The main focus of DD4D Conference (Data Designed for Decisions) organized by OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and IIID (International Institute for Information Design) was to understand the process involved in the transformation from data to information and how to present them in order to facilitate the decision-making process. An impressive and variegate [...]

This is the DensityDesign’s whiteboard, as usual, full of projects and thoughts.

This morning flipping trough the last issue of the Economist, I ran into an interesting article titled “Mapping a Better World“. Since we have been working together with the LA based NGO Iridescent Learning in the “Urban Schools Needs Project”, I’ve became quiet familiar with the shape of Los Angeles. When, flipping the last page [...]

We have receive the visit from a friend that is now working at SENSEable City Lab at MIT, we shared opinions and project on information visualization; inspired by his stopover, we discuss the needs of being able to tell stories about what our visualizations. Paolo stated our reflections in a very effective way, [...]

Who are the poor? Poverty is neither a number nor an index. It cannot be reduced to a line that divides those who are above and those who are below establishing a unique space for social exclusion. Poverty is a multidimensional and complex phenomenon. Its reduction to a unique representation can generate distorted visions of the phenomenon and create ineffective or counterproductive interventions.

In 2009 we should decrease our graphing addiction and increase attention to coincidences!
happy new year!

A causal loop model has been developed in order to help understand the complex systemic structure of poverty in all its dimension. System diagramming is here a loose term used to describe the activity of conceptually representing and visualizing a system in its constitutive elements: the elements, the relationships and the system boundary distinguishing what does and does not belong to the set.
The assumption of this qualitative exercise is that poverty, and its dimensions, are the result of the dynamics between a wide variety of factors from macro-politic, to the personal behavioral patterns.
The key element of the visualization are the factors and the variables. They are the environment attributes and characteristics that have an influence level of poverty.

27 August 2008
Michael Bond
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926711.500-how-to-keep-your-head-in-scary-situations.html

This has led Slovic to suggest we need to imbue statistics with more emotional significance so that we take them to heart. “We learn how to deal with numbers from a young age as cold or abstract entities – to read them, add them, multiply them – but we don’t learn to think about how they represent reality in a way that conveys feeling and meaning. We need to think how to teach people to step away from their intuitive response, which is insensitive to magnitude, and think more carefully about what numbers represent.” [...]