“My basic idea is that the world has changed so much, what people need isn’t more data but a new mindset.”
Hans Rosling
A companion website to a book Google sent out to a small number of it’s customers, Think Quarterly is a well designed and interesting on-line site dedicated to information and how to handle it. (Well it would be). A number of articles may be of interest generally but the one that grabbed by attention was a piece by Hans Rosling.
This is a brief extract:
But even when people act within a fact-based worldview, they are used to talking with sterile figures. They are used to standing on a podium, clicking through slide shows in PowerPoint rather than interacting with their presentation. The problem is that companies have a strict separation between their IT department, where datasets are produced, and the design department, so hardly any presenters are proficient in both. Yet this is what we need. Getting people used to talking with animated data is, to my mind, a literacy project.
For more on Hans Rosling – this from Wikipedia:
Hans Rosling (born 27 July 1948) in Uppsala, Sweden is a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. He is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system.
a plan conceived in the mind 