We’ve heard a lot about info overload. David McCandless suggests that good design “is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.”

Overall, we tend to view an excess of information as a problem. It is for many of us. We now see or hear too many messages per day, over too many channels. Infoglut is “masses of continuously increasing information, so poorly catalogued or organized... that it is almost impossible to navigate through them to search or draw any conclusion or meaning.”

Ads in the paper. Ads on the internet. Messages on the radio. Subliminal messages on TV. And on and on.

Data visualisation techniques provide a beautiful respite.

Here’s one definition of the term: “Patterns, trends and correlations that might go undetected in text-based data can be exposed and recognized easier with data visualization software.”

This might just be the next big thing, if you’ll pardon the cliché. It’s already quite big, and the idea has been around for decades — but the point is, sooner or later, we’ll absolutely need visualisation to make sense of the sheer amount of info around us.

I’m not talking enterprise tech, where a bunch of people in black suits look at their annual reports in the form of diagrams and so forth. I’m talking about you and me. Information is soon going to become so burdensome that we’ll need diagrams like this one to help us understand things:

Tags : Data Visualisation, infoglut