It’s all about the data!

In our digital age, information is available anywhere and anytime. We are urging to immediately understand this information, work with it, benefit from it, but the sheer amount of data that is submerging us every day makes this simply impossible. More often than not, we are unable to digest the overwhelming quantity information and instead of being more responsive, more reactive and more knowledgeable, we get paralyzed by it.
But in many cases, this doesn’t seem to matter to us. Digital technology turned us into magpies, if we see shiny data we need to have it, collect it and store it. The question if we really need all this information and how we are going to efficiently make us of it is secondary.

Until recently, data was all analog and we got used to measure natural phenomena through analogies. We were used — for example — to look at our watch that represented time as the slices of a circle. Easy to understand, an analog watch gives us precisely the information we are looking for. Nothing more, nothing less. A digital watch on the other side is certainly more exact. It can easily tell us that it is 11:56:14 AM but isn’t it true that what we really care about in most cases is to know if it is almost noon or not? Extreme precision and an abundance of information available does not always facilitate our understanding of things but rather confuses us.
The visualization of data is born out of the need to make data relevant and digestible for us. To create an insightful data visualization you have to understand which information adds value to the consumer, how to interpret it and keep the purpose of your visualization and your audience in mind. The Visual Agency does exactly that. We help our clients to make sense of football sized spreadsheets, interpret information in creative ways and transform data into a visual language that can be understood by technicians and laymen alike.

The below example gives a good idea of how the reinterpretation and visualization of data using special techniques and graphical elements can add value and uncover hidden patterns without falsifying the data-set.
What we see below is the visualization of outbound flight-data from Milan; a massive data-set consisting of many megabytes of numbers. What immediately catches our eye is the reinterpretation of distance between Milan and other global cities. The more direct flight connections there are per day between Milan and any given city the closer the city is represented to Milan. The visualization attributes more weight to accessibility than to geographical proximity. Therefore, London appears much closer to Milan than Rome and Vienna is further away than Moscow.

Another interesting aspect of the visualization is the representation of airport-traffic. The bigger the bubble representing any given city, the higher the airport-traffic of the respective city. Hence, we can immediately understand which cities can be considered air transportation hubs and which cities are playing a minor role in the transportation grid.

Just like a topographical map represents the physical constitution of a territory, our map represents the functional relationship between population centres. In other words, creating a data visualization by selecting and re-interpreting data allows us to create relevant visualizations that help us to understand the information at hand. Data visualization done right, has to helps us to extract knowledge from complex data-sets, discover patterns and increase our knowledge. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about the insight.

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