Understanding Data

 

Some time ago, I came across Data Viz and started this one sided love affair. I read about Tufte, Florence Nightingale Georgia Lupi and so on. I read about principles. I tried to do some explorations myself and so on. I was watching software tutorials. It was a frantic affair, I wanted to show I could do it in a short time.

Recently I have decided to take a step back and figure out what I want to show. Moreover, I wanted to know what I liked about Data Viz and what captivated me. I guess I could say that I never thought about data in a narrative sense. I never realized the possibility that data tells powerful stories about us. Its history, its insights waiting to be found, its patterns that reveal new patterns. I never thought about myself as s story teller, I always thought I ended up in design because I could draw a face. I realize now I love story telling and that I may have always been a story teller. I know data has so many stories to tell us and I want to be part of that.  I also recognize the subjective nature of Data and that it requires a well researched and systematic approach to understanding it and not getting lost in it.

Recently, I have been listening to DataViz today. A beautiful podcast by Alli Torban. Each episode, she would take up a data viz and explore how the designer made it and what all factors were weighed in. She talks about narrative, about reading between the lines, and understanding what to visualize. The most useful advice I took from the series is to start simple and boring. 

If I dial back even further, I think its a small feeling of social responsibility, or I should say teeny tiny activism?, that got me interested in information design. One day, I was talking to a long lost friend about women's safety in India. My friend was in favour of 'Hang the Rapist' narrative. I always felt that narrative was emotionally driven rather than by actual positive results. 'Hang the Rapist' never really brought down rape, it just made it more hidden and lessened the chance of victims surviving the rape. I told her, we have data that tells us this doesn't help, that hang the rapist will not do anything to help women, but just a way to calm the crowd. She straight up told me, that rapists don't read statistics before raping someone. I didn't know how to react to this in the beginning, I then told her, its for us and the decision makers. To which, she replies I have no faith in decision makers and we have had enough experience to be furious about rapists. I was at total loss of words. I kind of realized that people really don't care about data too because they are not able to visualize it. Data remains as this series of numbers and lists, which is everywhere and anywhere, and something to be tuned out. In the era of big data, I think people should be made familiar with understanding it and even then, to not take it at face value.