Hans Rosling is the leader of the non-profit organization Gapminder, where you can find more excellent examples of social data presentation. Rosling wants to present information about global development, social differences etc. in a transparent way. In this he succeeded by using exclusively first-class data visualization which we can comprehend immediately and which – at the same time – is not trivial but actually displays quite a complex dataset. His presentations are absolutely fabulous – clear, tense and informative. Rosling calls our attention to the most important fact in reporting: demonstrate detailed data, not only averages (average data, high aggregation). You know: there are lies, big lies and statistics. Only by showing averages we can not tell the whole story. »The devil is in details«. Reports, graphs and tables MUST show a lot of information (longer timelines, wide variety of information?!, comparative categories which bring about context). Only such a report can teach us something new and leads us to act with a clear focus.

Rosling nicely animates data by using bubble chart. His presentations are one more prove that bubble graph is intuitive, understandable and clear. It is the only basic chart displaying 3 dimensions simultaneously and by animating it we can add the fourth one (e.g. time). This chart is too seldom used in the business world.

The only problematic issue is perhaps Rosling’s use of logarithmic scale because of which his pictures are in fact a bit misleading. Rosling himself makes the public cautious of this fact. You will also notice that he is cutting the axes on the chart, which is generally a dangerous concept, except when you only want to stress differences and guide the user ot the same time. And that is precisely Rosling’s intention, which is symbolized by the project’s name: Gapminder.