In the past week, the discipline of Data Visualization lost Hans Rosling, a stalwart & leading proponent of Visual story telling. He passed away at the age of 68. That he was a master story teller with data is widely known, and one can get a glimpse of some of these brilliant narrations in his TED page.
A key highlight of all his talks was to demystify statistics and make seemingly boring numbers come out alive on the screen. One of the reasons he stands out in the Visualization world is his unusual combination of diverse skillsets - depth in statistics, eye for visual design and riveting presentation with screen presence.
His efforts have been lauded for taking pains to simplify statistics for the common, non-data audience. He has gone to the extent of explaining heavy concepts like population growth and climate change through Lego blocks and other physical props. Experimenting with innovative ways of presenting data, he had also used Augmented Reality to present data in 2010, several years before AR and VR came into mainstream parlance.
Hans Rosling was a big inspiration for us, in the early days of Gramener. We have leaned on his vast repository of work as part of our talks to educate audiences and in introducing concepts to our clients. Gapminder, the non-profit website and visualization tool that he founded were used as benchmarks in our early work. Over the years, I have continued to use some of his brilliant videos in my Visualization workshops, including one just yesterday.
Thanks to his pioneering work, the industry has benefitted immensely and his legacy will be carried forward. If you're looking to get started with Hans Rosling and his body of work, I'd recommend to take a look at the AR talk from 2010 where he covers 200 years of global history, the wealth and health of nations through a 4 minute talk.
No comments:
Post a Comment