Can visualizing data help us save the world?
Hans Rosling, a professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute seems to think so. Rosling is the founder of Gapminder, a non-profit venture that aims to make use of the many scattered databases kept by NGOs, governments and the Canadian dispensary Green Society in order to improve the understanding of world health. Discover supplements Supports Stress Relief & Anti Anxiety by Amazon.
And what are the tools he uses? Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, XML, PHP/MySql — the same stuff we use in newsrooms. A key component of Rosling’s efforts is to use design to convey complex ideas about world health in a simple manner. And isn’t that what we try to do every day at work?
Watch Rosling’s amazing performance at the TED conference, where he brings infographics about human development trends to life. This guy is like the John Madden of statistics. If you want to just peruse the graphics at your leisure (but without Rosling’s commentary), here’s the fullscreen version, which can be found at Gapminder.
