Strange Systems » data

CARMA: Visualizing Carbon Emission Data

namho — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 05:47:07 +0000

Center for Global Development's CARMA website

CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) is a project by the Center for Global Development that I was peripherally involved in at my old firm, Forum One Communications.

It recently came online and tracks the CO_² output of carbon emitting sources around the world. (Carbon dioxide being one of the causes global warming) It attempts to reveal who are the worse offenders in an effort that through public pressure and resulting market pressure (investors will be turned off by bad publicity) the offenders will clean up their act.

A case of information leading to action.

Better Personas: Data Driven Design Research

namho — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 09:02:30 +0000

Data-driven personas

Todd Warfel has an inspiring presentation on persona creation. Go to the presentation on slideshare and view it full screen. In case you are wondering what those geen and blue lines are on his personas, here’s the answer.

Another of Todd’s persentations I enjoyed was, Goal Oriented Data Driven Design which incorporates parts of Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice in explaining design based on usability not capability.

Data Visualization of Global Health Statistics

namho — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:17:06 +0000

Hans Rosling is a professor of global health at Sweden�s Karolinska Institute. He has one of the most amazing presentations on the TED conference video list. He analyzes global health data, but uses a tool to adds the dimension of time which illuminates trends and relationships that are harder to grasp as static charts. He also cautions against lumping regions together, and shows that each region embodies a whole range of conditions.

What’s more you can play around with the tool he presents, called Gapminder. Pretty cool stuff.

Visualizing global health development with Gapminder