Last week I had the pleasure of hearing Swedish Professor of International Health, Hans Rosling, speak on global poverty, HIV, and carbon dioxide emissions in a developing world. A former sword-swallower forced into professor-hood as his “day job”, Hans is an excellent presenter, though it helps that he has some of the most potent graphical displays I have seen in the field. He has his son and daughter-in-law to thank for creating Gapminder, a flash-based program (and, since May, a Google Tool) which colorfully animates otherwise dry and inaccessible statistical data.

With the ability to let you interactively visualize world development indicators over time, Gapminder presents us with a way to wrap our heads around what’s happening to our world, overcoming the expense- and user interface-barriers that continue to plague government agencies’ solutions.

View Hans Rosling speak at this year’s TED conference
View Google Tech Talk by Gapminder.org Founders

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See Also: Obesity Mapping through Social Networks,Breathing Data,Art: Your Own Internet World,

This entry was posted by Jessica Pfund on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Design, Social Change, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.