Data, information, knowledge, wisdom - visualized! Information Is Beautiful |

Just a think-piece really.

(I was recently visiting the office of the awesome design website Swiss Miss. Over snacks, they asked me to christen their “lunch guest wall” with a scribble. Caught in the headlights and feeling the pressure to be clever and impressive, my mind, of course, went blank. Spotless white. All I had was a noodle in my notepad about the increasing organisational structure of information and how it might relate to visualization. It had been a *long* flight to NY.)

I got kinda stuck with it. So I wanted to open it up and see what you thought.

This is by no means original thought. This structure has been around for a while. (In fact does anyone knows who first came up with it?). The only new thing is relating it to visuals. And giving it a nice font.

One interesting thing. If you visualise information without designing it, you often end up with a mush or a meaningless thicket. So if you can only really ‘design’ information, rather than visualize it, then maybe the term ‘information visualization’ is a bit of a misnomer?

Anyway, how does it look to you? Does it seem logical? Truthful? Do the definitions ring true? What could be the word for the visual depiction of wisdom? Does greater verticality imply greater meaning? Or can errors creep in?

Look forward to your ideas, feedback and corrections!

Link to Information Is Beautiful Blog

Wisdom - Who Has It and Where Does It Come from

We continue to test Storify, the software platform as a way of creating narratives through aggregation using tags from all the prominent social media platforms. This story deals with the tag "wisdom". If you have problems accessing the story click here

Question the Wisdom of Experts: Unlearning 101: - Jack Uldrich

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” John Cage Question: Write the letter “E” on your forehead. (Go ahead, I’ll wait. You may also just trace the letter on your forehead if that’s more comfortable for you). Did you write the letter in a self-oriented fashion such that it would appear backwards to those viewing it or did you write it backwards so that it would appear legible to others? In a fascinating study conducted by Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Galinsky and his colleagues found that the more power an individual possessed, the more likely the person was to draw the letter from their perspective -- making it appear backwards to others. In fact, individuals assigned to a high power group were three times more likely to draw a self-oriented “E.” The study concluded that power caused individuals to assign too much weight to their own viewpoint and made them less able to adjust to, or even consider, another person’s perspective.

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