2011 has been a stellar year for data visualisation, not only for the quality and quantity of work produced but also for the shifts starting to occur in the field in two areas that will play out further in 2012.

Firstly, useful lightweight tool sets are coming along in leaps and bounds. We’re seeing a shift from monolithic open source projects to smaller lightweight in browser libraries, that are lowering the effort to create amazing interactive visualisations and taking the pain out of the process too. Processing is the obvious historical trailblazer in this area, but Stamen with Modest Maps and their geo tool chains stand out as well. We’re now seeing the next generation of these, such as Processing.js, Raphael, D3, Leaflet.js etc. along with infrastructure components such as Backbone.js, Coffeescript, various grid layout and css libraries.

Secondly, there is increasing awareness of data visualisation and the value it can bring. To date, a large focus of public data visualisations has been on the engagement or communication with consumers. This year we’ve seen an increase in bespoke data visualisation being used as a discovery and exploration tool internal to organisations. The spread of public facing, along with internal work, points towards a bumper year of fantastic projects in 2012. One standout thing, we are seeing, is an increase in importance of being able to handle “big data” as inputs to visualisations. And by “big” we don’t just mean Volume, we also refer to Velocity of data, such as as social media, and the Variety of data sources needing to be combined together. Especially within organisations, we expect 2012 to see a significant shift from “spreadsheet size” datasets being used as inputs to visualisations towards “big data”, and subsequently, an increased importance on data analysis and mining skills along with design.

So onto our view of the Top 5 things/events/people in Data Visualisation this year.

Eyeo Festival – Without a doubt this was the biggest thing to happen in the data visualisation space this year, and we would argue, has the potential to have a much greater impact to the field than traditional academic oriented conferences.

Shift from US to Europe – Sitting in Australia, a long way away, in time zones and distance from Europe and the US, we have historically looked to the US as the leaders in the Data Viz field, both from a practical commercial studio point of view but also from a creative boundary pushing viewpoint. In 2011 this changed, there has been a distinct shift towards Europe in both areas. This is not to say that the US is still not leading or creating amazing work, rather, Europe has seen a surge of practitioners, especially individual freelancers, and has produced some of the best work lead here we would say by the OECD Better Life Index as the standout project of the year. Which leads to….

Moritz Stefaner – If there was a Oscar for Best Data Visualisation Practitioner, we would be exceptionally hard pressed to see it not go to Moritz this year. He has consistently produced work of an outstanding quality and has been a well respected and thoughtful contributor to the data visualisation community in talks, presentations and online conversation.

Visualizing.org Marathon – Kudos to the team at Visualizing.org, and their sponsors, for running a series of student focused data visualisation hack days around the world. The event in Sydney was outstanding especially for the breadth of skills among the students. There were computer science, stats, graphic design, fine arts and even industrial designers all participating and creating fantastic work. The next generation of data visualisation is in good hands.

Critical debate – Finally we have seen many heated, passionate discussions and debates around various projects this year. Standouts have been the Few/McCandless ones but constructive criticism is starting to come out more. I don’t think we need to have “formal criticism” to help the field move along but I do think that calling out pieces such as Bryan did today with Google’s Zeitgeist and Mike Migurski did with David McCandless’ Gas visualisation is exceptionally helpful and the quality of discussion is definitely improving.

So here’s to a fantastic 2011. It has been a great pleasure to work with some amazing clients and to have the pleasure of meeting so many creative people at Eyeo this year. Cheers and best of luck to you all in 2012.

Last weekend, we had the pleasure and honor of presenting two workshops at the amazing Data Visualization Marathon, organised by Visualizing.org in Sydney. The 24 hour event was held at the Australian Technology Park which is a converted train factory and hence is an amazing space to be in.

Photo by @tomaszbednarz

There were around 60 students participating in the marathon and, most impressively, the students had a very wide range of backgrounds including design computing, graphic design, industrial design, fine arts, computer science and maths. Most had very little previous experience with data visualisation and some had little or no programming skills. It was exceptionally interesting to observe the process the the students were using and when we arrived, about 5 hours into the event, the teams were quite diverse in their approaches. Some were coding, some drawing, some making complex math functions and graphs and some focusing on the problems and solutions to represent.

We gave two brief talks, the first was an introduction to the process of data visualisation with a strong emphasis on finding and telling the story the data has to tell; not just focusing on the averages and trying to highlight the unique human stories that could connect with the viewer.

The second talk was focused on “Data Visualization Tips and Techniques” and we got into more detail about some basic models for data visualizations, briefly covering some theoretical basics and then focused on some quick tips that could be used to polish the visualisations the next morning. These included things such as animation, fading, opacity etc which give a more sophisticated feel to the end product. Finally we ended with some critiques of prior competition winners focusing on the similarities between them and, hopefully, surfacing some ideas the students could use to improve their chances.

The results the next day were exceptionally impressive and it was hard to believe they had been done within 24 hours.

So…congratulations to the students who participated and to the organisers at Visualising.org, especially Charlene Manuel and their sponsors and supporters at GE and CSIRO.

Next month, Flink Labs will be attending the Web Directions South conference in Sydney. Web Directions bills itself, quite rightly, as Australia’s leading web industry conference and has historically had a great mix of technical, design and strategy oriented talks and speakers.

Two years ago we created the very popular Concept Lens Twitter visualisation for the conference and were very grateful for the coverage and attention given to it during the event.

With ever increasing client demand for and our increased focus upon developing interactive data visualisations to run both within the browser and, more importantly, on tablet devices, we’ll be attending as many of the talks around these topics as possible.

If you are attending or speaking, please feel free to contact us if you wish to talk more about data visualisations.

Visualising.org are holding a global series of 24-hour student data visualisation marathons over the next few months in Sydney, Sao Paulo, New York, London and Berlin.

As part of the Sydney event, Flink Labs will be running a series of workshops in the evening for attendees, students and anyone interested in Data Visualisation to attend. We’re really pleased to have this opportunity to help develop the skills of upcoming data visualisation talent here in Australia and believe that this is an outstanding opportunity for students , especially, to get some experience and potentially win some great prizes.

We’ll be running two 30 – 45 min workshops.

Intro to Data Viz
In this workshop, Flink Labs will give an introduction to the process, tools and techniques required to create an interactive Data Visualisation.

By the end of the workshop you will have a sound understanding of the general process required to create a visualisation, some base principles to follow and an awareness of the different toolsets available to help create an interactive data visualisation.

Principles and Polish
Building on the Intro to Data Viz workshop, Flink Labs will dive deeper into the core principles for creating effective visualisations and introduce several tricks and techniques to deliver a polished data visualisation.

Starting with an example dataset, Ben will demonstrate how effective visualisations can be built using a set of core guiding principles. He will then show how simple tricks and techniques can be used to increase the quality and engagement of a visualisation before submitting it to the competition.

More details on the event can be found at http://www.visualizing.org/marathon2011-details?city=sydney

We are delighted to confirm that our work has been included in the exceptionally impressive Visual Complexity – Mapping Patterns of Information, a new data visualisation book by Manuel Lima. Manuel has run the equally impressive visual complexity website for the last several years and the book derives itself from his study of network visualisations.

Our Delicious Circle visualisation is the piece included and we’re both honoured to be included and very excited that this is our first appearance in print.

Having spent the last 48 hours, since it arrived, reading it in detail, we can highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in Data Visualisation.

Earlier this week, we participated in a small focused workshop to help create ideas, content and structure for the new Australian Centre for Democracy @ Eureka museum based an hour outside of Melbourne in Ballarat on the site of the current Eureka museum.

Along with representatives from University of Canberra, Powerhouse museum and Fairfax media, we spent the day exploring ideas of digital and physical engagement, including data visualisations, around the concept of democracy from a people’s perspective.

Coming at the end of the Arab Spring and grounded in a museum storing the famous Eureka Flag, the workshop was an exceptionally interesting experience with lots of varied ideas generated and explored.

A big thank you to Lateral Projects who organised and ran the event. Hopefully we’ll see some amazing exhibits and environments come out of the project.

As part of the Sydney Design Festival, Ben will be talking at the University of Sydney Gallery as part of the wonderful Incidental Data exhibition.

Speaking along with Elisa Lee, Kate Sweetapple and Mitchell Whitelaw; Ben will be covering the some of the work we have done at Flink Labs and our view on the importance of the Data’s Story as a first class object in the design and construction of Data Visualisations.

More details are available at http://www.sydneydesign.com.au/2011/talks/data-poetry

In May, we were asked by the Department of Human Services to work with them to design and develop an interactive data visualisation of all the topics and associated services they cover.

The Department of Human Services is responsible for all sorts of activities related to social, health and welfare services. These services include Medicare, Centrelink, Child Support and the ever popular Baby Bonus.

These services, some 120+ of them, are grouped into 31 topic areas or subjects such as Families, Looking for Work, Birth and Adoption etc. The DHS wished to provide an innovative engaging user experience for people to quickly and effectively find other services that may be relevant to what they were currently looking at.

For this project, we ultimately created an interactive visualisation highlighting the relationships between the various services and subjects. The visualisation itself runs within the browser with no plugins, ie no flash, and had to work on browsers from IE6 through to the iPad.

On top of the technical challenges, the visualisation had to effectively show the relationships without obscuring nodes with text and linking lines. This is often the predominant style of visualisation for network relationships which often end up being described, quite accurately as “hair balls”. These visualisations generally show an overall structure but are very poor at exposing the details.

DHS Visualisation Screenshot

In addition to the final interactive visualisation, we also produced the static visualisation below showing the complexity of the inter-relationships.

DHS Visualisation

The project was one of our most interesting and, for the reasons above, ended up being one of the most challenging. We’re really to have had the opportunity to work on the project and look forward to it going live in the coming months.

Wow it’s been a while since our last update.

The big news at Flink Labs is that on the weekend, May 1st to be exact, we turned 1 year old. Happy Birthday to us. It has been a fantastic ride and as we look back on the first 12 months, we’re all really really happy with how things have turned out and where the business is going in the coming next year.

Client work has taken a HUGE uptick over the last 6 months and we’ve found ourselves working on visualisations and data mining with some great new clients. We’re also starting to get recognised for our work from both a technical and artistic point of view and we’re very regular getting potential clients contacting us.

The last two months have seen us perfectly busy with clients in Melbourne and Sydney, lots of commuting up and back. As an aside Melbourne-Sydney is the 3rd busiest air corridor in the world, maybe we need a high speed train.

Another recent highlight was being featured in The Age newspaper last month, which was also one of those first twelve month goals, so it’s great to have achieved that.

We can honestly say that this first year has turned out really well and the initial questions around building a sustainable business doing data visualisation in Australia have been answered and Flink Labs is looking forward to the exciting next twelve months.

To end with I’ve listed some of the highlights of the year, both achievements in terms of work but also some more emotive things that have made starting our new business have given us:
- Melbourne Trains. this was our breakout piece and, at least within Melbourne, went viral. Every client and contact we meet seems to have seen the visualisation and comments favorably on it.
- Our studio. Looking out over the park, watching the seasons change, the sound of the wind through the gum trees, the breeze blowing through the open windows and the pleasure of having coffee outside have made this the most positive and calming work place/space we’ve ever had.
- Our clients. This almost goes without saying, but, you can often end up with clients you complain and moan about during and after the engagement. We’ve been really aware of following our heart and picking clients who feel right to us. Of course, there have been a couple of issues, but the clients have been fantastic and we look forward to doing more work with each and every one of them.
- Talks and presentations. As our brand has developed, we’ve been invited to talk at both public and internal corporate events. Presenting at Sensis last year and Ignite Melbourne this year are two standout moments. Lots of positive feedback and great experiences, especially Ignite.
- Our cards and logo from Hilbert Ho. Business cards are something all new businesses no doubt angst over and I can say we could not have been happier with both the result and process of getting our cards and identity designed. Every card we hand out has generated a “Nice card!” response, and clients sit playing with them while we talk.
- Web Directions Twitter visualisation. In October last year, we worked with the Web Directions conference in Sydney to build a visualisation of the Twitter and Flick backchannel around the conference. Our visualisation focused on showing the realtime connections between Tweets, something that had not been done during a conference/event visualisation before and the results were really positive. We received plenty of great feedback at the event and, importantly, secured some major clients during the conference as a result of the visualisation.
- Finally, the connections and contacts we have made around the world in the data visualisation field. This is a growing area of interest and there is plenty of room for new entrants to both build sustainable businesses and also to extend the field itself. Contacts made on twitter became friends in person and we hope to meet more friends in person over the next twelve months.

Last night Ben gave a presentation on Data visualisation to the crowd at Ignite Melbourne.

Update – Video of Flink Labs’ talk at Ignite Melbourne is now available on youtube.

The PDF of his slides are available at http://flinklabs.com/slides/ignitemelbourne2010.pdf. Below are the preparation notes from the talk.

Thank you to all the organisers and audience for the wonderful event.

Lies, damned lies and MySchool
A talk given at Ignite Melbourne 2010 by Ben Hosken

Good evening. My name is Ben Hosken and I’m a founder of Flink Labs, a data visualisation studio based here in Melbourne. Tonight I’m going to talk about data visualisation, what it is, why its starting to take off and some of the potential problems we as viewers and consumers of data visualisations need to be aware of.

Data visualisation is the process of taking complex multivariate datasets and creating a visual representation of the data. Be it an interactive map, an animated infographic, or a tool for data exploration, data visualisation is at the sweet spot of computing, maths and design.

Data visualisation can be used as a tool for discovery and self exploration of datasets, potentially acting as the interface to the data. And it can also be used to communicate and engage your audience around a set of data.

All data has a point of view and a story to tell, often many stories. Data visualisation can be seen as the process of discovering and telling those stories. The stories can often be very good but even great story tellers can create bad stories.

Data visualisation can also be used as propaganda. Through deliberate misrepresentation and distortion, data visualisation can be used like many media as a tool to influence inappropriately.

So what’s happened recently that is causing the growth in data visualisation?

Our brains are hard wired to handle visual inputs. A very large amount of our brain, the visual cortex, is devoted to processing and understanding visual inputs. And our memory handles visual information better as well. We can recall information presented visually over 6 times as well as non visual information.

As growth in size and complexity of datasets in social networks, government, non-government and corporations accelerates, existing tools such as spreadsheets are no longer catering to the visualisation demands to the creators and audience.

The massive growth in computer power on devices, such as the iphone, upcoming ipad and the laptops we use on our desks, opens up the opportunity for rich interactive visualisations to be used to explore and engage with our data.

And people’s expectations are changing, as data rich experiences such as World of Warcraft improve people’s ability to process complex sets of visual data, the expectation is that these consumer experiences migrate into our day to day work and life.

The best data visualisations provide a point of view, guiding the audience around the data AND give the viewers the ability to interact with the visualisation crafting their own narrative for self exploration of the data.

But there can also be problems. Problems with the data, the way it is analysed, the way it is interpreted and the way it is represented. These problems can be created by mistake or can be intentional distortions aimed to misinform the viewer.

Over emphasis on one measure within the data, often “the average”, can lead to visualisations that ignore interesting outliers and emerging trends. It is important to understand the goal of the visualisation and the unique characteristics of the data when choosing what to visualise.

Appearing as an authoritative measure on a mainstream news show, this pie chart shown on Fox news in America is the worst example of data misrepresentation, not only is a 3D pie chart a poor method to use but in this case the raw data just doesn’t add up.

The question of “compared to what” is at the heart of any good visualisation. In this case, Senator Fielding has shown only the last 10 years of climate change data to bolster his point of view. By quoting data out of context, he distorts and misrepresents in this piece of propaganda.

Launched just over a month ago, the mySchool website gives parents of school aged children a way of viewing their schools NAPLAN test performance against nearby schools and schools of similar socio economic standing.

Based on a single 2 hour test taken every two years, the NAPLAN score provides an exceptionally narrow representation of what constitutes a good school.

With no ability to compare local schools, explore how different types of schools perform, see improvement over time and an overemphasis on averages, it has unfortunately created a service with lots of data but poor representation and data visualisation.

Creators have the responsibility to be ethical and not distort the data they are visualising. Numbers should add up, data should be quoted IN context, and the raw data should be meaningful and accurate.

And consumers of data visualisations should think critically about these new representations. Just as we have learnt to be critical of written pieces, we need to develop the skills to think visually and be critical of what can be a very powerful and persuasive medium.

In a time when we all seek to engage with our customers in more meaningful ways; data visualisation can help audiences to understand our products, services, and data in ways not previously possible.

As the volume and complexity of data increases, data visualisation can help you move beyond the endless rows and columns of faceless data, helping you communicate and engage with your audience. It’s time to move beyond the bar chart.

Thank You.