Creating empathy with Visualization

We spend hours and hours writing the code, cleaning the data and applying the best visual principles to communicate our stories with data but sometimes the best stories come with minimal code and yet making a deep emotional impact. Last week, I came across this visual “When Children Lack Nutrition” from Alberto Lucas Lopez published in National Geographic and gave me goosebumps. Here Alberto has done the infographic on Childhood Malnutrition and the size(circumference) of the pictures below actually depict the mid-upper arm circumference(MUAC) of kids in the respective regions. For example, you see the East Ghouta region in Syria the MUAC is just 8.7 cm and the circle circumference shown in the infographic is created that size of 8.7cm. While this in itself invokes lots of thinking and emotions what makes it more compelling is the scale on the right border.

Further, the below GIF makes it more real and does a great job in creating empathy for the topic touched here. Deservingly, It also won the Best of Show award in Malofiej27 Infographic Summit held recently.

Here’s another great visualization (created by some unknown artist) on the massacre that happened in Christchurch wherein around 50 people died when a gunmen killed while they were worshipping in a mosque. As you could see below, the graphic shows 50 men & women standing in worship and shown as a Fern Leaf which is represented as the symbol of New Zealand. It amazes me how you could create such a powerful story with a single image without any word – any annotation.

Mona Chalebi of The Guardian Newspaper is another great artist/Data Analyst who does these very creative projects – mostly with pen and paper and yet convey the issue in a very powerful way. Here, very creatively she has done the visual showing the pay gap for different races by using a dollar bill. Imagine how would have this looked like if this was a bar chart instead of these dollar bills. It would have been the same data but these dollar bills adds in creating the empathy for the subject.

I feel working day in and day out with the big data, churning millions of records and creating all those complicated visuals using R, Python, Tableau, Power BI, excel and what not sometimes it’s good to take a break and take some inspiration from these acclaimed artists and their heart touching creations.

What would you create next? 😊