Quote Media
Clip of the week
For this week, instead of the usual
quote from a podcast or blog, I’ve decided to do a “Media Clip of the Week”. Why?
You’ll understand when you watch the video clip below (or watch
it here) of Hans Rosling
from the 2006 Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED)
conference which was held FEB 22-25 in
Hans Rosling is director of
renowned Karolinska
Institute and an expert on public health. As you can imagine, his talk
about worldwide public health issues consists of a multitude of scientific data
and is extremely heavy on graphs and charts. However, what makes this so
special and awe-inspiring, is the combination of Hans’ charismatic ability to “work
the slides” and draw the audience into the data, together with his amazing
chart-rendering presentation tool that simply turns a typical data-set into a
symphony of statistical information. As Brent Edwards said in his Innovation
Science blog, “Hans gives a tour de force data-driven
overview of world development that uses data displays that would make Edward Tufte
weep with envy.”
According to Garr Reynolds from Presentation
Zen:
If you want to know how
he did all those graphics, go to gapminder.org. It's all there. Hans is saying the
problem is not the data, the data is there. But it's not accessible to most
people for three reasons: (1) For researchers and journalists, teachers, etc.
it is too expensive. (2) For the
media it is too difficult to access.
(3) For the public, students, and policy makers, it is presented in a boring way. His solution is to make
the data free, let it evoke and provoke an “aha” experience,” or
a “wow!” experience for the public.
Actually, I was highly impressed by
every single one of the presentations published on the TEDTalks
section (definitely check out Sir Ken
Robinson’s talk as well) and even Al Gore
did a great job, with a hilarious initial run until he
started getting a bit too serious with his slides. In fact, I must say that I was really amazed
by the overall design and quality of the entire website—if only every
conference could achieve such high standards!
All I have left to say is WOW–What an
amazing conference!
Here are some reviews of the
presentations and more links to resources:
- TED
(official website)
- 2006 TEDTalks (2006 presentations)
- TEDBlog (official blog)
- A
comprehensive write up on the Presentation Zen blog
- A
nice summary on the Innovation
Science blog
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