 Our next speaker is a UK-based freelance data visualization specialist. You may know him from visualizingdata.com, which has been a staple in data visualization since 2010. And it's grown to become a popular source of information for many, many practitioners. He's been a freelance professional since 2011, focusing on providing data visualization, consultancy, and training services. And he's taken on quite the challenge for this conference. So please help me welcome Andy Kirk. Thank you, Irene. Thank you, everyone, for coming back after the break. So I'm British. Just to get that out of the way straight away. And over the years, I've learned two main things about speaking at conferences. Always make sure that the topic you choose strikes a chord with people. And always avoid using gimmicks and superfluous presentation devices. So that's the main thing that I want to really get out there. Design per niente. Design nitschige. Jara. I'll present you a gift. God. The design of nitschige. Taro here, Togi. The design of nothing. Projectare nulla. The design of nothing. The design of inget. Hmm. It's design for niente. Design para nada. Connuit. Huh? Quoi? The design de rien? Bem, voy en haut. El diseño de la nada. Pero que me estás contando, Andy Kirk? The design of what? Did we really accept this? The design of nothing. Really? I don't know, Andy. Well, speaking of tough crowds, something that I'm really kind of, and we all are naturally, we're drawn to gaps and exceptions and things that don't kind of fit in with the rest and this is a great photograph from many years ago, the defiance of August Landmesser, the single person in the audience who's not saluting, he's there with his arms folded. And so it's in the sense of design and visualization, there's wonderful opportunities from nothing, from not doing things, from the magnitude and things. And when we see nothingness, we're kind of intrigued by what that means and this is a front page from the International New York Times from a couple of weeks ago and that big gap, the kind of data darkness that that gap shows on the left of the Pakistan version of the International New York Times. It kind of reveals a very powerful story about censorship. And the visualization design is the task of handling and presenting and representing zeros and nulls and blanks. It's a very fiddly challenge. It's a very annoying and frustrating process. This is a project to visualize measurements of car speeds in the Netherlands by Eric I want to attempt the surname. But Eric, let's call him Eric B. And what we've got here is a number of things all in one kind of finely balanced display. We've got zero speeds in black. We've got when there are no cars on the road in that kind of empty gray area but also we've got these big chunks of the failure of the sensors to capture the data in the same gray and we can only judge that absence of sensor data based on the fact that we expect data to be there. So it's a very difficult balancing act to fine-tune the representation of things that are absent and not there in terms of magnitude. So the four things I want to talk to you briefly about this afternoon are really the nulls the absence of data the zeros in our data and how we represent things that are zero in size the use of blank and nothingness in design and also finally just some invisible concepts around this issue of nothingness. So first of all null and is anyone in the room got this t-shirt? New Ireland? Oh there's one or two. Hopefully you've got the receipts. That's fine. So when nothing becomes something when we deal with data as we as we all do in this room we're often handling gaps in our data. We're often trying to find ways to kind of fill all those gaps and make sure we've got a kind of perfect data set and it's very easy to get frustrated and kind of down about any gaps that do exist but we should embrace the gaps we should see it as an opportunity to switch and pivot the focus on the absence of data. What does this mean? What does it mean about the absence of measurement devices or the absence of transparency? I often deal with a lot of clients who work with survey data and they always articulate to me this frustration for those data points where there are no responses but once again I see that as an opportunity to learn about why are there no responses is it a measurement failure? Is it a lack of engagement with the question lack of understanding of the question? There's so much richness in that that we can exploit and we live in an age of information overload as we all know and so we're not used to no information we're not used to no data unless you're CNN trying to find hours and hours of coverage of this mission aeroplane we're not used to the absence of data and it's something that was mentioned on the BBC in their coverage that the first week or so in that plane was just anywhere in the world it was very uneasy to see that this in this generation but sometimes the absence of data is very very interesting the Bloomberg visuals that you see there the billionaires the absence of faces to me is fascinating about these hidden billionaires the people we don't know the faces of just as interesting as those that we do see the faces this project by Mitchell Whitelaw in Australia to visualise the metadata of Australian prints and printmaking the bottom row I highlighted in yellow is the no data the no metadata and the lack of thumbnails also reveals something quite useful about the you know the great distances that they have to go yet to kind of capture all this data about printmaking and prints in Australia this project from the South China Morning Post looking at the weather patterns over 70, 80 years there's a big chunk missing there where no data was recorded during the war years and it's such a striking pattern because in many respects the most interesting insight from that graphic this project from Periscopic the state of the polar bear there's a big area on that on that project where there is data deficiency and as you see in the quote there they use this almost as a political statement to try and get Russia to reveal to share and to release the data that they have about the polar bear so whilst in some respects it might be kind of frustrating we don't have the whole picture as it's our advantage and this idea of data darkness is something that is in this age of information overload is becoming more and more prominent through its absence this project looks at some data about kind of industries and the contribution of jobs in different parts of the west of the state and there's a big chunk at the bottom of that stacked bar chart which is no data no revealed data this is the government who are keeping these details back because it's about industries or jobs that they don't want to reveal the details of and that is so fascinating and the big chunk that that represents in itself is kind of revealing and of course the techniques of showing and representing no data is kind of tricky and that uses kind of a soft pastel colour this project from the New York Times uses kind of a texture hashtag to once again to show and give the same emphasis of lack of data data not available as it does to the colour shading of the Coropleth map but sometimes that doesn't quite work out and this attempts by the BBC to show where it's legal to be gay we've got very very similar shade of grey for no data and homosexual acts are legal and it's not different enough for our eyes to be able to see which is just the map and which is actually an important category of the data so when it comes to the absence of data to the nulls in our projects I think this quote from JFORP which he shared recently I think is very important one of the first questions we should be asking about any data set is what's missing what have we got and what does that reveal what can we draw legitimately from that data set in terms of interpretations and what can we learn from the gaps on zeros we're talking about the challenge of something to represent nothing how do we give physical form to the absence of amounts the absence of magnitude often the judgement of zeros it requires local context or local knowledge the facts that we all know Central Park is in the middle of New York means it's far easier to explain that big rectangular gap in the census map of New York this picture that Rob shared Rob Simmons shared on Twitter reveals Mount Etna but you kind of need to know that that exists or that that is a significant gap a significant circle of space and emptiness John Snow you may have heard of him the context, the knowledge of this project is that the the gaps in terms of the lack of deaths in that particular rectangle were the brewery and in the brewery the workers there drank the beer rather than the water so they were kind of fine they didn't get the cholera and it's pretty striking gap in the data I'll just do some quick demonstration just to take that off my to-do list the absence of data is also revealing in terms of in this plot to look at the kind of prime display of human age the gaps in the data there reveal the longevity or the ceiling of our lifespan this project is not actually associated with the finding but the Red Cross during Hurricane Sandy we're using the absence of social media data to reveal where people were struggling as I've said many times in my training course as people have got better things to tweet about than wow this water is really rising my building's collapsing on top of me so while that project isn't the direct source it kind of gives you the idea we can look at the absence of data, the zeros and it's kind of unfortunate that the agency who did that project were called Floating Sheep but anyway so how might we encode zero with form to no magnitude we're running through the kind of classic repertoire of different marks and visual properties we've got quite a few options to work with the position along an axis of a mark or a circle or a hollow circle we can see the zeroness of that mark along the axis bar charts are a little bit more tricky this is an interesting project you play you won't be able to see the details it's a very low res image but this is the uniform distribution so all the different sports the number of players playing that sport who have or wear that number on the back and the number 42 is absent I know nothing about baseball but I understand that this is the retirement of the number 42 jersey for Jackie Robinson but that only exists because we've got the space the blank, the empty achieved from having 42 still included on the x-axis and I just want to make sure at this point that we all know the importance of having zero baseline because we really should not allow this to happen I mean this is one of the very best works graphics I've ever seen in my life the decimalization of the y-axis is just pure joy given that the values are 18 or 19 but but there we go the position along an axis and also the area for an area chart the striking I don't think many of these values actually reach zero but the striking absence of data there is achieved through still including on the x-axis those timelines those dates to give it a home to give zero a home on things like parallel coordinates or by extension in the line charts it's kind of still valid to represent zero but the difficulty on this as those of you familiar with parallel coordinates will know that the left most of those two maps is actually representing null so it's kind of misleading it also shows the same high to the same position for zero so that's a very tricky thing to try and pull off when it comes to color shading once again the main thing and the main theme about representing zero is we need to have a home to see the absence so in this color scheme it goes from zero to I think it's about 70 plus but the white is the zero so all those gaps are legitimate zeros in this project looking at the unemployment rate across the states the first band is begins from zero but it's not white because actually would not expect any part of the U.S. to have zero unemployment rate so it doesn't start from white to not imply the fact that there is in some respects a zero state this work by the Guardian U.S. the gear rights analysis across the states of the U.S. there's some interesting use of texture there to show where laws are prohibited or banned in terms of homosexuality so that's a nice way to differentiate from also the absence of any law or kind of lack of clarity we also see the use of density so this is work by interactive things to look at the Fukushima outbreak and the top left most there just has a single trait a single dot and it's not pure zero but once again the idea that we give a frame we give a home in a grid to the presence of zero is a nice and effective device and likewise on the wind map I don't expect there are many places on the wind map that is zero winds but where they are it does still have a home the coordinate of the map and that black area still allow you to see the zero this next project I think came out this week but it's a nice flip it kind of shows where people don't live the fact that despite a population of 310 million 47% of the land of the US is unoccupied so that's a really nice way to show zero when it comes to things like networks core diagrams, this is a project from Jan Willam-Tolk for Scientific American looking at the interactions between different entities in a hospital between patients and physicians and nurses there are obviously plenty of interesting insights to me once again the kind of contrarian view is that there are two or three dots on that perimeter that show that there are no interactions there are people just operating in isolation or receiving no care and treatment during the given sample period not everything does work so when we've got the the judgment of angle we can't see zero degrees when it comes to using area of circles now this is very small but Newey and St Helena are pretty much zero and yet the graphic still includes a very small circle to give them a home so that's kind of fraudulent let's play a strong word we'll scrap that from the recording but it shows you that with area we still have to show something or we have to eliminate it for tree maps obviously in the stock exchange there will always be a value but for that same approach there is a zero state and so for these type of encodings we have to think alternative approaches use of annotations use of a separate call out to say that there are also these zeros included which feels kind of disappointing because it's just a label of value and we're not able to encode it but still that seems to be one of the only options we've got in many respects moving on to blank so this is about when we're trying to use nothing to represent something and this is a great quote from a book by Alex White the single most overlooked element in visual design is emptiness but space must be used deliberately there's a kind of interesting website which I'm sure very few of you have been to called this page intentionallyleftblank.com and this is a place where they kind of recreate that idea that you used to have in books where there's a place holder for blank and as you can see there in the quote internet wanderer is a place of quietness and simplicity on the overcrowded world wide web so in a sense what we're talking about here is almost like visual punctuation marks the ability to kind of allow us to breathe and have a little space and time and the most elegant infographics out there from the likes of the mastery of Jonathan Corham and this project from Simon Scar you know they embrace emptiness they embrace blank to give us that kind of that sense of a paragraph break of a comma of a full stop they allow it to breathe and live and it's almost like the courage of empty the courage of a editor to say we will give you this real estate and we won't care if you do use blank we won't care that we lose in the potential to use that as advertising revenue so it is quite a courageous statement and Kennedy showed this before but what I love about this is now we haul it for graphics that involve endless scrolling but I love the fact that this embraces it to show the depth and the fact that you've got plenty of thousands of feet of nothingness the sense of scale and the sense of the journey to the bottom of the seas really kind of captured and portrayed through this project and we could wait all day for the bottom but we'll skip on this is a graphic from the independent newspaper from a number of years ago but that striking emptiness of the countries that did not lack the immediate ceasefire is so striking and so effective editorially and there are many similar examples the Nigeria polio cases the gap on the right just shows how much progress has been made and then it stands Nigeria out that kind of shines the light on the exception this was a graphic that caused a lot of stir on the on the World Wide Web a couple of months ago from Reuters this is looking at the kind of glass ceiling that persists for for women at the executive level and a lot of discussions have been about how it didn't quite capture the ceiling and so the the remake from Francis on the right there shows the height of, you know, essentially the optimum level, the 50% which then reveals just how far that ceiling is away from the actual and the utilization of blank space is something that we can exploit this graphic from Christian Shooks from a few years ago now but the beauty of this is it kind of exploits the space of the absence of data above to show that very striking shape of the profitability of avatar. We're having to fit that into a scale or having to use the dreaded log scale it fits it into the space above and utilizes the empty space the kind of the kind of bravado of this work from Accurat to go diagonal to utilize the space of the diagonal real estate. I've never seen that before but I mean it's very Italian isn't it but it's something that's, you know, quite striking and kind of courageous and obviously a lot of this is going back to the origins of Gestalt from I think it was 1912 and the different understanding about how we perceive shape and relationships between shape and nothingness and the famous FedEx arrow that's kind of embedded and hidden within that logo and the same can be utilized in visualization or information design so this once again that you put this op-ed from the New York Times I'm sure some of you have seen from a couple of weeks ago the print version is on the left and actually the web version on the right is actually that idea of kind of the disappearance into thin air of the play which is very striking I'm kind of reluctant to move on the slide but I will do anyway because this is something that dominated the agenda last week and created me all sorts of nightmares because it was lambass I mean the whole might of the worldwide web were pounding on this poor lady who created this graphic she lied she lied she should be hung drawn and quartered and she just said no I tried something it didn't work sorry but you know the flaw of this it wasn't deception it wasn't lying it wasn't some agenda by Reuters it was just an attempted copy of the one we saw before Simon who works with Christine play two or three desks away is an influence and you can see that she's tried that kind of dribblin but the use of the axis on the bottom creates that sense of an enclosure which makes it look like it's a white area chart rather than red so it's just an unfortunate byproduct of a slight mistake and then just to finish off with the invisible a bit more think about nothingness so just a few random themes of nothingness I mean this is actually an advertising from a couple of years ago but there's something so kind of intriguing about this it's about the the idea that a good books hard to put down it kind of also suggests that not many people are reading or that that person's got a very powerful kindle light but you know it's kind of a really kind of intriguing in its nothingness it doesn't tell you what to think but it invites you to think itself and we should at least quote one said the best design is invisible the viewer should not see your design they should only see your content and I think Mike this morning talked about Dita Rams, good designers as little designers as possible and it's the same idea and this is a beautiful graphic I'm not sure I think that Lubey might be in the audience but this is a beautiful piece of work where the design is almost invisible there are no clicks it's just hover and move and the the friction between your curiosity about the subject there's no obstacles to that you just move around and explore it it's a very invisible design piece this quote from I'll just go with the name Antoine for now I won't attempt the surname at this stage of the day but you know you have a cheap perfection design when there's nothing more sorry not when there's nothing more to add when there's nothing more to take away from the most elegant infographics there's nothing superfluous, there's nothing redundant or remaining it's all there and it's all serving a purpose another quote from the clearest most precise graphic in the world communicates nothing if nobody looks at it and Jen was talking in her presentation about the fact that Scientific American is not required reading so there's a requirement sometimes to seduce people to convince people to look at something but no one will see it no one will see the insight but conversely far too often we see things where there is nothing to take away and you know this is well it's quite a stinker unfortunately but there you go and lastly sometimes there are points where we reveal that people know precisely nothing where in the world is the Ukraine I'm sorry America but there's no problem here so just to leave with the end of this talk pay attention to nothing care for nothing because it really is worth something