Showing This Many Per Second – Data Humanized

I’ve always thought one of the best ways to make data relate-able is to humanize it. Wouter Walmink, from studio:ludens, does this quite literally in so_many_a_second. I’m sure you’ve across statistics that state something like “this many people die of this condition per second in the world,” but that number, even though it’s a rate – something that is dynamic, feels very static.

In so_many_a_second these rates are represented by objects in an attempt to show these types of numbers on a “human scale.” The above shows number of plastic cups used by airlines per second. Oh yes, it’s raining cups.

Depicting the ongoing stream of events, this application tries to get the user in touch with the emotional actuality of these objective data.

The concept itself isn’t anything new. We’ve seen stuff sort of like this before (e.g. Running the Numbers: An American Portrait, Google employee count), but the novel thing with so_many_a_second is that you can create your own flows and compare them side-by-side. It’s more than just a literal representation of numbers.

Yes, we could efficiently place all the rates in a horizontal bar graph, but somehow, so_many_a_second makes me care more.

[via infosthetics | Thanks, Tim]