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  • So I'm gonna do some sorta like, role playing here today.

  • So I'm gonna treat you guys as the board members

  • of the World Values Survey Association.

  • It's a nonprofit association seated in Stockholm,

  • Sweden, so you're all in Sweden now.

  • All right, now before I, go dive straight into my presentation and

  • would you, would you hazard a guess, what, what is this?

  • >> [INAUDIBLE].

  • >> Nice, good guess, bingo.

  • It is the tip of an iceberg.

  • Now, imagine yourself at sea one day, and you're navigating through unfamiliar

  • waters and you come across, this, what is really the tip of an iceberg.

  • Now, you really do want to avoid a Titanic crash so, but

  • what, how do you steer your ship, around this iceberg?

  • Now, how you steer your ship is gonna depend on what you know,

  • about this iceberg.

  • In many ways, culture is like this iceberg.

  • There are aspects of it that are observable, but much of it is invisible.

  • But for the past 30 years, your Association has been trying to go

  • beneath this cultural water line, by finding out what people truly value.

  • Values change the world, and

  • we want to know, how the spirit of our time is, is defined.

  • And that brings me to this presentation.

  • We want to visualize world values survey, a rich trove of data set,

  • that your association has provided for the world.

  • Today, I'm gonna urge for a rethinking of how we're gonna use this data set,

  • by running through data, our audience.

  • Research a design problem, a design purpose and our design strategies.

  • Now, when we talk about values, we always think of values as a little bit iffy.

  • How do you define values?

  • Right?

  • For the longest time it has eva, evaded statistical definition.

  • How do we even measure values?

  • Where do we even begin?

  • Your association has changed that, by providing for

  • us an empirical data on people's values.

  • For the past 30 years, you have been collecting lots of data from across

  • the world, with regards to what people really value.

  • And your results have been cited by thousands of publications,

  • from Wall Street Journal to The Economist to JSTOR Publications.

  • And this has changed the way we see society, we understand culture and

  • ultimately ourselves.

  • But distilling the spirit of our time, takes more than expertise.

  • It shouldn't be the sole domain or exclusive domain of social scientists and

  • experts.

  • I say that distilling the spirit of our time takes perspectives.

  • Now the more perspectives we have, the more lenses through which we can see and

  • navigate our complex cultural terrain.

  • And that is why it makes sense to cater to the average information consumer.

  • You know, your man on the street, people who don't necessarily want to

  • parse through huge amounts of data, just to understand something, right?

  • We want to cater to the average information consumer,

  • who might not know how to do, you know, figure out data.

  • But nevertheless have something to take away from the [UNKNOWN] survey data set.

  • So what is the design problem here?

  • Now, we live in an age of big data.

  • The problem is no longer, the fact that we don't have enough data or information,

  • the problem is that we have too much of it.

  • And how we make sense of data depends on, how we present it and

  • how we visualized it.

  • So your association has provided for us a rich trove of data online and

  • it's available on an online data analysis platform.

  • But a closer look at this platform reveals several design issue.

  • Firstly, the layout is far from exciting.

  • There's lots of clutter, clutter on the page and people,

  • well, users can hardly navigate through these buttons.

  • And, look at the density of information presented in these

  • traditional Excel charts.

  • Not only are they visually discouraging, they're simply uninformative.

  • So the problem here is that we have a gulf of evaluation, and that is

  • a cognitive gap that we have to cross, before we can understand these graphics.

  • This is the problem, we are trying to solve.

  • We want to make the data comprehensible.

  • We want to make data, easy to understand, and but

  • we don't want to compromise the complexity of our data.

  • So how, what do, what are we trying to do here?

  • We want to make data accessible and make exploration social.

  • So easy that even my 80 year old grandmother can understand data,

  • without knowing Excel.

  • How do we do this?

  • Part of the answer lies in I think interactivity.

  • Interactively allows us to do real time analysis by allowing users to ask,

  • explore, and find questions of interest.

  • Personalization.

  • Remember the last time you looked at a group photo of yourself of let's say,

  • a friend's party, what's the first thing you usually do?

  • You look for yourself, right, in the photograph.

  • And I guess, we're all kind of,

  • vain that way, but, the same applies with data exploration.

  • When you look at data, users are usually interested in finding out how their

  • home countries perform or do with respect to other countries.

  • Interactivity makes that possible by making numbers have more,

  • greater emotional relevance.

  • Thirdly, we want to make data go social and how do we do that.

  • We want to be able to do data exploration that

  • allows people to share their findings and interpret graphics in different ways.

  • And that leads to father, the new hypothesis and stories.

  • We're also guided by this design principle,

  • very simply articulated by Edward Tufte, and that is graphical elegance,

  • is often found in simplicity of design and complexity of data.

  • Beautiful graphics do not traffic with the trivial.

  • We want to reveal the complex through the simple.

  • So what have we got here?

  • I think you've probably had enough of my ramblings about design principles and

  • design strategies.

  • We want to go from this, to this.

  • Our designer team over the past couple months, has come up with

  • the World Visualizer, an interactive social data exploratory platform.

  • What does this do?

  • So as you can see, this is a much more minimistic, minimalistic design,

  • as compared to the traditional XL charts.

  • So by totaling through this different options, users can easily navigate and

  • find the questions of interest.

  • So lets say, we are interested in finding out what people think about work.

  • So man have more right to a job than a woman?

  • Now, our survey data shows, interestingly sort of East West divide.

  • People in the west tend to think that men should not have more right to

  • a job than women.

  • And people in the East tend to think that,

  • well maybe men should have more right to a job than women, interesting finding.

  • And what this program also allows you to do, is to resize these squares.

  • So that it reflects GDP instead of population.

  • So here, here we see a correlation between income.

  • As you can see these, these countries that are richer with higher GDP,

  • also coincide with a more liberal worldview or

  • a kind of liberal worldview with regards to gender issues.

  • How about politics?

  • That's even interesting, politics and society.

  • We want to find out what people think about, political systems.

  • Is it important to have a Democratic political system?

  • Let's resize this to population.

  • Now, unanimously, countries think that it is important to have a Democratic

  • political system, but which country most strongly expressed this preference?

  • And if we look more closely, we see it's Egypt.

  • What's interesting about this data set is that,

  • this data set came from a 2008 world values survey data set.

  • Three full years before the Arab Spring.

  • Might we have better anticipated or

  • predicted, the Arab Spring if we have looked more closely at the data.

  • It's something for us all to think about.

  • So, we think that this word visualizer that our team has designed is much,

  • caters much more to the average web consumer.

  • It allows people to easily toggle through different options to get

  • to the questions that they're interested in.

  • Allow me to now move on, to the second in thew report that we have.

  • It's an infrographic hook, that seeks to provoke thought and seek questions.

  • What does this do?

  • So, some people have never heard of the World Values Survey.

  • We want to tell them what World Values Survey is about and

  • a few through succinct points.

  • Also, this info graphic sees, how to teach people about cultural proximity of

  • different countries by laying all of the countries in a culture map of the world.

  • And finally we want to invite end users to use our world visualizer so

  • they can explore visual world value survey data on their own.

  • So, using beautiful graphics and bold colors, we hope to capture

  • what World Values Survey is for the general public who has never heard of it.

  • So we have come pretty far down to, through our presentation.

  • We have gone through data and why it's meaningful for

  • the average web consumer to be concerned, with World Values Survey data.

  • We looked at the design problem,

  • the gulf of evaluation that has to be crossed to interpret graphics.

  • And we argued that, we want to make data accessible and exploration social.

  • We hope that our final deliverables, ha, will go some way to helping people

  • understand, something as complex as human values.

  • [BLANK_AUDIO]

  • So before the end of my presentation, I'd just like to share one insight

  • that I think, one of my favorite philosophers have spoke of.

  • Mahatma Ghandi, whom I believe needs no more introduction.

  • And he once said that, your beliefs become your thoughts.

  • Your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions.

  • You actions become your habits, your habits become your values,

  • and your values become your destiny.

  • Is the world destined, for

  • the clash of civilizations that Samuel Hamilton once prophesied years ago?

  • Or can we transcend differences in human values and belief systems.

  • All these questions lead us time and

  • again, back to this enormous iceberg we all try to understand.

  • As social scientists scratch beneath that cultural waterline that we see here.

  • Why not invite more people to explore data,

  • to interpret World Value Survey data through multiple perspectives.

  • We believe that, this will lead us to a more comprehensive understanding to what

  • it means to be living in today's time.

  • The spirit of our time.

  • After all, the spirit of our time is for all of us to define.

  • Thank you.

  • [APPLAUSE]

  • [BLANK_AUDIO]

So I'm gonna do some sorta like, role playing here today.

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