A healthy dose of insight

My wife is currently studying medicine – through Google, it seems.

Whenever she or one of our sons is sick, her first port of call is always to type some pithy description of the symptoms into the search field. That way, she can at least rule out any terminal diseases before preparing herself for discussions with her assistants at the local surgery. It all comes down to access to the right information – not that there's anything wrong with that.

But what I'm finding more and more is that the age-old adage knowledge is power is no longer true.

In fact, it's now more accurate to say that information is power.

And that, I think, is a problem because you'd have to be crazy not to acknowledge the gulf that exists between the two (as does my wife, fortunately).

Knowledge comes through understanding and experience, whereas information simply litters our lives, an often random sequence of data, symbols and other bits and pieces. Knowledge makes sense of information, whereas information on its own can often be senseless, unless of course you know what to do with it.

Which brings me to research.

Focus groups are typically the whipping boy for why research is so often so flawed, but that's too easy and obvious a target – plus, my friend Ingrid over at Aesthetics of Joy (the Christmas trees, remember) already wrote this article a few years ago that perfectly summarises the bigger issues.

But what frustrates me is the seemingly blind proliferation of information churned out by your typical research agency.

They can tell you what was said. In fact, they'll happily write dozens of slides in 8-point type, and even throw in the odd piece of Clipart for a little light relief – if there's space on the slide, they'll be sure to fill it.

But they can rarely tell you what it means.

They'd rather leave that to a mother of two from Castle Hill who you've just paid $80 for 90 minutes of her time to design the pack or write the tagline for you. Easier than making the decision yourself, plus you've now got someone to blame just in case.

Research has its role to play and there can be no doubt that the most successful brands are consumer-informed, but they are never consumer-led. If that was the case, then we'd all be riding faster horses, to paraphrase Henry Ford.

In the case of research, knowledge typically makes sense of information through insight.

But unless more research agencies are able to transform all this information into even the smallest morsel of insight, then my wife may not be the only one turning to Google for the answers.

Data is not dull, you are

It was Raymond Loewy, the renowned industrial designer, who once said "the most beautiful curve is a rising sales graph". And he may well have been right.

However, the information we communicate is not always quite so easy on the eye, let alone anything that comes close to being "beautiful". To my mind, sensible spreadsheets and po-faced pie charts only exacerbate mankind's weakness for convenience over character.

But the real poster boy for plain boring must be PowerPoint.

A few years ago, I discovered this PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address. An exercise in demonstrating just how far PowerPoint can reduce one of the most inspiring speeches of all time to a rubble of drab and dreary slides. And please don't get me started on clip art.

That said, the other extreme does exist in the form of David Byrne's creative use of PowerPoint as an artistic medium. However, it's not quite the same as using PowerPoint to share basic information, as most of us do on a day-to-day basis. And herein lies the real challenge.

Now I should say I’m not advocating that everyone rush off to design school (although a basic eye for aesthetics might be nice). But what is important is that we all take a moment to consider the poor people who have to wade through all this information that we feel compelled to emit. Because we have to remember that the only reason we ever communicate is to create a response – in the words of one of my favourite writers, the late, great F. Scott Fitzgerald, “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say".

If you communicate because you feel a purely self-motivated, almost evangelical calling to communicate, then go ahead and write 100 PowerPoint slides in 8 point. And help yourself to as much clip art as you can possibly find. In fact, go crazy with the clip art.

But if you choose not to follow this path – and trust me, it is a choice – then you need to think more carefully. Not simply about what you want to say, but more about how you want to say it so that your audience think or feel something in response.

And that’s why I love any software, applications, widgets and websites designed to show information in surprising and delightful ways.

My current favourites are Daytum and Information Is Beautiful, where some of the most mundane data gets presented in some of the most creative and thought-provoking ways. All of sudden, you see how data can take on the character of the story that you want to tell, not simply report the facts and figures in a statistical but ultimately superficial way.

Both take their inspiration from designing information in a way that can help us understand the world around us. David McCandless, who started Information Is Beautiful, describes himself as a visual and data journalist "with a passion for visualising information – facts, data, ideas, subjects, issues, statistics, questions – all with a minimum of words". And with an equally fervent hatred of pie charts.

To show you what I mean, here's the "Billion Dollar Gram" by Information Is Beautiful, which highlights the relative amounts of money spent on all sorts of different bits and pieces.

When you view data through a creative lens, McCandless describes how it can reveal hidden patterns, insights and stories, which strikes a similar note to how Nicholas Felton, Daytum's founder, describes his start. He began by producing yearly tabulations of his life which he called Annual Reports, "a collection of charts and graphs that concentrate the year into statistical chunks and illuminate his life in a wry but rigorous manner", and he then sourced the help of Ryan Case to evolve his basic methodology into a platform for self-expression.

This is the front cover of the 2008 Feltron Annual Report, the early springboard for Daytum.

There are probably more examples out there, but these both brilliantly exemplify not only the statistical value of communicating information in such an engaging way, but also the aesthetic advantage of their approach, one that elevates the end result in every way.

As it happens, Sydney design studio Toko also took inspiration from your typical set of statistics for their design of the annual report for "The Hague in facts and figures". To the point that they transformed the various charts and graphs that you would associate with your average annual report into visuals that could be read either as statistically-accurate graphs or stunning works of art.

What's more, some of the graphs shown above were also produced as canvases and displayed within their work environments. Yes, real art on real canvas.

As I wrote earlier, communication is only ever about creating a response, not simply tossing information into the ether while you sit back and wait for something – anything! – to happen. It really does come down to that age-old adage, "The more you put in, the more you get out". Which basically means that if you take a boring approach to the way you communicate, you will be rewarded with nothing more than a bored audience.

Data doesn't have to be dull. So nor do you.