The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Good Coffee + GOOD Magazine = Great Graphics

The Good Sheet, which hits Starbucks (SBUX) counters each week leading up to the election, tackles one election topic per issue: energy, carbon emissions, health care, immigration, education, etc. Starbucks' goal is to get people talking about the issues that matter.

"We had been looking at ways to bring a little bit of those conversation-starters into the Starbucks environment," said Terry Davenport, the senior vice president for marketing at Starbucks. SOURCE

The long newsprint sheets fold down into a compact 5" x 5" square, but when unfurled they are packed with statistics and detail that illuminate the complexity within each topic.

The project brings together an innovative publication (100% of your subscription goes to a charity of your choice) and America's version of cafe culture (the proverbial "third place") in order to seed the conversations that will face the next US administration and congress.

View each GOOD sheet on-line at: http://good.is

Comics + Google = Chrome

What?! A technology company that hires thousands of engineers used a comic book to explain their new web browser? (No one told me that software engineers liked comic books!) Google Chrome is Google's browser project; this comic book by Google, drawn by comic guru Scott McCloud, is scanned here and shown under its Creative Commons license. I have been test-driving Chrome since it's launch and love it--with the exception that all my Firefox plug-ins haven't yet made the leap, but give'em time.

Governing Sovereign Wealth Flows

From Kevin Kelly's Lifestream.

clipped from www.kk.org A wonderful New York Times graphic showing the global flows of sovereign wealth. see large view   A sovereign wealth fund is a huge heap of money that is controlled by a nation -- say Singapore or Saudi Arabia -- rather than by a private transnational company. The latter is called private equity funds and their investments have been prime movers in global finance for decades. Some of the largest banks and finance companies that are in the current news cycle, like Bear Stearns, or UBS, are good examples of private money. They buy and sell business across national borders. According to the New York Times in their article The Leveraged Planet, the amount of sovereign controlled wealth is expected to rise to $12 trillion by 2015.  These funds also buy and sell businesses across borders but since their owners are other nations, or nation-state organizations, the implications of their scale and intent are proving enormous.

Bay of Capitalist Pigs

How Havana might change after Castro
by Graeme Wood

clipped from www.theatlantic.com U.S. business interests have been eagerly awaiting Castro’s departure—one way or another—for years. Otto Reich, who worked within the Bush administration on post-Castro planning and other Cuba issues from 2001 to 2004, says that for a time, after the Cold War ended, construction companies were pre-positioning materials in Florida warehouses in anticipation of a Cuban counterrevolution. Bulldozers and cranes waited to cross the Florida Straits and start building condos and shopping centers. see large view Whenever Havana opens, it will face a clash of interests—between developers and preservationists, and between moneyed exiles and poor habaneros. This map, based loosely on the visions of Quintana, Cuban American economist Jorge Sanguinetty, and others who’ve been eager for Castro’s end, depicts what might follow, and how the city might be rebuilt.

Quick Primer on Graphs and Networks

The power and flexibility of a network--whether a simple group of casual neighbors or a complex next generation communication network--depends not just on the number of connections, but on the quality of the nodes, and more important, the type of nodes. Below is a fantastic intro to the concept of graphs and networks. It helps in understanding the a social graph and how it differs from a social network.   

Biomapping Cities

Christian Nold thinks we should pay more attention to how our environment shapes our emotional and physiological states.

His work with Bio Mapping—which measures people’s responses to their environment and connects those feelings to their physical location—suggests that a map of emotional landscapes represents a powerful tool for analyzing the relationship between place and broader social issues.

Debunking 3rd World Myths with Animated Statistics

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world" using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling's hands, global trends -- life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates -- become clear, intuitive and even playful.

Tufte v. Kirk: How Many Red-Shirts Must Die?

This intriguing chart was sent in by Mark A Hart. He describes it as "a traditional analysis and presentation compared to a Tufte-like graphic." Of course, anything that mashes up information graphics and Captain Kirk, well, it's priceless.

Analytics According to Captain Kirk

By Matt Bailey (Founder, SiteLogic)

Showing the Backstory

One of the running themes at Worldchanging is the importance of knowing the backstory of the things we use and buy. There's no better incentive to be a responsible consumer than seeing previously invisible (and frequently unsavory) aspects of our commodities. Arlene Birt has begun designing communications campaigns for edible products; specifically, she has dragged the lifespan of a chocolate bar into transparency, from unharvested cacao bean to first delicious bite, by designing an easy-to-decipher graphic label for the interior of a chocolate bar wrapper. Check out the clever use of simple information graphics used in her project, Background Stories.

Comics: Not just for laughs!

From Boxes and Arrows, this article provides a blow-by-blow description of how visual learning helped to easily explain a complex web strategy to a diverse client group.

Rebekah Sedaca works as a user experience designer on an interactive team at a mid-sized strategic communications firm, Capstrat, based in Raleigh, NC. One recent web project presented her team the opportunity to communicate using comics.