Observing Rosling’s Current Visual Style

On the sister blog, I wrote about Hans Rosling’s recent presentation in New York (link). I noted that Rosling has apparently simplified his visual palette.

Rosling is best known as the developer of the Gapminder tool, used to visualize global social statistics data collected by national statistical agencies. I wrote favorably about this tool in a series of posts (link). Gapminder made popular the moving bubble chart, although not the only graphical form present.

These animated bubble charts also made Rosling a YouTube star (See here.)

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In last week’s presentation, Rosling only showed one moving bubble chart. The rest of his graphics are noticeably simpler, something that anyone can produce on Excel or Powerpoint. Here is one example:

 

I’m particularly impressed by a simple sequence of charts in which Rosling explains the demographic changes the world is expecting to see in the next 50 to 100 years.

 

This is an enhanced area chart. Each slice of area is subdivided into stick figures so that an axis for population counts becomes unnecessary.

Instead, the reader sees two useful dimensions: region of the world, and age group.

How the population ages as it grows is the feature story and the effect of aging is ingeniously portrayed as layers. This becomes apparent as Rosling lets time roll forward, and the layers literally walk off the page. (Unfortunately, I couldn't capture each step fast enough.)

 (This photo courtesy of Daniel Vadnais.)

When Rosling showed the 2085 projection, we find that the entire rectangle has filled up, so the world population has definitely grown, roughly by 30 percent. The growth happens by filling up of adults; the total number of children has not changed. This is one of the key insights from recent demographic data. The first photo above shows something remarkable: the fertility rate in Asian countries has plunged to about the same level of developed countries already.

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This set of charts is unusually effective. It represents another level of simplification in visual means. At the same time, the message is sharpened.

As I reported the other day (link), Rosling does not believe modern tools have improved data analysis. This talk which utilized simple tools is a good demonstration of his point.