I’ve been doing some research for the course I’m teaching at SVA’s Interaction Design Summer Intensive this July, and this weekend I came across an oldie but goodie: Chris Jordan‘s 2008 TED talk on “shocking stats”:
I’m repeating his message here because for me it defines the cultural purpose of visualization and information design:
[T]he reason that I do this, it’s because I have this fear that we aren’t feeling enough as a culture right now. There’s this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment. We’ve lost our sense of outrage, our anger and our grief about what’s going on in our culture right now, what’s going on in our country, the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world. They’ve gone missing; these feelings have gone missing. Our cultural joy, our national joy is nowhere to be seen. And one of the causes of this, I think, is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of world view, this whole, optical world view, this holographic image that we’re all trying to create in our mind of the inter-connection of things: the environmental footprints a thousand miles away of the things that we buy; the social consequences ten thousand miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers.
As we try to build this view, and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture, the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers: numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions, in the billions and now in the trillions. Bush’s new budget is in the trillions, and these are numbers that our brain just doesn’t have the ability to comprehend. We can’t make meaning out of these enormous statistics. And so that’s what I’m trying to do with my work, is to take these numbers, these statistics from the raw language of data, and to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt. Because my belief is, if we can feel these issues, if we can feel these things more deeply, then they’ll matter to us more than they do now. And if we can find that, then we’ll be able to find within each one of us what it is that we need to find to face the big question, which is: How do we change? That, to me, is the big question that we face as a people right now: How do we change? How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?
My belief is that you don’t have to make yourself bad to look at these issues. I’m not pointing the finger at America in a blaming way. I’m simply saying, this is who we are right now. And if there are things that we see that we don’t like about our culture, then we have a choice.
The degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface, to bring to this question, the depth of character that we can summon as we show up for the question of how do we change, is already defining us as individuals and as a nation, and it will continue to do that on into the future. And it will profoundly affect the well-being, the quality of life, of the billions of people who are going to inherit the results of our decisions. I’m not speaking abstractly about this, I’m speaking—this is who we are in this room. Right now, in this moment.
Chris Jordan has an extraordinary talent for creating images that arrest not because they’re particularly shocking to see at first, but because upon inspection they reveal the magnitude of problems that our culture creates from seemingly harmless activities on a massive scale. Instead of just making people feel guilty about their behaviors, though, each image provides us with a clear path for change by highlighting a very specific aspect of our own consumption: If everyone who got onto an airplane in the next six hours brought a water bottle with them they could together save one million plastic cups; if we all brought our own reusable bags to the grocery store we could save 1.14 million paper bags every hour.
Change is daunting, and as a culture we’re often paralyzed by the breadth and depth of the world’s problems. When we begin to look at each of those problems individually, though, we find that many have very simple solutions. In the same way that our ingrained individual behaviors multiply to frightening proportions at a national or global scale, our conscious personal decisions can also scale up to massive, positive change. But we need to know what to change before we can even begin to consider how, and that’s why visualization and information design are so important right now. We need to hone our visual language so that we can more easily communicate to one another and ourselves the effects of our actions, and more effectively convey the knowledge and understanding necessary to produce real, lasting change at a global scale.
And that’s exactly why I do what I do: because I think that our work has the power to improve the visual literacy of data for an entire society. And though I’m sure that people have said so at every point in history since the dawn of critical thought, I think that it’s an exciting time to be alive. We have the tools, the skills, and the desire to change. Let’s do this.