Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode #20: Nigel Holmes
145 Plays9 years ago
This is a special bonus episode of the PolicyViz Podcast. I was in New Orleans last week for the Presentation Summit and Nigel Holmes kicked things off with his presentation about the role of humor in presentations. Formerly of Time...
The post Episode #20: Nigel Holmes appeared first on PolicyViz.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Bonus Episode
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. This is a special bonus episode of the podcast. I'm at the Presentation Summit in New Orleans.
Meet Nigel Holmes
00:00:20
Speaker
And today's kickoff keynote speaker was none other than Nigel Holmes. Nigel, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.
00:00:28
Speaker
Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is great. It's a great opportunity. So for those of you who don't know of Nigel, that's really a shame, actually, if you don't know Nigel. Famously and formally of Time Magazine, and now Freelance, Information Visualization, Graphic Designer, Graphic Artists. Correct. All the great things. So how about
Humor and Creativity in Presentations
00:00:48
Speaker
this? Let me ask you to give a quick recap of your keynote from this morning, and then we can just talk about it. Because you and I have talked about this in depth, and I think there's lots more that we can
00:00:57
Speaker
Say, but we'll spend 20 minutes talking about it. OK. Well, the person who runs the presentation summit is called Rick Altman. And I've done a couple of others for him. And he generally asks me not to put too fine a point on it to kind of play the fool and open the proceedings and get people relaxed.
00:01:18
Speaker
There's some facts involved and there are some stunts involved and there's some audience involvement involved. And what I try to do is to spin this into ways that the people in the audience can maybe open their minds to different ways of thinking about how to present.
PowerPoint and the Power of Voice
00:01:39
Speaker
The summit is about presentations. It's about PowerPoint, actually.
00:01:43
Speaker
and in fact when I make presentations I do use PowerPoint very simply and you know abiding by all the rules that people hate PowerPoint for and especially here and all I'm doing basically is putting images up on a screen and then talking about it because you know when you're alive
00:02:12
Speaker
The voice is the most important thing, I think. Anyway, one of the things that I did this time was something that I've actually done a lot of times before, which is to try to get people to see the difference between a million of something and a billion of something and a trillion of something. And if you set up a scale, which you can do with six people from the audience,
Visualizing Large Numbers with Audience Participation
00:02:39
Speaker
one of whom represents today, one of whom represents 16,000 years ago, and one that represents 32,000 years ago. And you can show things during that, like in 16,000 years ago, the Lascaux Capes were being painted and so on.
00:02:57
Speaker
And then you give the other three unwitting people who came up one sign that says a million, one that says a billion, and one that says a trillion, and you ask them how long you think on this scale is a million seconds. Nobody knows the answers. And they kind of fiddle about and they don't know where to stand and actually
00:03:23
Speaker
million seconds is only 12 days. So given the scale of people standing there, which is probably 20 feet, so 10 feet away from the first person is 16,000 years, you can imagine that in order to get 12 days, the people are practically standing on top of each other. Then it's a billion.
00:03:46
Speaker
so somebody I give the sign that big sign that says a billion to the second person and And they move further away It's kind of human nature that you will kind of move towards the middle and you have to point out no actually a billion years is Sorry a billion seconds is 32 years. So again, you've got 16,000 years only 10 feet away And so those two people are sitting right on top of each other as well. So you now have a
00:04:13
Speaker
the person who represents today, the person who represents a million, and the person who represents a billion standing exactly on top of each other. And then the kind of the kicker is you give the trillion sign that says a trillion to the third person, or actually the sixth person in total, and ask them where they would stand. And I think once or twice when I've done this somebody has
00:04:41
Speaker
really understood that 32,000 is, you know, it's a thousand times more than the 32, so they actually go and stand right at the other end, going right past the 16,000 and people just kind of gasp, because here we have a million and a billion right on top of each other and a trillion which is, you know, 20 feet away and
00:05:07
Speaker
All I'm trying to do really is to kind of show that we use these numbers with abandon and we don't really necessarily understand the complete scale of
Representing Trillions Visually
00:05:19
Speaker
them.
00:05:19
Speaker
Now one thing I saw, one thing you did today that I haven't seen you do in the past is you sort of, you had stacks of printed out hundred dollar bills and we won't talk about the legality of that. But this stack, and so I like that sort of, I like that visual because I can sort of see this stack of a trillion dollars and how tall it is. And I think part of the challenge is when you read the newspapers or you look at the budget or whatever, it's never a trillion, it's 1.6 trillion or 1.2 trillion.
00:05:47
Speaker
And too often I think we see these sort of comparisons that are, you know, it's three Empire State buildings high. So how do you think we as either, you know, people work with data or write policy briefs or memos or data visualization people, you know, how do we get people to
00:06:04
Speaker
really connect and understand these numbers in sort of a real way as opposed to just saying, oh, okay, it's a billion or it's a trillion, it's a million, whatever, it doesn't really matter. Well, I think you use the kind of trick that I've just explained and you just kind of excuse yourself from it by saying, if it was,
00:06:24
Speaker
a rounded million, then it would be this much. And here's a way to visualize that. I was quite surprised, actually, when I had the million dollars printed, which was $100 bills,
00:06:40
Speaker
in stacks so 10 stacks and each one was a hundred thousand dollars quite a chunky stack actually and it weighed a lot i mean it was it was uh 18 pounds worth i got a local printer to to print me the blank sheets and i just put a fake one on the top that's where the legality comes in
00:06:59
Speaker
And not a fake one, a Xerox, it was surprisingly real. And I got somebody to come up from the audience and try to stack these up. I'm not sure I got that part of it quite right. But again, all I was trying to do was to say, you know, be aware of
00:07:17
Speaker
the size of things you know and maybe you will go away from this and realize that well first of all if you have to pay a ransom you know you've got to have a certain suitcase size to put it in but it's not that big uh... it might be heavy but it's not that big but the main thing is that you know seriously when these numbers are when you hear these things in budgets
00:07:43
Speaker
any steps that you can take to help people to visualize what you're talking about is going to help them to kind of understand it. And my whole theory of
00:07:54
Speaker
getting people to look at information is to kind of make them smile. Not to laugh out loud, it's not funny to make them, it's kind of a smile of recognition. I don't want to say the word wit because that is too self-serving for me, but I think that's what it is in a sense. Like a knowing smile. A knowing smile that they say, oh wow, yeah, now I see kind of what you're talking about.
Relatable Visuals for Vast Quantities
00:08:19
Speaker
Right. And you are sort of,
00:08:21
Speaker
Well-known I think for doing information visualization that has that knowing smile after the whimsy yeah you know many famous examples of some you did a time and since then. How is there a is there a sort of a combination of those two of sort of like a sort of the.
00:08:38
Speaker
the illustration and the whimsy around the actual visualization and then trying to get people to connect with the numbers and Bring those two together in a way that maybe you're sort of standard bar chart You don't get but you you know couch the bar chart with yeah different color annotation or illustration around at that
00:08:55
Speaker
Or is it really just like the construct? You really need to get people to say, well, if I stack it here to the moon and back, that's not very meaningful. But if I put it on the floor around me, it fills up a room or whatever it is. Yeah. Well, it's exactly that. It's trying to relate it to something human, I think, which is why a million dollars in hundred dollar bills comes up to your waste.
00:09:19
Speaker
give or take an intro to, and depending how tall you are or old you are. And I guess as you get older, it comes further up. And of course, is it $100 bills or is it $1? I mean, there's so many variables here. Another example that I tried to do for National Geographic was when they were doing a series about
00:09:48
Speaker
seven billion people on the planet, which was a couple of years ago. They asked me to do a page in the magazine and then to make a little video from it. One of the things I wanted to do was to show seven billion of something. And I could have chosen sand, grains of sand, but grains of sand are not equal.
00:10:14
Speaker
However, I'm not kind of uniform. Morton's salt actually is milled to a certain shape. You do get some smaller bits and the bottom of the container and everything and so on. So I counted out 100 grains of salt and then another one. I did it 10 times. I got 1,000.
00:10:37
Speaker
And I gave it to a high school teacher who put it on an incredibly precise scale that would measure tiny amounts.
00:10:55
Speaker
What happens if I just write on this tiny little piece of paper a thousand grains and put it on and the scale went right up. So I knew that this was very sensitive. So he did that and then he worked out how much seven billion would be.
00:11:11
Speaker
And my plan was to get Morton salt to deliver that much salt to the school playground and just pour it out. Now, we could have faked it, you know, we could have had a fake wall and just glued sand to the beginning of it.
00:11:27
Speaker
But we couldn't do that. By the way, it's about seven and a half average sized bathtubs. So it wasn't much for Morton. And they would have loved it, but National Geographic actually nixed it. So I couldn't do that. But the kind of thinking I'm doing is that if people
00:11:53
Speaker
can actually feel, you know, they use salt every day, they know what a bath is, of course that question is, you know, how big is a bath, exactly how far up does it come in, if it's got a curved top, you know, do you just scrape off the top or what. I mean, I don't care about that, actually, which I should do, but I don't. But it's just the concept. It's the concept of getting people
00:12:14
Speaker
who, I mean, if you said how much is seven billion, I mean, it would range from, you know, a huge amount. And actually, I didn't think that seven bath loads was very much. I thought it would be more than that. I was a little bit disappointed, but it didn't happen anyway. So the things I'm trying to do are to,
00:12:40
Speaker
kind of involve human beings with it. And the sand thing I found with a way to think about bytes and megabytes and petabytes up to zettabytes.
00:12:59
Speaker
And so if a bite is a grain of sand, how much are all the other bites? And you can say, you know, megabyte is, or whatever it is, a gigabyte is 20, no, that wouldn't be 20 PowerPoint things, but anyway, whatever it is, you can do it by media, or you can do it by something that people actually know about.
Evolution of Data Visualization
00:13:26
Speaker
And there's some sort of limit to this. So H&R Block does these commercials. You get your money back. And one of them that they did that I liked up to a point, they said, that's like $500 on every seat.
00:13:40
Speaker
in a football stadium. It's not just on every stadium, in this stadium, it's every football stadium. And so there it's sort of like, I get the one stadium, I can relate to one, but now you're telling me it's 30 stadiums. So, there's a limit, right? And is it just a feeling as you're sort of creating these? If the salt example was 100 bathtubs, I'd say, I don't sort of, can't think about, but seven bathtubs, I can sort of,
00:14:07
Speaker
Yeah. Get that in my head. It's like three people's houses or seven people's. Or seven people's houses, right. Well, another example was how much toothpaste we used. This was something that I actually did. And the question is how much toothpaste do we use in a year?
00:14:25
Speaker
And I worked it out, and if you squeezed it out, it went to the moon and back, and the moon and back, and the moon and halfway back. And you're lost already. So a whole lot of really long trips, and I'll never take. Right. And so I said, wait a minute. That's the wrong question. What I want to know is how much toothpaste, how about a day,
00:14:51
Speaker
And then it comes to 3,467 miles or something like that, which is Los Angeles to New York. And I might have got those numbers wrong, but that's what it is. And then you don't need any graphic at all. You just say to people, okay, close your eyes, draw a map of America, you've got to be talking to American audiences, and draw a white line across it. That's the amount of toothpaste we use in a day in America.
00:15:21
Speaker
And you don't need any props, you don't need to squeeze the toothpaste out, you don't need to confuse people about whether they're going to the moon and back once, twice, was it three or four? Half way back and you're stranded in space with toothpaste. Kind of ridiculous. So the limit is what a human can grasp. Right. And the interesting thing about that example is
00:15:43
Speaker
I mean, it sort of only works in the sort of presentation setting. But you don't need an image. You build the mental image through the presentations. You verbally speak. Right. But it does work outside. It's a very simple thing. How much toothpaste do we use? So a day, Los Angeles to New York. End. And it's not even a graphic. It's a sentence, which is sometimes just as good.
00:16:10
Speaker
Yes. And one of the problems that we're in, or that I have faced, is, you know, an editor says, we need a graphic. And I say, I've got a great idea here. I can do it in, you know, 10 words. And they say, you're a graphic designer, you know, and we need something on the page. And, you know, I said, well, I don't know, I'll do something else on the page.
00:16:35
Speaker
So let's segue if we could for a second, because this brings up sort of the next thing. So as we talked about earlier, you're sort of known for information visualizations that have sort of illustrations. And I think there's probably a segment, maybe a significant segment of the data visualization community, which probably doesn't believe in that, where you just show the data, right? And people who are listening could have a bunch of names in their heads probably. And it's just the data.
00:17:05
Speaker
Do you think that that has changed over time? Do you think we're in an era where we've gone too far to one extreme and not to another extreme? Where do you think we are in the stage of data visualization in this illustration component? And where do you think we're headed? It all comes down to who is looking at this. Who is the intended audience?
00:17:34
Speaker
What has changed is the ability to deal with huge data sets. Anybody can look at any of the work that I've done and say, well, it's easy enough for him using 12 or 15 points. Easy to make a mountain out of that or the back of a camel or something.
00:17:53
Speaker
which I would actually never do now, but I did used to. And I get annoyed when people keep bringing up these things. Digging into your past all the time. But the thing that I think about data visualization now is that
00:18:16
Speaker
and i may be wrong here but it seems to me that a lot of data visualizers are first scientists and academics and not artists now you don't have to be an artist
00:18:27
Speaker
But you have to be a combination of the two somehow. You have to be interested in numbers and have some idea of communicating it. And if you just dump the data and say, you work it out, or you see the pattern, then I don't think that's going to do later visualization any good at all. So my key is to say, who is this for? And how much data do they actually need? And how much can I edit?
00:18:57
Speaker
out. And I know that's a no-no, that you shouldn't edit things out, but I just hold to that principle because my idea is to get the idea across.
Artistic Balance in Data Visualization
00:19:09
Speaker
Now, there's a whole different area, which has nothing to do with publications, really, or communications so much. It has much more to do with scientific research. And there, all the data you need and the best tools that you can find to visualize it, that's all good.
00:19:39
Speaker
I don't work in that world. And so I don't quite understand how many people are going to be able to discern a pattern. So researchers communicating or researchers an academic journal is much different than communicating a national geographic journal. Except that, I would suspect that a lot of people who read the academic journal don't get it either.
00:20:07
Speaker
But nobody is going to take the step of simplifying, bad word simplifying, clarifying, I try to say, because simplifying implies dumbing down and all that. And that you can in fact exercise a certain amount of editing
00:20:27
Speaker
which again isn't probably the right word, it's probably culling. I mean, if you're drawing a line that is going from, he draws on John's page, that has tons of things on it, but basically what you want to know is what it was there and what it was there, then this is one line.
00:20:50
Speaker
And, but you have all this stuff. Now, if some of the, if more of these are like this, then maybe you should do something. The points are outliers and it's important to show the variation as opposed to the beginning and end. That's right. So I understand all that.
00:21:06
Speaker
But I still think that even the most hard-nosed academic needs a way into some of these things. It doesn't have to be a monster with its mouth open or the inside of somebody's leg. But not that you had ever done anything. Not that I've ever done anything like that. But you know, times were different then. Yeah.
00:21:36
Speaker
I'm not that I was at the forefront of anything because some wonderful, absolutely wonderful graphic visualisation work was done way back in the 30s. I mean, and Noirath, I'm actually just reviewing something for the International Design Journal.
00:21:52
Speaker
information design journal of somebody who's taking down Noira, who's basically saying he's not accurate enough for these days. But it's an evolution of the tools and the data we have available to us and the
00:22:10
Speaker
types of output that we have. My audience at the time that I was working from the late 70s to the early 90s, that period of time, my brief was not to decorate the page, but to make time more visual.
00:22:31
Speaker
And Ray Cave, brilliant editor there, and Walter Bernard, who was my absolute champion as the art director there, really kind of encouraged me to push it. And the editors of the various sections first hated it, and then the letters came in, and they loved it. And so we were right at that time. I convinced we were right, even though
00:22:57
Speaker
Some of them were criticized, so some of them were overdone. I was doing five or six of these things a week, and they were drawn by hand, and they were labor intensive. So I understand the criticism. I can fight back against the criticism, but actually for that time, I think we were doing the right thing.
Future of Data Visualization: Motion and Interactivity
00:23:16
Speaker
And then we went through a phase of 3D graphs, and then we went through an extremely cutback phase. But now people are saying, you know, we lost the fun. Can we have a bit more fun again? Because readers, they don't need to be entertained exactly, but some subjects are less interesting than others to a delay reader.
00:23:44
Speaker
or web viewer and so they need some help. So let's close up with this question.
00:23:54
Speaker
drawing on that. So let's talk about sort of data journalism, however you want to call it, information visualization in journalism. What's your view on it right now as it stands? Do you think there needs to be more sort of fun with visualizations? Is there too much focus on interactivity, not enough? Do you have sort of thoughts on what's going on now and sort of where we might be headed? Well, I think that we're headed into
00:24:25
Speaker
into movement over time. Whether that is truly interactive or whether it's just it starts here and it moves, I don't know. But that is a way of showing a hell of a lot more data than you can in a still feature. And I certainly think that if I had the skill set to do it,
00:24:52
Speaker
That's what I would be looking at. And I would leave illustration out of it completely. And move on to the motion. And move on to the motion. Great. Well, I want to thank you for coming on the show. It's been a real thrill for me. Always fun hanging out with you. Thanks, John. And thanks to everyone for listening. I appreciate it. If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a note on the website or hit me up on Twitter. And please rate the show on iTunes. It really helps get the views up. And thanks for listening again. And we'll see you next week.