Today’s guest lecture by Anna Rosling Rönnlung has received great attention from the ME1033 audience. The ex-senior UX designer at Google and co-founder of GapMinder Foundation has presented the main vision of her company : fight devastating ignorance. It sounds like a huge entreprise. But they seem to be on the right track. In short, their core value is to give access to knowledge using images, pictures and good visualization.
Dollar Street is Anna’s main focus at the moment. This GapMinder startup gathers pictures of items and houses from all around the World. The idea is to make “everyone’s standard of living understandable with pictures”. There is no point of trying to explain it with words then; the following TEDx video will speak by itself.
Anna invited Jasper to join the lecture. Employee at GapMinder and just graduated from KTH two days ago, he gave us an insight of their visualization platform. The open-sourced tool converts data into bubbles, mountains or different sort of charts that render access to statistics more enjoyable. He pinpointed their wish in improving their service using collaborative and open innovation among the users.
After the two presentations, the students asked many interesting questions. Some of those were critical and challenging, which also showed Anna’s skill to be able to bounce back and give reliable answers. Dollar Street will be released by the beginning of next year. There are a lot of ideas and projects when looking at the future. The main one is to create a Dollar Street community that would share pictures and add content in the database. Another – and this is the one I like the most – would be to gather data over years to create a chronicle of GPS-coordinates.
I deeply think that visual have great impact on people. Convert numbers into nice charts help to understand the data. But Dollar Street goes even further: by using pictures, they manage to compare and analyse the social and ethnological diversity in a very creative way. Images may worth a thousand of words. As long as it is well used. I guess this will be the main challenge for Dollar Street in the coming years: keeping integrity in all the data they will collect and stay unbiased in the way they’ll combine them.
Céline
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