Last week, Fast Company magazine picked the 22 best infographic designs of 2011. Two of them were from GE. Health InfoScape looked at associations between various health conditions, and the Innovation Barometer ranked countries based on their approach to innovation.
Infographics are a smart way to analyze and make sense of the billions of gigabytes of digital data generated every year.
Health InfoScape was the result of a partnership between GE’s data visualization team and computer scientists from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab. The teams crunched 7.2 million anonymized patient records from GE’s proprietary database to investigate the relationships between various health conditions. For example, when you have heartburn, do you also feel nauseous? Or if you’re experiencing insomnia, do you tend to put on a few pounds, or more? As Fast Company’s Cliff Kuang described it, the graphic’s approach to understanding how different ailments are connected could help turn every M.D. into TV’s famously non-intuitive physician, Dr. House.
The researchers reasoned that looking at the data this new way could help us illustrate general health trends and provide new insights about prevention and the healtcare system in general.
The second data visualization chosen by Fast Company was the Innovation Barometer. Measuring innovation is a difficult task. Innovation is a loose concept that can be gauged in many different ways. GE partnered with the graphic designer Lisa Strausfeld and created an infographic based on tangible “innovation drivers” such as education, efficiency, and patents. The graphic also looked at how business executives ranked their countries on innovation, and measured countries on innovation outcomes in jobs, healthcare, environment, and well-being.
Check out GE Data Viz Team’s interactive infographic that compares real innovation drivers and outcomes to executive perceptions of them in twelve countries, using data from GE’s Innovation Barometer.
Last year GE also partnered with Seed Media Group and launched Visualizing.org, an open community of data designers and enthusiasts. One of the group’s key efforts is a series of some 40 contests that challenge participants to boil down a flood of information from a broad variety of sources and transform it into a comprehensive graphic that tells a compelling story. One example of such challenge was the Visualizing Marathon 2011.
