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 

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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.

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