The secret weapon of the 2008 presidential campaign: information design
It’s popular to say that the next President of the US will be chosen based on sex or skin color or experience, but I know the real answer. The candidate who unleashes the power of information design will steal the show. Remember Ross Perot—the man’s looks and voice were certainly not his charm—but he engaged people with charts and graphics that conveyed complicated topics in terms that they could relate to.
The power of good information design is its ability to show relationships between events, numbers and items. Good information design is achieved when the display of the information enhances its meaning. Topics that are hard to grasp, such as amounts and probability, are prime candidates for graphic depiction. That’s why I was so delighted to see The New York Times create a graphic to put the annual cost of war in perspective in its January 17, 2007 edition. The graphic showed the $200 billion being spent annually on the Iraq war and then showed what $100 billion could buy instead (universal health care for all people in the US without it), what $10 billion could buy (carrying out the 9/11 Commission recommendations), etc. At least now I know what the monetary trade-offs are.
When Charles Gibson, television anchorman of ABC World News Tonight, wanted to convey the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans one year after the storm, he sought a graphic representation. On air, he contrasted the hefty telephone book of 2005 to the much slimmer book of 2006, and it was immediately obvious how many people and businesses had not returned after the storm. Television is a medium of images, and in addition to its ubiquity, imagery is the source of its power. In the instance of the phone book demonstration, Charlie Gibson was using an image (the phone books) within an image (the television broadcast), doubling the impact.
I’m well aware how easily images and graphics can be manipulated to distort meaning. What I’m hoping for is a candidate who will unleash the power of graphics for good, not evil.
So, in 2008, “It’s the picture, stupid.”