Economy Map: Visualizing the Eco-Impact of Industry

What crude oil production has to do with interface design and public advocacy.

We’re big believers in data visualization as a sensemaking mechanism for the world. Economy Map, a new project from Jason Pearson, former President and CEO of the sustainability institute GreenBlue, aims to be just that by offering an interactive visual map of the US economy and its impact on the environment.

The ambitious project draws on data from the 2009 EPA report and maps the envionmental impact of specific sectors of the economy, ranging from crude oil production to advertising and nearly everything in between. But the project’s greatest strength lies in its capacity for pattern-recognition, illustrating not only the effect of specific sectors but also how they affect one another to exponentially impact the environment.

Each sectoris represented by a dot on a grid. A bubble around it depicts the size of its impact on one of the environmental factors examined — ozone depletion, human toxicity and global warming. Lines connecting the different bubbles illustrate “flows” between these sectors — for instance, see how many different sectors oil production draws on.

Though the interface is a bit clunky and counter-intuitive, Economy Map is not only an important educational tool for us in the “general public” but also a useful resource for public interest advocates and policymakers as they strive to identify areas where environmental impact can be reduced.

via FastCo Design

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Visualizing Enlightenment-Era Social Networks

Why Mark Zuckerberg has nothing on Voltaire.

Social networking isn’t really a modern phenomenon. Long before there was Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, there was the Republic of Letters — a vast and intricate network of intellectuals, linking the finest “philosophes” of the Enlightenment across national borders and language barriers. This self-defined community of writers, scholars, philosophers and other thinkers included greats like Voltaire, Leibniz, Rousseau, Linnaeus, Franklin, Newton, Diderot and many others we’ve come to see as linchpins of cultural history.

Mapping the Republic of Letters is a fascinating project by a team of students and professors at Stanford, visualizing the famous intellectual correspondence of the Enlightenment, how they traveled, and how the network evolved over time — an inspired cross-pollination of humanitarian scholarship and computer science. (An important larger trend thoughtfully examined in this New York Times article.)

The project pulls data from the Electronic Enlightenment database, an archive of more than 55,000 letters and documents exchanged between 6,400 correspondents, and maps the geographic origin and destination of the correspondence — something we’ve come to take for granted in the age of real-time GPS tracking, but an incredibly ambitious task for 300-year-old letters.

They were able to create and to foster public opinion, critical thinking, something that was going on in one city or country would soon be known and discussed elsewhere. So there was a sort of freedom of information that was created thanks to these networks.” ~ Dan Edelstein

For more on the Republic of Letters, its cultural legacy and the networking model it provided, we highly recommend Dena Goodman’s The Republic of Letters : A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment — a book controversial for its feminist undertones but nonetheless fascinating in its bold reframing of the Enlightenment not as a set of ideas that gave rise to “masculine self-governance” but as a rhetoric that borrowed heavily from female thought.

via MetaFilter

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American Software: The Titans of Silicon Valley in 8-Bit Animation

From Partizan director Gianluca Fallone comes this delightfully minimalist 8-bit short film about the giants of the American software industry. We love guitar-slinging Steve Jobs and hot-pink Bill Gates.

On a semi-related note, we highly recommend Profiles of Genius: Thirteen Creative Men Who Changed the World, a fantastic read about how the greatest iconoclastic (male) innovators of our time — including both Jobs and Gates, as well as Sony’s Akito Morita, CNN’s Ted Turner and FedEx’s Fred Smith — harnessed what the author calls an “innovisionary personality” to achieve remarkable entrepreneurial success. Meanwhile, however, we’re left impatiently finger-tapping for a sequel spotlighting 13 women of similar noteworthiness, of whom there is no shortage.

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