Andrew Odewahn has an article up at O’Reilly Radar on the dangers of visualization as an influential tool and biased visualizations in particular. He uses this example (shown above):
As an example, consider this recent visualization called Your New Health Care System from the minority members of the U.S. Senate’s Joint Economic Committee, led by Republican U.S Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas.
As a pure piece of design, it’s incredibly effective. Every element — shape, color, size, orientation, typography, and layout — conveys a sense of bewildering complexity and raises an unstated message of “See how complex this is? It can’t possibly work.”
This is nothing new, the argument’s been around for a while. The only real hope is educating the public ( a notoriously difficult thing to do ) to beneath the pretty visuals at the underlying data.
