Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

What a great infographic done by information designer Anna Vital. Most of the people featured in this visual were considered not successful and stuck in an un-creative situation for a big part of their lives. I think it’s very important to realise how often we judge one another automatically by what we do at this moment, and not look at each others potential instead.

Especially for those of us who haven’t had the privilege of growing up or working in a stimulating environment where talents were nurtured, it’s hopeful to know ‘that not all those who wander are lost’…

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How To Be Interesting

I’ve read a book that really challanged me this month; How to be interesting, by Jessica Hagy. It combines fresh and honest life lessons with simple diagrams and graphs. Definitely one of the most ‘real’ guides (or self-help books) to leading a richer life. The content is all about ideas, creativity and risk… after all it’s what you DON’T know, that is interesting, right:)?

Summer Projects #6: MONU Article / Inforgrahpics

I wrote about the Boring City Project before, remember? It’s a research project on Hong Kong’s housing estates that I’m doing with Inge Goudsmit since we’re both interested in topics at the intersection of architecture and psychogeography.

This summer we heard that our proposal for a big article in MONU (an international architectural magazine) was accepted. So we re-worked our data into an article about the relationship between housing estates and indoor urbanism (the overall-theme for the october-issue).

Hong Kong is a dual city; a metropolis where numerous parallel indoor worlds co-exist alongside the traditional, intense and vibrant city. It was fascinating to dive into the history of why/where this urban fabric originated and how it influences Hong Kong’s citizens.

This is one of the infographics that we included in our set of images.

Housing Hong Kong Infographic

This is pretty much the housing skyline of Hong Kong. A shocking 62% of all Hongkongers lives in a public or private housing estate.

I promised regular updates on the boring city our housing estate research; we’re making progress! One of our articles got accepted as part of the Open Society project of ArchiNed and the Dutch Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice. It is going to be published early July. To be continued….

Funny… I found out that my research partner Inge Goudsmit is not only a very talented architect but also a real data-cruncher😉 we made some nice infographics with all the numbers that were generated. I did this housing skyline yesterday. Like:)?

Work in Progress; Mindmap

I worked on this map in the passed week, about complexity in divorce cases and how that influences the well-being of kids. Heavy topic because complex it is… no doubt about that! I was thinking this afternoon; if it’s already hard to put down on paper by professionals it must be ten times harder for a kid to make sense of what’s happening in a real life family crisis situation! Time for weekend…

Information is Beautiful

I can stare at beautiful information for minutes. This infographic for example; to me it’s magical how information can turn in to a colorful pattern like this. David McCandless studied biographies of famously long lived, for clues that explain their age. Love it!

Secret Lives of Milk

Information is beautiful! This infographic is a great example of that notion. And even the title of this nice piece of work is intriguing: ‘the secret lives of milk’ (done by Seattle based designer Rachel Glaves).  Apart from that the whole illustration made me crave for cheese friends,  I just can’t ignore my Dutch roots;-).

Chinese to me: mapping mutual incomprehension

Last week I was working on an article about how we all should use correct Chinese terms over misleading English translations of those terms. As I was researching, I stumbled upon this really interesting map here. Although the design is very basic it really got my attention.

I know from living in Hong Kong that most English speaking people say: ‘It sounds like Greek to me’ when they don’t understand something. When we Dutch speakers encounter a language problem, we say ‘it’s Chinese to me’. And apparently we’re not the only ones using Chinese as an equivalent of ‘this is something way beyond understanding’. Chinese is used most often in this international phrase phenomenon, Greek comes second and Spanish third. (Original source of the map can be found here)

Chinese are the only ones who don’t refer to another earthly language to indicate that they can’t comprehend something. They say ‘This must be heavenly script’.  I admire the self-confidence of Asians;-).

Infographic: Colorfulness of Books

Artist and designer Jaz Parkinson created a wonderful art project called ‘Colour Signatures’. Famous novels are presented in a form of posters/book covers, where color spectrums are a reference to colors used in novels’ content.

Jaz explains more how the colors are found: ‘For example when it might say ‘yellow brick road,’ ‘yellow’ gets a tally, or when for example in The Road it says ‘dark ash covered everything’ (not an actual quote), that image evokes dark grey instantly in the mind, so dark grey gets a tally.’

According to Parkinson, The Little Prince is the most romantically colored chart so far. I like how his visualizations can tell you in a completely new way how ‘dark’ or ‘fresh’ a certain story is. Fascinating! (via)

Coffee Infographic

Coffee: Is there anything it can’t do? I just read this interesting article on the website of Time-magazine about a coffee-powered car that broke a World Record this past week. Isn’t that amazing? In honor to that, I’d like to share with you an info-graphic about how to brew the perfect cup. After all it’s also important to keep your own engine running;-)

The New York based designers of Plaid Creative made this one. I really like the simplicity of the design. Check out their website here.