DAVID MCCANDLESS

I love information. I want to stay current. I don't want to be under-informed. But I'm busy. Sometimes, I need an instant overview of a situation that I can grasp in a second.

By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes: a sort of information map. And when you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.

Over the years, online, we've laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments.

Personally, I find visualisations great for helping me understand the world and for sifting the huge amounts of information that deluge me every day.

What I love - and I'm a journalist - and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective.

In an endless jungle of websites with text-based content, a beautiful image with a lot of space and colour can be like walking into a clearing. It's a relief.

I feel that every day, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless; it literally pours in.

Data is the kind of ubiquitous resource that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights, and it's all around us, and it can be mined very easily.

Information design has been around since the 1970s. Pioneers like Yale University design guru Edward Tufte and design agency Pentagram have long known and used its power. But now with the rise of the Internet, it's having something of a second birth.

We've seen it in the last U.S. presidential campaign 2016: both sides were trading graphs and circulating data visualizations to make their point. So the political establishment is waking up to the power of a good graph as well.

Often I forget that design is really about removing things: optimizing the flow of information, the display, so there are the fewest elements possible, but still they preserve the essence of the subject.

I've been working on a graphic about carbon emissions. It's an incredibly simple graphic - a bunch of blocks and a table below it - but it's taken me three weeks to design. For some reason it just wasn't working. Then finally I realized there was a number present, which I was rendering in each version, that wasn't necessary for the understanding of the piece. This figure was getting in the way and distracting from the main flow of the narrative. As soon as I pulled that graphic out of the design, it sprang into focus. Suddenly it worked.

Data is the new soil, because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium. Over the years, online, we've laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments.

For years I thought I was just a writer, but when I sat down to design and started playing around with it, I realized that, really, it's pretty easy. Obviously it's more than just a set of rules, but the basics of design are actually pretty simple and quite mathematical. The link between data and design works at quite a fundamental level.

Simplification seems to be the removal of objects for the goal of making a graphic as clean and uncluttered as possible. Whereas, with optimization, it feels like there's more intelligence in that. It maintains the usability, but tries to distill something down to its essence. But with some data-sets you have to be careful because, as with linear, print journalism, it's easy to shave off facts that don't quite fit the flow.

I have a computational quality to my mind, I suppose. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with video games. I reprogrammed games, and this eventually landed me a column in a magazine. That's how I got into print journalism: writing about video games.

It's enjoyable to just drink in an image. It's effortless. That struck me as an interesting way of looking at it: I do all the grunt work so you can enjoy.

I think everyone is struggling somewhat with presentation. The Internet is generally well designed, if you look at the most popular websites, so we expect our visuals to be at that level of quality. When you sit in a presentation and you're looking at nonsensical pie charts and the like, your audience does disengage. People across a range of industries, not just science, are struggling with their communication because their output doesn't compete with what people see on a day-to-day basis.

Visualizing information is a form of knowledge compression.

I'm happy to provide that service. But that's the power of it. A good infographic that's been really worked on looks simple and easy, but it actually required a lot of processing.

I'm doing a lot of cognitive processing. I'm gathering research. I'm processing it. I'm arranging the data. I'm sorting out the narrative. I'm designing. It's almost as if I do all the cognitive work that you then don't have to do. I digest it, process it, and then offer something that's very easy for you to digest.

What I tend to do is blend quantitative with the qualitative to allow me to plot the qualitative data in some way. It's a question of what quantitative data are most applicable. So I'm playing with that, merging the two.

I think it's good practice, if you're a writer, or anyone who's shaping narrative, to be flexible and open with the direction of the narrative.

Data is the new oil? No: Data is the new soil.

There's a tendency in graphics to allow the trimming of certain parts. But I think that if you're open about your process, your methodology, such as introducing thresholds, introducing filters, techniques people use in research and data management, it's legitimate. It's legitimate to say, "We're only going to show data above this level, or between levels."