How Solid Is Your Understanding of Coal?

How does seeing this infographic make you feel? When you see how much coal you’re using, does it motivate you to green your home? Or does it leave you saying, “So what?”

The infographic, originally published in an article by EnergySavvy, puts energy use in context. But it could be improved. The EnergySavvy article explains the infographic using the following paragraph:

Reducing the original coal pile to 2,000 pounds prevents nearly 6,300 pounds of carbon dioxide, 36 pounds of sulfur dioxide and 16 pounds of nitrogen oxide from being emitted into the atmosphere annually (Environmental Protection Agency). It could also save the home around $300 on their electricity bills each year.

The problem with these numbers is that they do not translate directly to impacts people can understand. If I tell the average person that his new air conditioner will prevent a certain number of pounds of sulfur dioxide from being emitted into the atmosphere, what will he be able to do with that information? Not very much.

What is missing from this infographic is context that readers can use to relate these numbers and impacts to their everyday lives. What does that 36 pounds of sulfur dioxide do to the environment? Adding an illustration to show the scale of each environmental impact would make this infographic much stronger.

Without context, numbers mean much less than they would otherwise.

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How Infographics Communicate

A wave of infographics has hit the Internet. In this sea of visual information, how can one decide what differentiates a good infographic from a bad one? How can you decide whether or not to make an infographic of your own?

Surprise Your Readers

I believe the best infographics change readers’ perspectives. The infographic below – about the relationship between fitness and intelligence – shifted my perspective when I read it.

Stereotypically, many people in the United States think exercise has little to do with being an “A” student. For people who have demanding jobs, there can even be social pressure not to exercise.

This infographic from Classes and Careers shows that exercise improves mental performance throughout one’s life.

Think in Terms of Graphics, Not Words

Here’s an infographic which is too text-heavy. The organization which created it, FitnessHealthZone, has put lengthy explanations in the infographic rather than pulling out key statistics and diagramming them.

Use Design to Make Your Points Clear

Present information in ways that make sense to readers and lead them through your thought process.

Would you start a PowerPoint presentation with your last slide? Probably not. Expect your reader’s eye to travel through the infographic in sequence. Treat the infographic as a presentation that starts at the top of the page. Use design to draw readers’ attention to the sequence of ideas you want them to see.

The following infographic from Health Science should begin with images about the health impacts of sugar. Because it omits them, it is much less persuasive than it would be otherwise. Also, one of the diagrams implies that 44 percent of an individual fruit drink contains juice rather than showing that 44 percent of all fruit drinks contain juice.

Motivate Action by Focusing on Impacts

If you’re going to use an infographic to encourage readers to take political action, it’s especially important that you motivate them to do so. The fruit drink infographic focuses on documenting advertising dollars while omitting most of the health concerns. The advertising dollars aren’t the main problem – the health consequences are.

Make Recommended Actions Easy to Do

Asking a relatively passive online audience to push legislators for regulation of fruit drinks may not be realistic. A link to a petition might be a better option.

The personal actions shown below – drinking water and reading ingredient lists – are likely to appeal to parents and shoppers.

The infographic about vegetables and exercise suggests many easy actions but doesn’t present them in a graphic format.

Use Contrast and Humor

The exercise and intelligence infographic uses contrasts to show the effects of different types of exercise.

The fruit drink infographic is the best example of contrast and humor in this post. Its use of mustaches to represent misbehaving beverages is catchy. The calorie comparison between fruit drinks and chicken legs is also well done.

Find Online Design Tools

Are you interested in making your own infographics? Try visiting Visual.ly. Makeuseof has reviewed a few other tools. .Net Magazine has a tutorial which outlines some of the ideas I’ve included above but doesn’t focus on motivation, logical flow and action as much as I did in this post.

Building Homes for the Not-So-Nuclear Family

When I first moved to Boston, I became convinced the way we design houses needs to change. A persuasive editorial in the New York Times this week agrees with me. Building cookie-cutter houses for nuclear families has left us with houses that can’t adapt easily to hard economic times, changing lifestyles, and immigration.

In Chicago, one of my friends rented an apartment which was a former coach house and was built above a stable. The apartment was near the main house on the property, but detached from it. When recent graduates need to live with their parents, semi-detached apartments like that would give them autonomy.

Making housing modular – adding entrances and exits, providing small units that are partly detached from common spaces, and not assuming that everyone in the house will be part of a close-knit family – would add flexibility to home construction. If the traditional dream of owning a house is no longer families’ top priority, apartment buildings should be able to accommodate extended families and changes in their life situations.

The New York Times article talks about immigrant families sharing suburban houses. There are at least two more angles to that story:

1. Families of choice are rarely – if ever – a target market for housing construction. But many people who are distant from their families of origin may prefer to share space with their friends. Buildings that combine shared space with private sections or apartments could accommodate this social reality.
2. Since the recession, recent college and high school graduates often live with their parents. Since they are eager for autonomy and may even be in long-term relationships, this lack of privacy could cause family tension. Designing sections of houses with kitchenettes and independent entrances would make their lives easier.

The New York Times article recommends turning old industrial buildings into flexibly designed lofts that can accommodate larger families and changing work situations. A loft-style building would be one potential answer to the dilemma of families squeezing into small spaces in ways that may lead to conflict and stress.

Cohousing is another practical and relatively affordable model. In cohousing developments, shared spaces are surrounded by compact apartments or houses. Cohousing is usually designed for unrelated groups who share social values about common space. The same idea could be adapted for multi-generational families.

How Environmentalists Can Respond to Americans’ Need for Personal Space

While reading about social science and environmental communication, I’ve noticed a gap between how environmentalists in the United States view personal space and how their audiences perceive it. If environmentalists tell audiences not to “say ‘eww’ to thrift stores,” avoid public transit, or live in suburbs, they may encounter resistance—not because their audiences are opposed to sustainable choices, but because they value personal space.

Instead of overlooking personal space issues, environmentalists should address them constructively. Understanding the way United States audiences respond to these questions could transform the way we design eco-friendly housing, products and communities.

If environmentalists fail to respond to these issues, apathy is one likely outcome. Suzanne Shelton, the CEO of an environmental marketing organization, writes  that “gas may hit $10/gallon and folks may still want to live in the suburbs… because it’s more serene/away from the hustle and bustle.”

Although market research participants may see environmental actions as  morally positive , they may or may not integrate these actions into their lives—especially if other issues, like the economy, are on their minds.

In personal conversations, I often see the value of developing answers to these questions. Some of my friends and family drive frequently despite my attempts to persuade them to use public transit.

When Concordia marketing professor Zeynep Arsel interviewed me about thrift shops and clothing exchanges, she acknowledged that another personal space issue—hygiene concerns—can interfere with sustainable behavior.

Although social distance has some undesirable effects on communities, it also gives people the space they may expect or require. If someone is allergic to perfume, is it reasonable to ask her to take public transit daily? Expecting people who have spent their lives surrounded by lawns and picket fences to adapt to life in Manhattan may be somewhat naive.

Fortunately, environmentalists can respond to this problem upfront by altering their approaches to marketing and design. Recognizing personal space as a valid concern is an essential step toward developing solutions.

1. If you are promoting clothing reuse, look into the reasons people may object to buying products secondhand. Washing clothing and testing electronics are two pragmatic responses. Transaction ratings could improve the reliability of sites such as Craigslist.

2. If you are encouraging people to move from single-family homes to apartments, how can you take personal space into account? Soundproofing and visual privacy could make apartment living easier for people who have lived in larger homes.

3. If people are avoiding public transit or bicycle use, cities can improve safety in stations and parking lots, reduce the rate of bicycle accidents, and take other steps to make public spaces more welcoming.

One clear message which emerges from social marketing is that environmentalists can’t expect the people we are trying to reach to share our views. What is a fun thrift shopping outing for me may be an awkward or even unpleasant experience for someone who buys everything new.

Washing secondhand clothes doesn’t dilute environmental messages about reuse and recycling. Giving people privacy in their homes and a sense of safety in public spaces could make it much easier to promote high-density, sustainable urban living.

Image credits: Street photo by mrjamin

Originally published at Scientific American

A Picture Is Worth… An Audience

It’s easy to assume other people learn the same way we do. If we are used to explaining ideas verbally, we may forget the value of pictures.

Studying learning styles is valuable for people who are interested in mass communication.

Eye tracking studies show how audiences read images in the news. Poynter’s online class on color in news design quotes some of this research: readers look at 80% of the artwork on a page but only read 25% of the text.

This article from the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media demonstrates how graphics can clarify stories about climate change. The image of how shorelines change when sea levels rise could be very eye-catching for local readers.

Part of the communication appeal of science graphics is their “just the facts” approach.  But even though a science graphic may be matter-of-fact, it’s important to remember there is uncertainty in the data.

Also, one can change audience perceptions of a science story by choosing how one presents graphics. One can alter audience reactions by changing the scale of an axis, adjusting how one compares data sets, moving a zero point, or even changing the color of a bar.

If this red line was green, would that change how you respond to the graph?

Some academics spend their careers writing papers about how to present statistics effectively.

Design and Engineering: Similar Skills with Different Reputations

Although there are real differences between art and engineering, the social gap between them may be due to misconceptions. The impersonal and equation-oriented image of engineering doesn’t reflect what engineers do at work.

As I commented on an article in The Atlantic:

Since I spent so much time in machine shops and garages during engineering school, I’m not sure that there really is a solid line one can draw between engineering and hands-on activities.

When I took art classes, students there were doing the same activities that I was already doing at the machine shop. Math classes use visualization and design skills frequently. And engineering is much more about problem-solving than memorization.

In other words – art and theater tech majors do many of the same things engineering and math students do…. but they end up with different jobs later.

The article encourages educators to value 3D design skills. I agree that 3D skills matter – but not just to designers and architects.

As a college freshman, I realized I would need shop skills that went beyond anything I learned before college. I’d been using art supplies and building small objects since grade school. As a high school student, I’d learned more about woodworking and auto repair.  But that wasn’t enough. To expand my experience, I began working in electronics and machine shops.

The day-to-day life of a mechanical engineer involves building and visualizing products continually. Having solid math and computer skills is only one part of that equation.

Design and construction are some of the building blocks of engineering. Intermediate art-related fields like architecture and product design require similar skills and experiences.

Occasionally, I hear people say engineering isn’t creative. But brainstorming is integral to industrial design. Engineers know that if they spend more time and energy in the design phase of a project, that will prevent costly retooling later on.

So, yes – engineers are creative. But the field’s impersonal image doesn’t match that reality. In college, I saw women taking theater tech and art classes and learning to solder, weld, and use shop equipment. My male friends took engineering classes, learned to use exactly the same equipment, and had relatively good job security after they graduated.

I’d encourage other women who are interested in design to consider engineering. My engineering degree gave me access to many resources. Those doors might never have opened if I had an art degree.

Science Writing and Modernism

I fell asleep while watching the movie Helvetica last week. Like the font it describes, the film seems simple and empty. But it also sets the letters in context. Helvetica is a product of the reconstruction of Europe during the 1950s, when architects and designers idealized the possibility of creating a better, more modern, more democratic society.

Science writing and Helvetica often reflect the same ideals – readability, transparency and user-friendliness. When science writing isn’t stylistic, it blends into the page. The focus is on content, not verbal flourishes. There is an element of storytelling in news stories, but the value of clarity crosses genres. Technical writers strive to make their prose sound like Helvetica. It takes a huge amount of work to unravel scientific information and shape it into this seemingly simple form.

Although I value transparency, I’ve realized efficient writing isn’t the goal I want to pursue. I think we should go beyond putting human interest into stories and start writing expressively. We should put the curlicues and flourishes back into our writing. (That would make it more difficult for The Guardian to satirize the “formula” for BBC science stories, too.)

As a person in a creative field, I don’t want to wear gray every day. Why should my writing be gray, then? Why do we continue making our writing styles uniform when we are really a diverse group of people?

Although “gray” writing styles are user-friendly, they erase the diversity of people’s ideas and visual tastes and create a culture where clarity matters more than personality. I think it’s time to reverse that trend. Let’s be clear, but let’s write in our own voices for a change.

Design for whom?

About a month ago, I read about an innovative architectural education program called Rural Studio that has been featured on public radio and has also become the subject of a book. Students working at Rural Studio are building houses in a very low-income part of western Alabama. These houses were designed to be affordable, with a $20,000 mortgage, for people living on incomes of close to $637 a month. (No, there is not a zero missing in that first number.) The houses look distinctive – these are not cookie-cutter buildings – but they are basic, functional homes built with low-cost materials. Rural Studio has also been expanding its scope to create other community buildings, including an animal shelter and a bird-watching tower.

I don’t know how much it would cost to construct these $20,000 houses on a larger scale, but there might be a significant untapped market for houses in that price range in the United States (and probably in other countries too).