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Episode #178: Valentina D’Efilippo
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Valentina D’Efilippo is an award-winning designer, creative director, and author based in London. Working across formats and industries, her work takes many forms – from theatre productions and exhibitions to editorial content and digital experiences. She has co-authored “The Infographic...
The post Episode #178: Valentina D’Efilippo appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Season finale with John Schwabish
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. I hope you and your friends and your family are all safe and well and healthy in these strange times. This, my friends, is the final episode of the PolicyViz Podcast for this season. No, don't worry. I will be back in the fall with more great interviews with folks in the fields of data visualization and open data and presentation skills and technology. But I'm going to take the next few months off and rest and relax and recharge.
Introducing Valentina de Filippo
00:00:38
Speaker
And to finish off this season of the podcast, I'm excited to have Valentina de Filippo with me. Valentina is an illustrator, a designer, a teacher, and a writer. And we talk about all the sorts of things that she does, keeping her busy. When you look through Valentina's work, you don't see a lot of line charts and bar charts and pie charts, what you might consider some of your standard chart types. But instead, she spends a lot of times
00:00:59
Speaker
creating new and different forms and non-standard graphs. And so we spent a lot of time talking about how she thinks about communicating data in those different ways to her audiences. We also talk about her data visualization infographics workshops, one of which is coming up very soon. We talk about some of her mapping exercises and some that I've actually used in my classes when I teach to kids.
00:01:20
Speaker
So I hope you'll enjoy that conversation with Valentina and I hope you'll continue to support the podcast by sharing it with your friends and your social networks. I hope you'll consider leaving a review or rate it on iTunes or Stitcher or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:01:36
Speaker
Before I get to the interview with Valentina, just a couple of things as I think about the next few months and reflect on the few months behind us.
Reflections on COVID and diversity
00:01:43
Speaker
It's obviously been a very strange and difficult and challenging few months, both with the COVID pandemic and here in the United States and around the world, the protests against police brutality and inequality.
00:01:55
Speaker
And as I think about my work in the field of data visualization and presentation skills, I've been starting to think more carefully about accessibility and diversity and inclusion and equity and how we can do a better job of communicating our data and our analysis to more people so that they can use it so that they can make discoveries and they can improve policy in the world around us.
00:02:15
Speaker
And so I'm excited to continue that journey with you as we continue to think about ways in which we can make our work better and more accessible and more relevant to the world around us.
John's book: Better Data Visualizations
00:02:28
Speaker
Part of what I'll be doing over the next couple of months is finishing up my next book, Better Data Visualizations, which will hopefully walk you through many of the different types of graphs that are available to you outside of these lines and bars and pie charts. And that's why I'm excited to talk to Valentina, because she creates a lot of those non-standard graph types. So again, I hope you're well, and I hope your friends and your family are well, and I hope you're staying safe. And so I'm excited to bring this final episode of this season's podcast to you. Here's my interview with Valentina de Filippo.
00:03:02
Speaker
Hi, Valentina. How are you? I'm great, John. Thanks for having me. Of course. I'm excited to have you on. It's the last episode of the podcast for this quote unquote season. So going out with a bang because I get to chat with you and like what couldn't be better than that? Amazing. I'm delighted. Thanks.
00:03:21
Speaker
There are a few things I want to talk to you about, but maybe we can start with you telling folks a little bit about yourself and your background and what you are doing now and some of the work that
Valentina's career journey
00:03:33
Speaker
you do.
00:03:33
Speaker
Sure. Okay, so let's start with labels. I'm a designer, illustrator, and creative director. I'm Italian, as you can probably guess from my accent, but I'm based in London. And I guess I've been working with data for more than a decade now.
00:03:52
Speaker
But yeah, very different formats and different industries. So I guess when you're looking at my portfolio, you would see like many different way of representing or perhaps working with data. Sometimes it's pre-standard like interactive platform or editorial commissions. Other times it's a bit more unusual perhaps. So I've been working with theater productions.
00:04:17
Speaker
where we talked about privacy or climate change during live theatre performances or exhibitions or digital products where perhaps we don't even visualise the data but we use data as a way to create an experience. And I guess the common denominator of all these projects is data or working with some sort of complexity, I suppose.
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah, of all the labels, I suppose information designers in the designer is the one that fits the bill.
The creative process in data visualization
00:04:55
Speaker
Yeah. I find that when I do this podcast, people come to the field of data visualization or information visualization from
00:05:01
Speaker
from all different ways, you know, there's no like single path. So you are a designer by training and by background. How did you get into this, especially because you started doing the data part like 10 years ago. So even especially back then, it wasn't sort of a standard path. So how did you end up going down this path of working with data and combining it with your design training?
00:05:24
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. So it's been a journey. So I graduated in industrial design and the polytechnic of Turin. And then I came to London and I did a master in visual communication. And I guess like,
00:05:40
Speaker
From the beginning, my first steps in data design were really just experimentation with topics and subject matter that I was interested in. And because of the background that I had, there was quite analytical and perhaps more engineering. I was deconstructing everything. I had the opportunity to put my hands on while I studied visual communication and graphic design. So for instance, at the beginning I did a deconstruction of The Shining by Kubrick.
00:06:06
Speaker
my thesis in my postgraduate was visual analysis of stereotypes and how those gender stereotypes specifically are portrayed in the literature for kids. So I did a recollection of
00:06:24
Speaker
many symbols and colors and activities and emotions in which females and males were portrayed. Unfortunately, this was like 2005 and 2006. It was pre-dismay, the amount of bad stereotypes in which men and women specifically were described in this literature.
00:06:47
Speaker
And yes, you were saying like probably at the time there wasn't really a thing as called data visualization. Those projects started to fall into the bucket of information design in my program.
00:07:02
Speaker
And later on, I kind of understood that, yeah, since the beginning, my first step into visual communication were always kind of like driven towards visualising complexity, making sense of complexity, breaking it down and then piecing it back together to explain the insights or what I learned to others.
00:07:25
Speaker
And then really the project that cemented my practice came years later.
Infographics and global history
00:07:31
Speaker
So the first job that I landed after university was actually in advertising, in digital advertising. So I work as an art director for a number of years. And then in 2012,
00:07:41
Speaker
I got an email from Harper Collins, she's obviously a big publisher, and they got in touch saying, we saw your experimentation with data, like those projects that I just mentioned, visualising gender stereotypes, and we would like to discuss with you the idea of putting together a book.
00:07:58
Speaker
about the history of the world through data and infographic storytelling. And I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Right? But at the same time, it's like, really? Do I have the skill set to do that? But anyhow, it was an amazing opportunity. It was an arranged marriage.
00:08:19
Speaker
as you would say. So I was paired with the brilliant James Bow, who at the time used to work for The Guardian as a data journalist. And together, yeah, we put our brains together and we created 100 infographics from scratch, narrating the evolution of the world and the evolution of mankind. And this is the infographic history of the world, the book that came out in 2013.
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it was like a very ambitious project, very hard, certainly a daunting brief, but absolutely amazing, an amazing opportunity, an amazing learning experience more than anything is by doing that you actually learn how to do it.
00:09:12
Speaker
So when you finished the book, is that when you decided just to start doing information visualization and teaching and workshops full time?
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah, I guess again, it wasn't quite a decision. I guess one thing just led to another thing. So the book came out and there was the business card, right? It just opened a lot of opportunities. So I started to receive more and more briefs and commissions that were labeled as infographic projects or database projects.
00:09:44
Speaker
Then the Guardian got in touch saying, we're putting together these master classes and we would like to expand our curriculum and include infographics storytelling. Would you like to teach? So one thing kind of led to the next thing is life. As it were.
Non-standard charts and visual metaphors
00:10:01
Speaker
I want to talk about the workshops in a minute, but I also want to talk about your
00:10:08
Speaker
I guess it's your style or your approach to data visualization because when I scroll through your portfolio, I don't see, I mean, obviously see lots of different types of work, as you already mentioned. But I also don't see a lot of line charts and bar charts and pie charts and area charts. There's a lot of, you have a lot of complex data and there's a lot of different forms going on with your work. And so I'm just curious about
00:10:32
Speaker
that aspect of your work, are you anti-bar chart or anti-line chart? Or is it more that creative side of the brain sort of takes over? So I don't really know how to formulate a precise question, but it's more of an observation I think I've made about your work over the last couple of years.
00:10:52
Speaker
Yeah, no, I guess like in the portfolio, there is a clear curation of the type of work that I would like to work on. So there is a filter that I apply. I clearly do lots of bar charts and conventional charts in the day-to-day. But I suppose like whenever I can, I try to push it. I try to kind of like
00:11:18
Speaker
find a way to balance form and function, obviously, depending on the audience, the brief, the purpose of this visualization. I try to combine the informative aspects of what we're trying to do when we're creating a data visualization, like a simple bar chart, to the more creative aspect, as you were just saying, to create something that perhaps is more compelling.
00:11:42
Speaker
maybe more aesthetically pleasing or they can perhaps resonate more with an audience from a semiotic point of view. What I mean is how can we actually bring the narrative behind the data, behind these numbers to life through the
00:12:00
Speaker
use of color, use of visual metaphors, novel forms, different aesthetics that perhaps we borrow from other fields. I guess like a lot of times we tend to think that our chart is
00:12:18
Speaker
like a standard chart, right? Like a bar chart is easy to understood because anybody can read a bar chart. But is it true? Like, can everybody read a bar chart? And also, are we really bringing to life the stories of this bar chart by representing bananas, let's say, in number of deaths in the same conventional way?
00:12:43
Speaker
So I guess those are the questions that I keep pausing whenever I'm approaching a new brief. And sometimes the bar chart is the most appropriate way to go about. Other times I might just experiment with something else.
00:12:58
Speaker
And do you find when you have these experiments and you end up on a form that you like, but it's not a bar chart. It's not a line chart. It's, you know, it's something different. Do you find that you have to spend, well, actually I was going to ask you about how you, how you spend time explaining to the reader or the user how to read the graph, but actually I want to back up. How do you explain to the client?
00:13:21
Speaker
that this is maybe a better, you know, maybe they're coming at coming to you and saying, Oh, I, you know, maybe they're expecting a dashboard, although maybe they're coming to you because they don't want to dash the standard dashboard. But do you often, do you have to explain to them why this form that looks, you know, it doesn't look like anything they've seen before. It's actually a way that they should go. This is a better way.
00:13:42
Speaker
I guess as I was saying before, it really depends on the brief. So depending on the audience and the type of communication, the type of design work that we're doing, I might need to just stick to whatever is conventional. So let's say I'm designing a trader platform, right? It's not that I'm going to be redesigning the way that the trader does the work. And I will leverage the way the
00:14:10
Speaker
the visual cortex has been trained for years and years, so I'm not going to enforce a new novel way of creating the dashboard. On the other hand though, whenever I've got a brief that allows me to be more creative, I suppose the reason that much selling work to the client to convince them that there are different ways, because usually,
00:14:38
Speaker
It's kind of like a process, right? We go from the insights, the data, what it's telling us, discussing the stories that those insights communicate, and then it's a journey into getting into the forms and the shapes and how those can be communicated.
00:14:59
Speaker
As long as you kind of like always reference the numbers and the stories, then the forms actually comes as a normal evolution, I suppose. It's not something that you are trying to inform, let's say.
00:15:15
Speaker
Oh, I really want to do, I'm saying something stupid, but like I really want to do a flower and then you actually look at the data. It doesn't make any sense to create a flower out of this data, right? Because the flower doesn't connect to the story and it's probably not the most appropriate way to represent the data shapes either, right? In terms of pre-attentive processing. But if you're looking at the data and you look at the story and then you can find a connection with a flower, then why not? Right.
00:15:45
Speaker
Does it make sense? It does make sense. It's really interesting how especially this your comment about including the data on there somehow makes it or not somehow, but it makes it easier for people to read and understand it because they can read the numbers right there.
00:16:01
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess like now that I said, um, uh, I talked about this metaphor of the flower, I guess like you can briefly just discuss these, uh, poppy field that perhaps is one of the most popular visualization. That's simply a scatterplot, right? Um, so when looking at the numbers, um, and the stories, what you're looking at is the last centuries, uh, war.
00:16:27
Speaker
from the 1900s and the present days where the war took place and the toll in terms of the cost, the human cost, the number of lives each war claimed.
00:16:38
Speaker
as well as I think we had the geography, but quite broadly speaking, just the continent. So the starting point is obviously the data. We're looking at the data and what type of shape is best suited to actually represent all these different variables, because we've got a magnitude, number of deaths, we've got time, so some sort of timeline, and we've got geographies to kind of like tag these wars.
00:17:05
Speaker
I guess after a short exploration, a scatterplot seems like evident to be a good way to go, where perhaps we've got a bubble chart on a scatterplot. The bubbles are representing the number of deaths that each were claimed.
00:17:21
Speaker
And then in terms of timeline, where do you place these bubbles at the beginning, at the end? It seems intuitive to put it at the end because that's when you count the number of deaths, right? The end of the war is when you actually see the cost of the war. So you anchor the bubble there.
00:17:39
Speaker
And then what do you put on the y-axis? So on the x, we've got time. On the y, I'm thinking duration to see how long the war was. Because on the timeline, I just have the end point, right? So I want to see when it started, when it ends. So I get duration on the y-axis. So this is kind of like initial exploration. I see what the numbers are telling me. And by visualizing just on this simple bubble chart on a scatterplot,
00:18:05
Speaker
I can see some interesting outliers, like two big bubbles at the beginning of the century, the Great War, and then in the middle of the century, the Second World War. And then I see right at the end of the timeline, a small bubble, but really tall in terms of the white positioning. So it's been lasting for six decades, Palestine, Israel, and Palestine.
00:18:34
Speaker
And that's pretty much the first investigation. Now that I've got an idea of what the skeleton of the visualization looks like, I'm kind of thinking, okay, now instead of just bubbles, what can I do? And that's when I come up with the idea of it can be a poppy field.
00:18:51
Speaker
It can be like a field of commemoration, right? So what if I dress those bubbles with a flower? And then if you think about the flower, then I've got a new element that is actually the stem. So I can anchor the flower to the timeline in the moment where the war started and then make it grow horizontally as well as vertically to indicate the passing of time. So I've got timeline, both.
00:19:19
Speaker
for the duration vertically as well as the duration horizontally on the time on the y on the x-axis. And yeah, those poppies they can change slightly variation of red to kind of like group them together in terms of geography. And that's basically the process of getting from something that is quite standard like scatter plot into something that is perhaps a bit more novel that is
00:19:49
Speaker
pop field. Right. Now it's interesting, the way you describe it is going in some ways step by step and just letting the data inform how you evolve the form of the piece.
00:20:04
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think the starting point is always the data. I always need to see the numbers and what they look like. And that usually happens in a very raw way in Excel or Google Spreadsheets, sometimes in RAWgraph, sometimes in Tableau.
From data to compelling visuals
00:20:21
Speaker
But I just need to see the numbers and the insights. And then I apply all the visual communication, the graphic design, semiotics later on.
00:20:30
Speaker
I guess it was only one case where the visual metaphor actually unlocked the data puzzle. It was in mid to main term, which is funny that I'm referencing to projects that they both use a flower as a metaphor.
00:20:46
Speaker
So not all my projects are flowers. But anytime the starting point is always the data and then I go into visualizing the data and then getting to the visual metaphor. But in this specific case, for me to maintain that is a visual analysis of the two movement of the first six months.
00:21:07
Speaker
I really got stuck at the beginning. We had a million data points. We've got so many tweets related to the me too hashtag. We had a very multi-dimensional dataset. We have the geography. We had obviously the time in which the tweet was shared, the person who shared it, the number of followers.
00:21:35
Speaker
also the number of likes, the number of comments, and obviously the granular data that is contained in the content of the tweet, right? So doing some sort of semantic analysis, you could find meanings and frequency of words and all of that.
00:21:51
Speaker
And that was like, wow, okay, where do we start to piece it all together? And more than anything, it wasn't even just the complexity of the data. It was actually the complexity of the subject matter. And looking through the data sets was really hardcore. Reading through these tweets and the stories was like, yeah, really challenging, really, really hard.
00:22:14
Speaker
At that point, I actually felt the heaviness of working with the data and irresponsibility as well. Am I going to paint anything meaningful? How can I actually give justice to these voices?
00:22:33
Speaker
And then kind of moving forward into the direction of like painting and thinking, okay, it's just going to be an expression of what this data set that is actually just a drop in the ocean because obviously the movement has been massive and we had all the limitations that come with, you know, scraping the Twitter API and
00:22:55
Speaker
And so forth, thinking, well, what if I just paint an image? What could this image be? And I thought, what are these voices? These voices are amazingly powerful, but on their own, until now, they've been incredibly fragile.
00:23:12
Speaker
And that kind of like brought me to think about the dandelion as a visual metaphor for something that is regarded as something beautiful as well as fragile, like a female voice. You know, like you just blow it and it disappear, but it's also amazingly strong because dandelion is actually not a flower, it's a weed.
00:23:32
Speaker
You know, like you blow it and all these seeds can just grow anywhere. And it's really fertile. It can grow pretty much everywhere. So you like it to see in a field, but you don't want to have it in your garden kind of thing.
00:23:49
Speaker
And also if you think about the dandelion is this symbol that has been used in proper culture many times to symbolize the hope for change. When you blow it, you say most of the time, did you make a wish? So the kind of like semiotics dictated then the shape of the data analysis.
00:24:14
Speaker
In that case, in this specific project, I was like, okay, what if I could paint this data with the dandelion? What attributes do you have in the form of the dandelion? I've got the seeds, they could have different length, they could have different size. Then I started to plot the data into the visual metaphor, if it makes sense. But that was the only case where I actually went reverse.
00:24:43
Speaker
But it sounds like you had this connection with the data in such a way that the form sort of informed how you were going to do the work. Yeah.
00:24:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. It's also interesting the way you describe your process, the way you describe it sort of very flowing from one state to the next. So it's not so much like I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, it has this, the way you describe it just a little bit more has a more of a flow to it. And I'm curious
00:25:16
Speaker
So I know you teach a lot of workshops. You mentioned the Guardian Masterclass. Is that how you teach people to create information visualizations? Again, I don't have a specific question, but what is your approach to teaching this skill, which as we've already talked about, people come from all different ways to be creative with data?
00:25:37
Speaker
Yeah, so that's an interesting challenge, the workshops.
Hands-on workshops
00:25:42
Speaker
So I run Workshop with the Guardian, Graphic Hunters, it is an organization in the Netherlands, as well as corporate trainings or workshops with university students.
00:25:52
Speaker
So I've got many different audiences and also the length of my workshop can vary from three hour format to a week or perhaps a couple of weeks if I'm working with university students. And I started actually with the Guardian. That was my first commission I would say of Infographic Storytelling Workshop and I guess like
00:26:18
Speaker
I took the challenge as a design challenge. How can I actually explain to other people what I do? How can I design a format that will explain that? I guess, as you were saying, it's like sharing with others this flaw. How do you go from the raw spreadsheet into something that is visually compelling as well as highly informative?
00:26:42
Speaker
So I've created a few activities and exercises that hopefully illuminate the process and it's very analog. I try to keep all these workshops very tool agnostic to kind of remove the barrier of tech.
00:26:59
Speaker
And also because like saying at the Guardian, I might have a group of 20 people and all these 20 people are coming from different backgrounds. Some might be data scientists or very fluent with data in a spreadsheet, but other could be storytellers or health practitioners or even just students or retired people. They just want to expand their knowledge and become better consumers of charts and data.
00:27:29
Speaker
So I try to remove a few entry points like the tooling and really just focusing on the kind of decision making process that goes into creating a successful database.
00:27:46
Speaker
And yeah, I guess like the aim of these formats is always like to create something that is interesting, informative, inspiring, but also highly accessible. So for anybody to be able to create something, I want to everybody be able to participate. And I do create a number of activities with just pen and paper.
00:28:09
Speaker
So you are kind of familiar with the first activity, I suppose, because I spoke at Information Plus at the conference where we met about this activity that is mapping the world geography from memory. And then on top of that, we're going to be mapping a personal data set. So perhaps I can talk a bit about that.
00:28:31
Speaker
where this initial activity is actually an icebreaker in my formats and it's based on an obsession of mine. So I'm a map collector and I've been collecting hundred maps for about 11 years since 2009 when for the first time I visited Japan and I saw a representation of the world where Europe was not in the middle and I kind of felt lost. I was like, oh my God, what's going on? East and West are rivers. The Americas on the wrong side, you know, like
00:29:00
Speaker
I kind of felt disoriented so I turned to the local people and asked them to draw the world map from memory to just kind of like sketch it really really quickly for me and over the 15 maps that I collected all of them presented Japan in the middle and the geography around was somehow more detailed
00:29:25
Speaker
And then the rest of the world was very much personal, right? Was very much subjective to each one unique map. And that's kind of like a fascinating thing for me, like how we are inevitably able, right, to describe a concept like the world,
00:29:48
Speaker
visually, but at the same time it's like so unique to each individual person, right? Based on our own experience, our perhaps knowledge of geography, as well as like ability, right, to draw
00:30:04
Speaker
So I've been doing that for a number of years. And then when I started to design the format of my workshop, I thought, wouldn't it be cool to actually introduce people by drawing their own world map? Because then we could see where people are from, where perhaps they've been. And then on top of that, I thought, what if then I can use that to actually plot some data? So the map itself is already a representation of information and personal data.
00:30:33
Speaker
that I can walk people through that we can share. And then on top of that, we can then map a dataset, a specific story. So to be a bit more specific with that, after we draw the world map, we think about a story that could be maybe the trips that you've taken or if you haven't traveled extensively in
00:30:53
Speaker
across the world, you might think about the food that you consume, whether it's Japanese sushi or Chinese takeaway or Italian pizza and spaghetti or, I don't know, Mexican tacos, right? Anything can make this story. The only, I suppose, filter of all the personal stories that you can possibly introduce yourself to the class is it needs to be global because we've started with the world map.
00:31:23
Speaker
And one note, we start with the world map and I think it's quite effective in a way because the blank canvas can be very intimidating, especially if you're not coming with a creative background, if you're not used to drawing and sketching.
00:31:37
Speaker
Staring at the blank canvas and thinking like, oh, now I'm going to draw this dataset, it can be like incredibly challenging and intimidating, especially when you're in a group with strangers. So anybody can somehow articulate what the world looks like when you're asked to do so.
00:31:54
Speaker
So it's a nice kind of like icebreaker in the sense that everybody can actually start noting down something on paper. And then the next step is to plot this specific story that you might have chosen like the travels that you made or the food that you like or where your family and friends are from, whatever the story might be.
00:32:18
Speaker
And usually in live events, so if it's like a face-to-face workshop, because nowadays obviously everything is online, so the sophistication of paper choices is not available. But if it was a live event, I would bring tracing paper.
00:32:34
Speaker
I love working with tracing paper on my own work because then you don't need to start from scratch over and over. You can just overlay a new layer on top of the map and start with a new dataset, perhaps for correlation to see two different datasets, or if you perhaps weren't not happy with encoding that you've just done, you can just remove the tracing paper and start again.
00:33:03
Speaker
But online, yeah, we just do everything on the same sheet of paper or cereal box if you don't have paper laying around. And then I guess what is interesting in this exercise is that at the end, once we have created our maps and we plotted our data stories,
00:33:24
Speaker
we swap them around and from being the creators, we become the readers. And there is plenty of learning that can actually be drawn by just doing some really rapid user testing and see how people actually entered these maps, what they find useful, how they travel perhaps back and forth between the key and the visualization, what type of titles are the most interesting, most successful.
00:33:54
Speaker
And ultimately, also, it's important to note that the bias that we put as creators are also mirrored in the bias that we put as readers. So whenever we create our maps, obviously, we put ourselves in the middle of this creation. We see the country where we're from and blah, blah. And when we're reading this visualization, ultimately, what we do is overlaying our own map
00:34:20
Speaker
on top of these world maps to find if the creator actually did include our country or did include the places that we know. And that's actually how we read data visualization, right? Like there isn't a universal way to depict a dataset and there isn't a universal way to interpret the chart because everybody has a unique experience and there's a unique understanding of the specific data.
00:34:48
Speaker
So yeah, in summary, that's kind of like the icebreaker of the workshops. Wow, really interesting. And when you prime people to start adding data to their maps, do you show them examples or do you say, here are some data types that
Encouraging creativity in workshops
00:35:06
Speaker
you could plot? Because when I've done this and you had inspired this exercise for me when I teach kids,
00:35:12
Speaker
When I teach kids, I have them just draw the floor, one floor in their house. And I feel like the times when I show them a drawing of my own house, and then I draw circles in each of the rooms of how much time I spend in each room, I get a bunch of kids who start drawing circles on the map. And so it's a double-edged sword because on the one hand, they may not know how to add the data to the map, but on the other hand, I don't want to prime them to just be using circles.
00:35:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's a fine balance. I found the same and I run the same exercise with kids myself and usually kids tend to just follow the instruction, which is fine. At the same time, with an adult audience as well, you might have
00:35:59
Speaker
the audience they're kind of like stuck and it's a bit of prompt and help and that's totally fine too but I guess like I always try to suggest a few parts like it could be troubles it could be food but what if it was your unique story what could it be and kind of like rewarding as well of like
00:36:20
Speaker
you know, saying the most creative or the most unusual story will get read in the class or something like that usually does prompt a bit more inspiration or the challenge at least. You have a workshop coming up, right? I do on the 6th and the 7th of July. And it must be virtual.
00:36:41
Speaker
is virtual, yes. It's going to be on Zoom, one of the many Zoom columns. One of the many Zoom meetings, right? Yes. Do you want to just talk about it real quick? I'll put a link on the show notes in case people want to check it out.
Upcoming virtual workshop
00:36:55
Speaker
Sure. It's like a full-on deep dive into the process of infographic storytelling and data visualization.
00:37:03
Speaker
The activity that I just explained right now would be probably included as many others. We're going to be looking at conventional charts as well as the use of visual metaphors, storytelling devices, interactivity versus linear storytelling, and just a lot of visual communication and visual perception and hopefully a lot of fun.
00:37:29
Speaker
So yeah, if you want to join me for anybody listening, it would be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I'll put the, I'll put the link on the notes page and people could check it out. And I also will put links to the various projects that you talked about. And of course your, your whole site and the book.
00:37:46
Speaker
Um, which is great. I have it here somewhere. I'm trying to turn around and find it in my bookshelf. Um, great. Well, it sounds great. It sounds like you're doing, you're doing great. Um, thanks so much for, for chatting with me. And, um, yeah, it's been great chatting. Great to hear from you. Thank you so much for having me, John. Thanks.
00:38:08
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed that interview with Valentina and I hope you learned something and maybe can incorporate it into your own work. Take a look at Valentina's website, her portfolio, and her classes with The Guardian, all linked on the show notes. I hope you'll consider leaving a review of the show on iTunes or Stitcher or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. I hope you'll share it with your networks and if you'd be so kind to support the show financially, head over to my Patreon page where just for a couple bucks a month you can help me pay for things like transcription, sound editing, and more.
00:38:36
Speaker
I hope you will have a lovely, restful, healthy summer. And I look forward to connecting with you all again in the fall. So until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.