Tell the story in a different way
A message that I continually hammer home for the students in my Urban Studies class "Planning the Canadian City" is that they need to find interesting and imaginative ways of telling their story. Rather than have a series of exams where the students just regurgitate information, only to forget it the next week, the class is one large group project, with various assignments asking them to study a community and come up with recommendations for its future. In order to emphasize the importance of getting their message across, a 20 minute presentation is worth 40% of their entire term mark. The related paper is worth another 40%. The entire semester, I continually try to get them away from the standard, double-sided, 12-point, Times New Roman paper that they are forced to do in every other class. Outside of the classroom, that kind of report would be used as a coaster.
I have recently come across two excellent examples of sharing information in innovative and powerful ways. Good magazine has a remarkable series of "transparencies" as they call them. They are graphics that help portray information - from bankruptcies to sports mascots to the use of water - and are some of the best I have seen. In the example below, they look at the most used words in two books on either side of the American political spectrum: Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (in blue on the left) and Ann Coulter’s Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (in red on the right). Fascinating stuff.
For a complete listing of the graphics, go to their Good Transparencies Archive on Flickr. Trust me, you'll come out of it with some great new ideas of telling your story.
The other fascinating way of portraying information I recently saw was a TED Talk by Chris Jordan. Using "large-format, long-zoom artwork," he portrays daunting statistics - like the fact that 1 million plastic cups are used on US airline flights every six hours - in a thought-provoking way. His work really does an incredible job of putting these facts across in a way that people can relate to. This is something we all need to do a better job of.
Here is the talk:
- John, August 24, 2009
Labels: good magazine, information, transparency
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