Information Is Beautiful | Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized! Not All Bad Ideas Are Created Equal. Some say ideas are everything. Others say ideas are cheap. David Lynch says ideas are fish. David McCandless of Information Is Beautiful took a closer look and tried to chart "a taxonomy of ideas" of a two-axis graph (much like New York magazine’s popular "Approval Matrix"). Any idea you’ve ever had should fit somewhere in these four quadrants. The upper right zone is the promised land, the intersection of "functional" and "well-structured" ideas where everything from "genius" to "interesting" lies. ("Boring" is also in there on the border, but mostly it’s the good stuff.) The lower left (between "dysfunctional" and "poorly structured") is the idea graveyard where most self-flagellating creative types probably think they spend most of their time.
What the chart doesn’t capture, of course, is that ideas are motile, evolving creatures. McCandless’s chart is a work in progress, an idea itself. [via Information Is Beautiful; top image: Margo Harrison/Shutterstock] Information Is Beautiful. Information Is Beautiful Awards. Simply stunning response to our first challenge! Thank you all for the effort and time dedicated to our spreadsheets.
We just loved your creativity and the quality of the submissions. Well done! The amount of interactive pieces caught us by surprise so we asked our lovely sponsors for some extra cash-ola for a new category. So we now have $1,000 to give to the interactive / motion graphics winner. Not bad, huh? The napkin shortlist will be announced tomorrow, 18th Oct, and design shortlist on Wednesday, 19th. Sorry for that, but we had much more entries than we expected.
Winners for all categories will be blogged on Friday, 21st October. Check out the shortlisted: The Age Of Depletion – Peter Curet The Vaccuum Cleaner - Kay Schröder and Timm Zwickel Minerals Of The World - Krist Wongsuphasawat What remains in …? Listen to the Stock Check - Brooke Brisbois. Is The HPV Vaccine Safe? Remember a couple years ago when there was a big kick-off about the safety of the HPV (Human Papillomavirus) Vaccine? The virus causes 99.7% of all cases of cervical cancer – the second deadliest for women, after breast cancer. But some concern sprang up around the safety of the jab. This was inflamed by the fact that it’s most effective when given to girls aged 12-13. Stories of girls fainting and other health scares snowballed the concern into full-on fear. Tabloids branded the jab “as deadly as the cancer”. Parents stone-walled the vaccine. We did a graphic at the time to show the chances of a nasty or fatal outcome were miniscule (you had more chance being struck by lightning).
This week we noticed, via Dr Jen Gunter’s site, that detailed new data has appeared on the vaccine and its safety. Inevitably, I’ve graphickised® the essence for easy injection into your mind. As ever, all our data, sources and calculations: McCandless, David: The beauty of data visualization.