co-founder of Petillant, the first "mind mapping school" in France), Claude Aschenbrenner (a blogger I had the pleasure to have lunch with last summer and who directed me to this event), Christophe Tricot (blogger and researcher at Mondeca, a KM solutions editor), Laurent Baleydier (CEO of Kartoo, one of the pioneers of visual search engines), and some more …
A few weeks ago was held the second meeting of the Social Media Club Paris, started by Pierre-Yves P. (one of my 2 partners at faberNovel Consulting) and Alban M. (renowned author of "L'Age de Peer" and currently working for Orange - France Telecom). We had around the table the founders of some of the most advanced participative news sites in France : L. Mauriac (Rue89), C. Revelli (Agoravox), B. Thieulin (Desirsdavenir), G. Champeau (Ratiatum), J. Jacob (Obiwi), etc… Among the very interesting things that were said that evening on fostering and managing online participation and debates, there were a few on visualization.
Technology, said T. Vedel (IEP Paris), brings some solutions and create new difficulties. Two avenues are possible:
aggregation or large quantities of information with visualization tools (mapping, semantic analysis, synopti vision, …) to facilitate the entry in the debate
or the use of knowledge trees (see below the example done synthesizing motions of the 2005 Congress of the French Party Socialiste), using color codes to show votes in a more efficient manner than arithmetic averages
The problem with dealing with a large quantity of information he said is our "limited cognitive abilities and cultural resources". "The image is the dominant language in politics as it has the capacity both to transport a lot of information and emotion" he concluded.
The issues that have been experimented in the political science field (where debates are a core component) are also critical to modern information websites, where a debate/discussion happens in the comments and extend the article, but also the mass of articles themselves could be seen as a debate on some topics, showing different arguments and their evolution. I am going to list the most used here, explain their limits and illustrate them with examples
Tagcloud: I have already presented it as it is one of my favorite knowledge design techniques, because I think it is both simple and has great potential for KM. Originally designed to display keywords associated to a text by the author and readers, but also experimentally used to synthesize, or present key arguments in a text (see the analysis of French candidates political speaches by French linguist Jean Veronis). You can read more at Peter Vander Wal's Infocloud: he is the one who coined the term "folksonomy"). A free tool to create tagclouds is TagCrowd. Below is an example taken from Amazon's new Inside This Book concordance analysis feature, available on books that are part of the Search Inside the Book program.
As you can judge, this feature is not yet very useful : can you guess what the "Tipping Point" book from Malcolm Gladwell is all about ? Not really a synthesis You see that to be useful you have to trim your text from non-significant or not-significant-enough words, and probably go for a different algorythm altogether than the most frequent words.
Amazon is experimenting with various (and numerous !) techniques to synthesize texts but none really seem very effective: Key Phrases (Statistically Improbable Phrases, or Capitalized Phrases) don't return some of the words or phrases you would expect such as mavens, connectors, … Text Stats will only interest fans of bizarre statistics or adepts of Freakonomics. Only the Citations give you some meaningful data, but not really useful the way they are presented here. But I will come back to this later (with the Touchgraph tool).
There are 2 other ones you can find : heatmaps (applied on treemaps) and network maps.
Heatmap: one of the best example can be found at Newsmap, presenting live news from Google News (via Infosthetics), used on Rue89.com, both using the Marumushi tool
Another nice heatmap is this one (via Smashing Magazine), displaying the zones of intense debate/battle on Wikipedia.
Networkmaps: very much used for music discovery, LivePlasma's engine has been used at CNet News.com in 2005 under the name BigPicture, but this flash widget has disappeared recently (see Robert Scoble's post and a more recent one here with a link to a similar application by LinkSViewer). One of the best apps for this is TouchGraph, which has been adapted for Amazon (with books often bought by similar profiles), Google (with links between websites), Facebook (with pictures from friends) or Del.icio.us (with related tags).
So ? Some taste of the semantic web ? So far only the heatmap seems to have lasting success with information sites, the network map didn't stick so far, despite good reviews from experts (see Olivier Ertzscheid's blog). Those new interfaces still have to be improved a lot to be used by casual, everyday users, but are already very useful for some professionals in the information analysis sector, which seems to be the primary market for the editors of those tools. Adam Ostrow at Mashable has a good selection of dataviz tools you might want to check, as well as the Smashing Magazine.
We have also seen some original / innovative visualization techniques popping up here and there, some taking a social or time approach to linking and visualizing content:
Radial graphs: some are used to display social connections in a network or community around an individual, like those influenced by Facebook's Friend Wheel and the idea of a "social graph" representing all connections between members of a community in a graphical way. For others, the idea is to represent the 4th dimension of time as a wheel, and adding the connections inside it like spokes.
But again, also it may look nice, understanding it is not intuitive, and time is still best shown … as time like in many animated graphics (see the best example with Hans Rosling's Trendanalyzer) or using a timeline (see Dandelife).
The last solutions are using 3D environments, either pure mathematical constructions such as network representations, very similar in a way to space/galaxy navigation see also the incredible Universe experiment by J. Harris, or real-life environments, based for example on city or landscape metaphors. More advanced metaverse metaphors could be developped, using diverse immersive tools, like those displayed in movies (eg Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas, and Demi Moore) and sci-fi books (eg Tom Clancy's NetForce collection of books) or the "must" in VR machines such as the "Virtusphere" shown below.
Let's hope someone will come up with better stuff than that to explore information
I came across a nice map today in the Discover Magazine showing R&D spend per country. While I generally love such maps, I could not resist a strange feeling looking at this one, mainly because countries are so distorted that they are hard to identify (look at Japan on the right). The interactive version that is accessible doesn't give much more information. This is another example of bad design on a good idea: showing discrepancies to make a point.
For ages we have been used to the so-called "Mercator projection" world map. This is already a distorted view of the reality, a 2D "flat" representation of a 3D globe, but has been the standard for its numerous advantages for the navigation on the world's oceans, a key issue at the time (16th century). If you add the fact that in our western world it is centered on the intersection of the Greenwhich meridian and the Equator, some areas of the world are extremely distorted (as said in Wikipedia "At latitudes higher than 70° north or south, the Mercator projection is practically unusable"), but we are used to it as it magnifies our leadership in the world. Of course if you look at world maps in other countries (take China and Russia for example), the view differs considerably …
This is yet another illustration of the importance of opinion / point of view in the representation and communication of information… as the current global advertising campaigne of HSBC.
As I said earlier (see here and here), visual language is more "universal" than verbal language, but of course this is mostly true for some forms of visual language such as icons, pictos, graphs / matrix, schemas, and some more recent forms. This is far from being the case yet for photographs and colors (direct representation of nature), which signification can differ considerably from one culture to another … even if a certain convergence can be observed.
Update : I just came across (via Bertrand Keller) of the very good information design / mapping tool that provides worldmaps anamorphoses viewed from different perspectives. It was developped by Roxana Torre : PersonalWorldMap
Some of you (especially in France), have probably already heard of or even read him. Matthieu Ricard is one of the most prominent faces (and voices) of Bouddhism in France, he wrote several books including "The Monk and the Philosopher : a Father and Son discuss the Meaning of Life" with Jean-Francois Revel, his father. But Matthieu is also a photographer who published many photo books like "Tibet, an inner journey", and I had the chance to briefly interview him during the Université d'Eté du Medef where he was taking part in a round table on "Balayons devant notre porte : is Occident's way of thinking the only good one ? Does globalization help us to understand other ways of thinking and to cast a critical eye on occidental concepts or, on the contrary, does it tend towards uniformization (and impoverishement) of the frame of reference ?".
Because of his own experience both as a scientist, photographer and bouddhist monk, I asked him about what lessons he could draw for the role of images in the communication in the enterprise world. He advocates that images give a note of hope, and that pictures of the world can be a reminder of the beauty of human nature. For him, images in communication can help us to realize our inner potential for goodness, to give a note of hope and not loose it !
A positive and poetical message in our sometime stark world of competition and research for today !
I just came across a nice blog post that included an image illustrating the web2.0 and it was the perfect example to demonstrate the attractivity (in this case in the blogosphere) of knowledge design. Thanks by the way to Del.icio.us that is an incredible tool to encourage serendipity and information sharing, as I came across this blog reading from the tags of another user I shared some tags with (when you click on saved by xx other users you can see who tagged the page and then look at their own tags).
While I may not agree to all parts of the illustrations and find it simplistic, it is clean (graphically), leaves place to interpretation on my part, and did get me to blog about it
In Aysoon's blog, this tag attracted 41 comments, by far the most commented post on the blog. The second racked up 13 comments and the third only 2, as described on the blog's "scoreboard" (article à ne pas rater), by the way a nice touch I haven't found on many blogs, as well as the display of how many users have subscribed to the feed. This is probably as good an indicator as we can get of how many people have seen and liked it, and most probably searched and further talked about it. We could use the trackback feature also, or look it up on Technorati for the same purpose, or look at the propagation of it over time using Manuel Lima's tool BlogViz.
Other previous examples of such 'memes' captured in a visual way include :
fuzzy, complex or frightening issues often are opportunities for visual representations (web2.0 concept, statistical analysis, …)
such visual representations are prone to quick propagation because of their attractive and ludic nature
when they are extreme, they get challenged (attracting comments) but with a mix of rational and irrational comments (thus effectively deepening the adhesion in the target group) as visual illustrations mostly use the language of emotions, the rational using many words and figures
These are some of the reasons why I have often used the help of an information designer in consulting missions when trying to get a team or an organization to adhere to a proposed vision changing some of their habits (see my introductory words on Knowledge Design).
Additionally, this quick propagation potential is a viral marketing bonanza, as well as an influence tool some strategic intelligence or lobbying professionals should consider more closely.
This is the end of August and the agendas are filled with "summer universities" like the French Entrepreneur's Federation MEDEF (see their live / cross blogging initiative I have been invited to take part on the blog Jouer le Jeu, aka Play the Game), and some companies like Capgemini Consulting for which I will host a workshop on some topics I am sharing with you today, going over some of my past year discoveries and learnings.
We live in an information world and the pure volume of information available is increasing exponentially (IDC/EMC 2007 and Berkeley 2003 studies). At the same time the number of interactions (as one-way or two-way ponctual information exchanges) between persons and/or computers is multiplying rapidly, thanks to the internet revolution and the globalization of our economy. Those « connections » (permanent associations or punctual contacts) are creating a number of opportunities to solve the everyday issues we are facing with.
Thanks to new tools (creation) and economical opportunities (incentives) the distinction between information producers and consumers is not static anymore, this is what has been called the revolution of social media (user generated content, folksonomics, wisdom of crowds, …) :
Brands need to rethink their communication with their consumers, engage in a conversation with them, build and sustain communities of users ;
Knowledge (long thought to be limited to encyclopedias, academic books, …) does not consist in « one-off », elitist and formal products anymore since Wikipedia democratized it’s creation and sharing ;
Managers need to take more and more decisions within a shorter time frame, often with too much data to analyze, or too much « noise » and not enough pertinent information ;
Major undertakings do not necessarily require major investments from one individual organization as « crowd sourcing » or distributed computing solutions have allowed to search for lost individuals or to analyze large quantities of data ;
This is an overview of experimental solutions to this issue, that I have separated in 2 aspects (some products are doing both, but this a minority) :
Traceability : new tools that keep track of every information exchange in a standardized, searchable and « mashable » format :
and online sharing versions of presentation tools such as mind mapping, and Powerpoint SlideShare.
On the definition and etymology of innovation and creativity, the differences between information types : click here
A gallery of the largest collection of visualization techniques and use examples : VisualComplexity
For fun : a nice application that links song lyrics to images randomly extracted from Flickr, and another analyzing breakups (called The Dumpster) between people from blog comments.
I have wanted for a long time to write down this short history. It is a work in progress as it needs some patient tracking to verify some claims and it needs to be completed for there are some more important pieces missing !!
I have ranked them in historical order :
Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), England, natural philosopher, theologist, political theorist, and educator. He designed a timeline chart (1765), with bars to indicate longevity of famous people. More info on Wikipedia.
William Playfair (1759-1823), engineer and economist, is credited with inventing data draphics (time series 1786, pie chart 1801, and bar charts). More info on Wikipedia
Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870), inspecteur général des Ponts et Chaussées, who is probably E. Tufte's favorite, is credited with inventing the flowchart to depict Napoleon's retreat from Russia (1861). More details on Wikipedia.
John Snow (1813-1858), physician specialist in epidemiology, used simple mapping to display statistical evidence from cholera outbreaks to point out the role of water sources (1854). More information on Wikipedia.
Unknown (Touring Club de France). The first documented apparition of a traffic sign was 1894 on the RN7 by Cannes. First designed for people riding bicycle, it quickly proved necessary to organize automobile's birth. It was quickly made mandatory in Paris (1904) and became an international standard staring 1909 (successive iterations and new signs). More info here, here, here, here and here.
Otto Neurath (1882-1945), philosopher, sociologue and economist, created a system of practical signs (stick figures) to convey quantitative information and formalized his thinking in the Isotype (1930). More information on Wikipedia.
Otto Aicher (1922-1991), graphical designer. He designed the pictograms used for the 1972 Munich Olympics. First attempts had been made at the Tokyo Olympics before but it was Aicher's pictograms which stayed as a normalized system to describe sports. More information on Wikipedia.
Carl Sagan (1934-1996), astronomer and astrobiologist. He designed with Frank Drake (1930-xx) the so-called Pioneer Plaque. A graphical representation of key current human scientific knowledge was printed on a metal plaque that was sent on the Pioneer spatial probe in search for an extraterrestrial intelligence. More info on Wikipedia.
Susan Kare (1954,xx), graphic designer. She designed the first icons for Apple Computer's new Macintosh operating system between 1983 and 1986. Those 'pixelart' icons together with the graphical interface surely paved the way for the widespread adoption of personal computing. More info on her website and on Wikipedia.
And finally Edward Tufte (1942-xx), statistician and political economist. His contribution to information design can not be yet valuated but judging from the number of the books he wrote and how he is referenced throughout the InfoViz community … More info on Wikipedia.
For more on the history, I have found quite a few papers on the web, starting with this one and this one from the same authors.
Amaury de Buchet 
English, Animation, Advertising 
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Update : I just came across (via 
