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New York Times shows Luge death, drops standards

Tom Pearson kicked off a debate at work. Instead of pestering my old team over email, here is what I think.

a screen on the lead up...
 

The Issue

The New York times recently showed a click through explainer of the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. I think they were wrong to do this. They were wrong on terms of taste and decency and they also they missed a chance to do some good journalism.

A variety of factors combine to make this disturbing. By understanding these elements (be they accidental or intentional) we as practioners in the media can maybe not repeat this. 

You may choose to see the graphic here (it's unsettling, shows a man seconds before death)

Taste and decency
User implication
One disturbing effect is the users implication in this scene. By clicking through the 8 steps of the interactive guide, we whisk the man to his demise. We are then left with the final screen, whose tragic, kinetic image is the final take- out. There is no aftermath - even some (obvious maybe, but - hey) flowers or a photo could have acted as a memorial.

Point of view
Throughout the piece, the luger travels in our direction, then in the last stages, he flies towards us, dying in front of us, not hidden away from us in the distance. He almost dies in our laps.

Clarity of final image
The images that lead up to this are fuzzy, blurry, with the yellow line and cc tv shot helping us undertand the position of the Luger. The final one is in a radically different mode- of clarity - not the more acceptable vaguary of the run up. If anything, the vaguary should have been kept for the final portrayal of his death, if that portrayl is required at all.

Modal leaps
Slick 3D representations of the course (a decent use of 3d - ice, steel, man-made fibres) lull us into an unreal, schematic world, where we will be shown representations of things - not the things themselves. The final photo jumps out of this un-reality and is more realistic and visceral for it.

Historical precendent
Public interest often demands that significant deaths be shown. The human condition demands we confront death - often when the deceased is well known or it is part of a significant event. If neither is the case - as with this, the public may ask why they are being shown it. Their need for confronting these matters is replaced by an intrusive, unpleasant sensation that although impactful is unwelcome and hollow.

Journalism
I my mind, the main issue was his impact - into a metal pole/support - and why that was there. This is the missed opportunity - an investigation into what other options were and their safety record. My dad mentioned that in his wild youth when he did the bobsleigh, they used a combination of drift snow, pine branches and man made barriers (all softer than a metal beam). 

This graphic has focussed on the What rather than the Why or How, so is just showing, rather than explaining. The thing is that showing this is not really very necessary or nice.

The lack of insight leaves sour taste.

I hope there is a discussion about that at Malofiej this year. I won't be there I'm afraid (we have a new baby who is a bit young for the Jumping Jester after-parties). But it is important and needs discussing.

Issues within (and pictures) explored  in this excellent post too.

Cheers Tom.

St. Martins Talk Resources, Notes, Links

Thanks to you all at St Martins for having me, both for the project and the talk - here are some of the things I mentioned in said talk (project stuff remains between project team) . Mail me for anything else. maxgadney@googlemail.com

Some of the video and interactive examples are referred to to in this talk/ post

Mapumental by Channel 4 

For Newspaper and News Online graphics, Infographics news has alot of the Good stuff - often a good selection of the winners at the upcoming Malofiej Conference awards -(these from last year)

(I cant go this year due to a shiny new baby to look after, but if you like hearing/ chatting about (more news-based) graphics with fabulous people and drinking and eating like a Navarran Prince then you should go)

anyway, enough reminiscing...

Further Good Magazine video graphics found here

I think some are not so detailed in their data-resolutions - some just show words on film - but in a way more elegant than standard news-words-stuck on a crowd 

Here is that MIT real-projection stuff by Patti Maes and Pranav Mistry

Here are some links on the Urban Informatic stuff - these links are all from City of Sound, where my pal Dan Hill blogs at - 

- Intro here Street as Platform

 - Recent conference write up here (also contains good names-list of other folk interested in this - and in fact - lots of these folk are trained-designers but with many other interests so worth checking out - further to what I mentioned about not just being an art-monkey)

anyway all other links to this stuff on his site are here

I also mentioned the means at your disposal - some include:

Print on demand stuff (v cheap, mass publishing) includes Papercamp (writeup, wiki), Bookakake, Newspaperclub, lulu

Applications - learn processing for data vis

and one of the questions asked about - 

- The nice examples of edited Actual Video  - NYT Winter Olympics stuff  - compare the full video ski jump with the weird 3dness of the skate - the jump from the real to the putty is too much for me in what is otherwise excellent work - there was a time a while ago when people would have done the whole thing in 3d - (possible demonstration of mastery, lack of integration with picture/video suppliers etc) - now it seems silly not to.

(not sure how some of those links are behaving so here is the section on olympics - just look for Inside The Action Stuff)

so that is that - thanks for coming and maybe see you all again

US Aircraft Carriers, WWII Magazine, Mar-Apr 2009

 
 

This month's graphic for WWII magazine is about US aircraft carriers. Some say the US fought a naval war, one of large naval battles and amphibious landings (including many in Europe).

Drawing the carrier happened after assembling iPhone pics from a book   

I knew that somewhere would be a diagram of the carrier. I knew I had to do a general tour of key areas and ideas rather than 200 specific features. Some of these are fascinating - the 'ready room' for fliers, the split engines to avoid hits, the protective wall around the fuel tanks. Invariably in such a massive system there is a temptation to get stuck in the detail so I had to zoom out a bit to find the actual story.

This was settled on as concentrating on the Essex class carrier and it's hasty and timely entry into service.

I wanted to show the effect the Essex had on the Pacific carrier war by graphing the following variables:

- Post December 1941 - time

- US and Japanese carriers commissioned, sunk, damaged, repaired, capacity of carriers

So that you can see at any one time how many carriers and ultimately planes, the opposing forces could send at each other. This was something I wanted the piece to stress - that naval power was now about mobility of aerial force, not firepower and armour.

The sketch of the wave concept 

The first graph was about aerial force but in a different way - I sought to show the changing balance of planes - from anti-ship torpedo and dive bombers in the early days when the main objective was destroying other ships - to fighter planes, whose main job was to defend against the kamikazes in the final months.

Here is where I got temporarily distracted by a motif. (I sure I am not the first designer to think I have had a moment of conceptual brilliance, only ditch it after a lot of self-discipline and asking the honest opinions of others.)

I really liked the concept of this fighter make up shown as a wave.

It fitted the nautical theme. It symbolised the crushing might of US industrial output. Best of all it referenced the Japanese artist Hokusai whose Great Wave off Kanagawa is a well-known piece. 

 

It also went with the headline "Launching a steel tsunami" which I was pleased with. (Alliterative headlines provide a simple warm glow to me)

Thus began an internal dilemma of being happy with the visual motif, yet being uncomfortable with it as a means of carrying information.

Cute but faulted 

It was faulty - the area if the inner curve is way less than the outer, distorting the quantitative impression in favour if the outer. (and rendering this with illustrator offset path created loads of duplicates of the vector and overloaded my mac - so there's a tip!)

More importantly, it didn't contribute to a strong story idea - "balance of plane types changed to echo changing strategy/tactics" is ok - but " the Essex carrier helped win the pacific war" is better - so I ditched the wave and went for the other graph as it told a bigger story better.

I deleted the vertical grid - it made too much noise - although it did help with the positioning when drawing the graph

 This graph worked ok- some issues were-

- Data - lots of contradictory data meant a lot of work between the magazine and I to get it right (thanks Caitlin)

- Overlapping lines - I decided that if there were two lines overlapping, the top one would be the one that was at the most advantage at that time

- Tour points - worth mentioning that doing a graph with tonnes of data isn't good enough - key points need pointing out - in this case, key battles and main themes (lots of data-vis these days just throws data at the wall and asks you to ‘play’ with it, without direction – which is why most people don’t.) Take a Tour.

Out of interest - the featured carrier is the USS Intrepid - which is in New York City - go and see it - I'll return after doing this with new stuff to look at for sure.  

Information is Beautiful by David McCandless

 Amazon.co.uk
 
 

This book is out now. Information is Beautiful is a collection of many visualisations of data - on lots of different subjects.

I met David McCandless the other day and we both share the view that if you are in the business of information design - and are serious about your form-giving, you should seek to do something with it apart from just 'data art'. 

this graphic from his blog
 

It's a good sentiment. That's why I'll buy this book.

The book took a long time to do (a solid year apparently) - but the thing that shines is that the time it took would have been to understanding the data and stories. 

They are rendered economically but humanely. They are boldly coloured for sure - where some may prefer NYT sobriety - but colour is nice - they are the closest I have seen to smart mass-market graphics in a long time. If only most of our journalists in the UK had a fraction of this visual smarts.

So I'll be buying a copy and if you know people who work with a lot of text and information, get them a copy - this book is infinitely more likely to make sense to them and show them a way forward than most info-vis stuff about today.

Noteworthy also...

David also created The Helicopter Game which caused me a major Remembering-doing-nothing-but-playing The-Helicopter-Game flashback when I visited it again - cool.