Even more so than history, the economy and the concepts related to it can become so abstract that it’s difficult to navigate through a lot of what many experts are talking about. The vocabulary itself creates a gulf between what an ordinary person might understand and what is actually going on. Not to mention all the complexity tied up in the various institutions, forms, and graphs. Yet, at the same time it’s something that fundamentally touches each and every person to some degree.

Throughout different discussions about the economy, bailout plans, and national debt, it’s difficult to really understand what these large numbers mean. What does $700 billion dollars look like? What does it feel like? At a certain point it becomes so abstract that it just seems like people pulling numbers out of a hat and using a calculator to solve all the world’s problems.

That’s why I think financial concepts are always ripe for some good design work, and why I was especially interested in a recent poster by GOOD:

(via GOOD)

I think it’s wonderful that they combined a bunch of layers of information. What’s great about it is that you quickly get a sense of what happened by looking at the main components: the timeline and the increasing debt, but over time you can keep digging and reading the various nuggets of information that are at more of a micro level.

Over the summer I had some time to spend thinking and reading about topics that sparked my interest during grad school. Part of that happened to be a new interest in history. I never really liked general world history during high school or college, but the prospect of designing things for the future made me intensely interested in the past and how we’ve come to the present. After all, design research is digging into past experiences of people’s lives. If you scale it up to past trends and ideologies you get a better idea of the current momentum of the world.

One of the first thoughts I had about history was how difficult it was to truly understand the time spans that are referenced. Hundreds, thousands, and millions of years are not easy to get a gist of. There’s a certain subset of time that we can truly relate to–probably between several seconds and year or two.  Anything else is just a mental representation of what we are dealing with.

In any case, I think historical timelines area really inadequet, and instead of years they should use something that we can understand a little better on an intuitive level. We can understand human generations pretty well, and have a natural sense of the time involved in a person’s liftime in relation to their children’s, and it would be nice to show historical events in those terms.

Luckily, I found someone else who had the same idea:

Dan Roam is some sort of visualizer extraordinaire. He put out a book, and visited Carnegie Mellon while I was there–sadly I wasn’t able to make it to his talk. His work looks interesting, but I’m not sure about the whole napkin think. I think the idea is that it’s important to recognize that visualizing is useful even in extremely low fidelity. The value really comes in communicating an idea, making something understandable, and ultimately being a tool for stimulating discussion.