1
>> Frank Martinez: Good afternoon. My name is Frank Martinez, and it's a
pleasure to have Nam-ho Park visit MSR today to share his thoughts on not only
data visualization, but mobile thoughts around data and story telling. We met
at Info Camp Seattle this year, which was a great conference, and it was an
opportunity to see Nam-ho's thoughts but also to engage on what he's been
thinking about and work he's been doing and sounds like he's been flying around
a lot lately. Worked with the Gates Foundation recently, and I think he was
just returning from D.C. So I'll turn it over to Nam-ho.
>> Nam-ho Park:
Thank you.
So today, I'm going to
this way? That's kind
how to tell your story
presentations into the
I was actually expecting a room full of people.
give the presentation, should I be looking this way or
of weird. But I'm going to give a presentation about
through data. But I'm going to try to weave two
space of one time slot, actually.
The presentation about visualizing and telling a story through data is
interesting, but it's maybe a lot of the stories that you've already heard. So
I'm going to try to go through that really quickly and get to some of the stuff
that I've been thinking about lately. And that second part is more about story
telling through mobile environments, through mobile devices and how that's
evolved and my thinking around that. So hopefully, we can get through those
two presentations within the hour allotted to me.
So let's jump into the first presentation. Just a quick one about the
organizations I work for. I work for Forum One Communication, which is an
organization that's been around for maybe 15 years. We've done about -- we've
worked with about 500 organizations on about 1,500 projects, mostly in the
nonprofit space. So we do web strategy and digital communication strategy for
predominantly nonprofit organizations and issue-based organizations.
The Gates Foundation is one of our clients. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
We've worked with the U.N., the World Bank and the IMF, as well as a whole, you
know, collection of smaller organizations who work on very important issues.
So my role right now is I am the regional director of the Seattle practice and
also the west coast practice. But I'm also the director of mobile services at
Forum One Communications.
2
So a little introduction about me, actually. So I was born in Seoul in 1969.
So that's where Seoul is. When I was born, you know, in 1962, the GDP of the
-- the per capita GDP of Korea was $62, which is kind of amazing. And when we
had the Olympics in 1988, it was just under $4,000, I think. And now, Korea
has a really booming economy, as you know, Samsung, LG, Hyundai, KIA. They're
all Korean brands and it's just over $20,000. So I've seen everything. When I
was growing up, I used to play with dirt, but now you have kids playing with
cell phones these days.
So in the span of one generation, I've seen, you know, incredible change.
So this is where I was born. And in 1970, because of my father's job, we went
to Rabat, which is in Morocco. In 1971, we went to London. In 1974, we went
back to Seoul, back to London, back to Seoul, back to London, back to Seoul and
then, for grad school, I finally went to New York. The first time actually
living in the States. And then just before 9/11, we moved to Washington, D.C.,
where I got married and a lot of changes happened in my life and that's where I
started with Forum One Communications.
In 2007, I returned to Korea, you know, to give my kids an opportunity to
experience the Korean culture and also had some opportunities in Korea that I
wanted to pursue. And then in 2008, I worked on a project in Hanoi, designing
the 2030 plan, urban plan for Hanoi. That was an incredible experience. Then
in 2009, I went back to Seoul.
Then in 2011, I ended up in Seattle. I started again, you know, at Forum One
Communications. Returned to my old job and now I'm in Seattle.
So this is one way to represent my life, through data. I mean, this is data
visualization, right? Another way to represent my life, I guess, is 18.5 years
in Seoul, 0.5 years in Hanoi, nine years in London, one year in Rabat that I
have no recollection of, and seven years in New York, six years in Washington,
D.C., and three months and going on in Seattle. So, I mean that's another way
to represent my life.
Okay. Here's one more way. So I studied architecture and I went to college
and I went to grad school in architecture and practiced architecture for two
years. Including all that experience, that will be nine years of architecture.
I worked in user experience and designing systems for about seven years. I
worked in web strategy for about five years and I've taught computer aided
3
design and other kind of teaching engagements for about three years. Web
development for two years, open design for one year, and then I worked for a
nonprofit, a foundation for one year. So that's another way to represent it.
And if you kind of break it out, these are all the kind of virtual environments
that I've worked in and these are actual physical environments that I've worked
in.
>>:
Do you mean the overlaps?
>> Nam-ho Park: No, no. They don't actually mean anything. And as you can
see, the numbers don't really add up to my age either. So these are just, you
know, there are some overlaps, you know. Like user experience and web
strategy, there's some overlaps there. But I just wanted to show you that I've
been moving back and forth physically between different countries, but I've
also been moving back and forth between the virtual worlds and the physical
worlds and I constantly kind of meditate around what's virtual and what's
physical.
So in this part of the talk, I want to give a couple of examples. Six ways to
tell your story through data. Data is everywhere around us, and through the
internet, I think we are experiencing a whole flood of data that we really have
to find ways of kind of finding stories and finding deeper ways to engage data.
So I'm going to talk about six ways we can tell our stories with data. Three
simple ways that we can get started and hopefully we'll have some time for some
discussion at the end.
So let's jump right in. So the first technique, I guess, is speak with
numbers. This is Charity Water. This is a capture from maybe a year ago. But
basically, Charity Water is an organization that sells really expensive water.
All the proceeds actually go to help people in developing countries have access
to clean water.
But basically, that is the gist. But how can they explain the immediacy of
this issue through numbers? One billion people. Almost a billion people on
the planet don't have access to clean water. That figure alone is kind of mind
boggling.
But in terms of what they've been doing, it's like 2,524 projects funded so
4
far. And about a million people get clean water through these projects. Also,
100 percent -- this is really important for them. 100 percent of the public
donations go directly to water projects. I think that's one of the missions,
clear missions that they had. And that is communicated very clearly through
numbers.
And just 20 dollars can give one person clean water for 20 years. So, I mean,
it's not something that's out of your reach and they communicate that very
clearly through the numbers that they have selected to express themselves.
This is the one campaign. Once again, one of the things that they focus on is
maternal and child health. And instead of writing these long kind of text
descriptions about what they do, they can actually jump you over to quick
facts. 8.1 million is a number of children under the age of five who die each
year. So that, once again, is a very hard-hitting number.
About 300,000 mothers die each year due to pregnancy related causes, and 80
percent of maternal deaths could be prevented if women had access to basic
maternal and health services. So just these three figures alone tell you the
mental. And that is -- you don't have to have big data sets. You don't have
to have complex graphs. Just talking with numbers is really clear. Sends a
real clear message.
You can also tell your story by revealing the change within the numbers. This
is something. This is Visit Mix. I think this is clearly affiliated to
Microsoft. But this is an amazing site, talking about obesity in the U.S. the
data goes back to 1987, and these while shirts are the states that don't have
any data. So these aren't really thin states. I mean, these are states that
don't have data collected at that time.
Basically, whether you can see here is that the state with the highest level of
obesity is North Dakota at 11.2 percent. Keep that in mind, 11.2 percent.
Let's zoom ahead to 2007, and this is what it looks like. Right? Everybody is
collecting data, and 32.6 percent is the highest level of obesity of any state.
And if you take a look at the lowest level of obesity, Colorado, 19.3 percent,
which is still higher than the highest level of obesity in any state in 1987.
So just by revealing change, and you can animate this change, actually, if you
use a slider. Just by revealing change, this tells a very powerful story that
you really can't -- is just really hard to tell through any other means.
5
You need to focus on the story. You need to find the story and you really need
to focus on the story. Here's Clay Shirky, I'm sure you know pretty well wrote
this book recently called The Cognitive Surplus. And it talks about the fact
that with the internet and with the availability of tours that you can actually
create things with, he's basically saying that before enter the net, the main
kind of casual activity was television viewing. And that was really a lot of
people were spending lots of time in front of the TV. Now with the internet,
you have an alternative to television where you can actually start creating
things.
So this is a really interesting graphic. 2 billion hours a year spent watching
TV by U.S. adults, right. And a hundred million hours is what you need to
create Wikipedia. So, I mean, this is a pretty amazing story. Not even one
year of all the people watching TV, but, you know, a small fraction of the time
expended watching TV if you actually provide an alternative to TV, where you
can actually create stuff, this is what happens. And just this graphic alone
reveals that story very effectively.
This is a client that we've worked with, and they created this 56-page report,
I think, around Appalachian states, around the educational system in
Appalachian states and how they were faced with a lot of challenges, poverty,
high dropout rate and other things that really was affecting the outcome of the
educational system. You can read the 56-page report. You can take a look at
all the data sets. You can download them and look at them.
But what is the conclusion here of this 56-page report? Of course, you can
read these bullet points, right? But reading the bullet points, it's not
something that is really easy to do. And also, at bottom, it says to
accomplish the above, we have compiled a comprehensive data set from various
sources of existent data and conducted preliminary descriptive analysis using
selective variables. Results of that descript of analysis are presented in
this report.
Just tell me what it's about. So, I mean, so what is the tweetable version of
this report, right? What is the 140 character conclusion to this report? And
we worked with the researchers, and they hate doing this. They don't want to
boil down years of research into something that is so short, because they want
the whole breadth of that report to be absorbed as a whole.
6
But, of course, nobody has that time. Nobody has that attention span to be
able to go through and pore through every single thing, every single word in
that report. So ultimately, tweeting something has a greater impact sometimes
than actually having a few people actually read the report. Having a lot of
people see the tweet may be more effective than having a couple of people read
the report.
So we actually force them to create a tweetable version and this is what they
came out with. Despite financial and demographic challenges, some school
districts are actually succeeding.
So how do you represent this? How do you take the data? How do you represent
this in a visual way? So we worked with them in creating this visualization so
you can set up some challenges on this side, and you can actually see what the
results of those challenges are so the challenge here is the graduate -- you
want to set up a challenge which says the graduation rate is greater than 90
percent. Well, you want to find schools that have that kind of graduation
rate.
District budgets per student is less than $8,000. And percentage of students
eligible for free lunch is greater than 40 percent. So these are pretty tough
challenges. But still, you see these pockets of schools which are actually
rising above those challenges tells that story in a very visual way.
You need to provide, also provide context in order to tell your story through
data. This is kind of an interesting graph. This is the billion dollar gram.
So everything is in billion dollar increments, right. So it's kind of
interesting. When you actually compare things that aren't in the same space.
So, for example if you talk about defense spending, you know, it's always
talked about in the context of defense spending. It's so much more percent
more than last year.
But that doesn't really give you a bigger picture on things. So when you start
comparing things that are outside the context of whatever you're talking about,
actually presents somewhat interesting findings. So, for example, $465 billion
is what is needed to feed and educate every child on earth for five years,
right? That's pretty amazing.
If you take a look at this, $200 million is the entire debt of African nations
to the western nation. And then you take a look at something like that, Iraq
7
war, estimated total is $300 billion. And the worst case scenario, total cost
of the financial crisis to the U.S. government is this amazingly large figure.
Saving the Amazon is relatively cheap when it compares to those kind of
figures.
And even Walmart's revenues for a year, $352 billion, is -- once you take a
look at these different things in context, you start to realize the magnitude
of some of these issues.
What do you think this is?
seen the presentation.
>> Frank Martinez:
Guesses?
You know what this is, right?
I actually forgot it.
You've
I'm looking at it, thinking --
>> Nam-ho Park: So what do you think? Have a guess. It's hard to tell if you
don't have any context, right? It's just numbers. But if you do something
like this, immediately, you start recognizing what these numbers are about. So
average rainfall in certain cities in the U.S. San Francisco, Seattle,
Chicago, New York and Miami.
If you do something like this, it's easier to read the numbers, right? You
realize the darker the colors, the darker the color, the more rainfall you're
getting, right?
If you do something like this, forget the numbers, right? The numbers don't
matter that much. When you talk about inches of rain, you have a vague sense
of how much rain you're getting. But if you do something like this, you
realize in Seattle in January and February and March, it's very rainy, as you
already know. I'm about to find out. Because I arrived in August, which is
very dry and just really, really nice. And it's still very nice. But
apparently, it's very rainy in the winter in Seattle.
But I can see that through this graphic. And you can compare January in
different cities immediately. You don't have to actually read the numbers.
You can actually take a look at the graphic and see the story right there.
You can go a step further and actually locate it on a map so if you're living
in New York and want to travel to Seattle in January, you just do the slider
and you realize it's going to be very rainy in January in Seattle.
8
This is a scary part for a lot of researchers. Researchers want to tell the
stories themselves, but sometimes it's actually better to lose control and let
the users explore, discover, and control the data. But one thing that you can
do is limit the level of control so that you see that clear message.
If you give them full control over the full data set, of course they're not
going to find the story. But if you give them limited control within certain
parameters, you can really allow them to explore and find the stories
themselves.
So who lives here and who can afford to live here? This is a map of New York
and it talks about the income levels of people who live in certain areas right.
After I graduated, I moved to East Williamsburg, which is about right there.
And it's very industrial and it's full of artists. But basically, Brooklyn, if
you take a look, right after I graduated I wasn't making that much money. I
was working, in school.
Extremely low income, which is 20K. Very low income, up to 40K. Low income,
which is up to 60K, and moderate income and middle income and then very high
income. Basically, I was right in this area, low income. And obviously,
Brooklyn is a place for a person like me at that time.
If you look at Manhattan, where I went to school, upper west side, look.
Students can't live here, right? I mean, students have an extremely low
income, right? But is it's basically people who have moderate to middle to
high income that live in that area, so it's obviously very kind of prohibitive
for anybody with income levels below that. But the graphic actually represents
that very clearly and very well.
So what's really important here is that once you start to get the interest
going, you can actually point people to the actual data, and that will give
them context in terms of understanding that data. So you give them a primer
and then you provide them with the data, find out more right there.
So this is a project that G.E. initiated a couple of years ago, get something
artists and web developers to really visualize their data. And this one
actually gives them -- gives the user some level of control, where you can
actually take a look at all these appliances that you find in your house and
you can see how much does each appliance cost to use in dollars. You can also
manipulate it so you can see it in Watts. The year and also the state that
9
you're living in.
So it gives them some limited control.
This is the one that uses the least amount of electricity, electric can opener.
I don't have one. I don't know anybody who has one these days. Who opens cans
these days? Right? I can't remember the last time I opened a can.
Apparently, it's the one that uses the least amount of electricity. The one
that uses the most amount of electricity is air conditioning.
So let's look somewhere in between. A toaster, in Virginia, I mean, for a
year, you're spending $3.70 in electricity for a toaster. Let's compare that
to Washington, $3.03. So it's actually cheaper to run a toaster in Washington
than it is in Virginia. Which is good.
But you can manipulate the data in various ways to take a look at that. So
you're providing the user control to find their own stories, but within a very
limited scope.
And the next step in doing that is, you know, once they start controlling data,
they can actually tell the stories and tell it to other people about the story
that you could probably tell, but also you probably didn't have the resources
or the manpower or the hours to be able to tell and find the story.
So this is the world bank, which we've worked with. So they've done a really
amazing job in releasing their data. So has the U.N., so has the U.S.
government, releasing their data. Actually not just releasing it but
visualizing in very new ways.
Previously, they had this tool where you could just go and manipulate certain
parameters. If you're a researcher or if you were like an expert, of course
you know exactly what you're looking for. But if you're like you and me, who
wants to check out what the story is, obviously, that's not going to provide
you with much information. But within given parameters, you can actually see
the story happening because they're giving you some tools to be able to see and
manipulate that data in very visually compelling ways.
So this is Bob Zoelick. He, in order to promote the use of data, he actually
created a competition. The World Bank created a competition called Global Apps
For Development Competition. Let's read what he says about that. As part of
our open data narrative, we will soon announce an Apps For Development
Competition, challenging the developer community to create tools, applications
10
and mash-ups, making it easier for users of development data to make better
decisions and better policies to overcome poverty. Bob Zoelick, right?
What's the interesting word here? I mean, who would have thought that the head
of the World Bank would use the word mash-up, right? That seems to be
completely out of his vocabulary, right? But that's how far we've come. APIs
and other things, the level of the tools that we have actually allow that to
easily happen. And what he's saying is, we're going to relinquish control of
the data so you can use the tools that are available to you and actually create
better tools for us.
So for the fraction of the cost it will take for their developers to brainstorm
and create scenarios and develop these applications, you can have, like, ten or
20 or a hundred applications for a fraction of the cost by releasing the data
and allowing other interested people to find uses for that data.
So this is a competition that we've entered a couple of years ago by Sunlight
Labs, Design For America, where they took public health information and did the
same thing. And this is what we came up with.
County Sin Rankings. We basically took this data and mapped it to the seven
deadly sins. So high school dropout rate. Income inequality, unemployment
rate. These we kind of mapped in a kind of fun way to certain data points.
The greener things are, the better the situation. The more red, the worse the
situation.
What you can do now is take a look at where your sister lives or where your
friend lives and start comparing the county where they live with where you
live. You can select the county and then you can start comparing things which
is a very unique and easy way to actually take a look at these very kind of
heavy data points.
So, of course, I mean, if you have really good communication skills and you're
a superstar, you can, of course, instead of allowing people to tell your story,
you can tell the story yourself, right? And that's the case of Mr. Hans
Rosling. Mean, I'm sure some of you have seen his TED presentations, but he
takes data and makes an incredible story out of the data. He's also created
his own tools that a company that begins with a "G" bought and actually
incorporated into their "G" docs.
11
So let's quickly run through a two-minute presentation by this guy and the tool
that he uses. So basically, this is health, public health data, and he's found
data all the way back to 1820, and he's going to explain how public infant
mortality and income have a relationship to each other.
>>: And they lost one fifth of their kids before their first birthday, so this
is what happens in the world if we play the entire world, how they got slowly
richer and richer and they add statistics. Isn't it beautiful when they get
statistics? You see the importance of this. And here, children don't live
longer. The lost century, 1870, was bad for the kids in Europe, because most
of the statistics is Europe. It was only by the turn of the century that more
than 90 percent of the children survived the first year.
This is India, coming up with the first data from India and this is the United
States moving away here, earning more money, and we will soon see China coming
up in the very far end corner here and it moves up with [indiscernible] getting
health, not getting so rich. [indiscernible] brings money. It moves this way
over here and the bubbles keeps moving up there and this is what the world
looks like today.
Let
the
see
can
the
us have a look at the United States. We have a function here, I can tell
world stay where you are and I take the United States. We still want to
the background. I put them up like this, and now we go backwards. And we
see that the United States go to the right of the mainstream. They're on
money side all the time.
And down in 1915, the United States was a neighbor of India. Present
contemporary India. That means United States was richer, but lost more kids
than India is doing today, proportionally. And look here, comparing to the
Philippines of today. The Philippines of today has almost the same economy as
United States during the first World War. But we have to bring United States
forward quite a while to find the same health of the United States as we have
in the Philippines.
About 1957 here, the health of the United States is the same as the
Philippines. This is the drama of the world that many call globalized.
that Asia, Arabic countries, Latin America are much more ahead in being
healthy, educated, having human resources than they are economically.
>> Nam-ho Park:
Is
I mean, if you take a look at Hans Rosling, he's an amazing
12
story teller. He tells a story through data which can be incredibly boring and
incredibly academic, and he plots it in away and he tells a story in a way that
it's actually a story. It's actually a story of health improvements and how
with the same level of income, you actually have vastly different stories in
this world today. So this is the tool that he used and it's publicly
available.
So three simple ways to get started. You really have to -- this is more
oriented to people in a nonprofits and organizations who want to do something
with their data, of course. Research, communications, program and development.
All these folks need to be inspired and there are a couple of really good blogs
that constantly kind of highlight really good data visualization and the use of
telling your compelling story through the data visualization in very updated
daily with really inspirational stuff.
But what's as important as that, I mean, after you get inspired, you really
need to find the story that you want to tell, and you have to really focus on
that story. You can't tell all the story and you can't give everybody
everything. You really have to focus on what is the unique story that you
really want to tell through your data and, for example, this is a very kind of
clear and very focused story, and you have to find the story that you really
want to tell and focus on it.
You need to pull the players together, story teller, visual designer and
engineer was classically what the team looked like in terms of visualizing your
data and telling a compelling story through data. But now, there are all these
tools available that you don't really actually need all those three people.
You can actually if you have the inclination and you have the time and the
desire, you can actually use these tools to actually tell the story through
your data in very compelling ways.
So that's the first part of the presentation. So wow, 30 minutes. So I have
another 30 minutes to go through the second part which I'm a little more
passionate about, which is a little less cooked, but it tells a little more
about where things are going for the future.
So any questions about this part of the presentation? Okay. I'll just roll
ahead. Okay. So story telling on mobile. So mobile technologies is obviously
something that is catching a lot of people's attention these days. If you just
take a look at the statistics, almost half of the U.S. adult population will
13
have smart phones by the year, roughly, about next year actually.
So mobile technology is as fast growing, not just in the U.S., not just in
developed countries, but also in developing countries. And so what are some of
the things, what are some of the ways we can tell our story through mobile?
Are the two things, story telling and mobile are the two things that kind of
came together in this presentation.
So my store, I think I've already told my story. So I'm just going to skip
over that. But basically, how do we tell our stories these days, today,
through our mobile technologies?
Previously, this is Egyptian scribe. If you were the king, if you're the
Pharaoh, of course, you would have this guy following you around all the time
and writing down everything you're saying and recording your actions all the
time, right? How many people have enough money to have a personal biographer,
right? Not too many people.
So you have something like this. You have a phone and if you hang it around
your neck, you can -- I think not quite now. I mean, the iPhone that you can
get these days, the cheapest one is 16 gigabytes. The one with the biggest
capacity is 64 gigabytes.
But every 16 or 18 months, it's doubling for the same price. So you can kind
of extrapolate and say within the next three years, you'll have a device that
will have 256 gigabytes of memory on a palm-size kind of mobile device. What
that means is in low resolution, you can capture every single second of your
life by just hanging this lanyard around your neck. Of course, you know, the
batteries will run out pretty soon. But still, you have the potential of
capturing every single part of your life from a device hanging around your
neck.
You don't need that scribe.
>>:
Yes?
Just a comment, that there's a [indiscernible] talk.
>> Nam-ho Park: Exactly. I mean, I'm kind of referring to that, but that's
where technology is going. There's other ways of engaging in not just that
way, but other ways of engaging, telling your story through mobile.
14
This is a project that NPR has running for a couple of years. They've revived
it. It's called StoryCorps, where you have these booths in certain areas
around the states, grand central station in New York has a booth. You go in
with your friends, your family and other people and basically, you tell your
story. A short story about your life. And that gets archived forever.
And they've created a mobile application where you can actually do that, you
can record the story yourself and upload it. So, I mean, that's one kind of
literal way of telling your story. And that's a really easy way to do that.
Other ways are more automatic. That was you actually have to have a
deliberate, you know, you have to be deliberate. You have to bring your friend
or your family member and actually think about what you're going to say and
then record it. However, I mean, Nike plus, for example, tells a story of your
run, right. Lots of pain. Pain. You know, these are good parts, right? Flat
parts, right? It tells the story. It tells the story of your run
automatically. You don't have to do anything. All you have to do is attach
this device to your shoe and run and it tells the story, right?
There's other ways of telling your story, of course. All the photographs that
I've taken automatically, you know, now with geo tagging automatically record
where I've been doing. Of course, these dots are pretty big here, but if you
zoom in, actually looks at the neighborhood level about where I've gone to.
And Four Square, of course, you can check into various places.
And that actually tells the story of where I've been, which is kind of
interesting.
And you can have other tools. This is of interest, a very simple tool that my
kids play with all the time. It's Stop Motion Recorder and they can put
stories together about themselves through stop motion animation. And this is
something you needed a lot of equipment and discipline previously. With an
iPhone or any other kind of smart phone these days, which has this application,
you can have a little stand and you can create a short animation.
And I'll share with you some really bad animation. Nothing really. Here's
another one. But you see what's happening? It's nothing. But you're already
putting a story into it, right? Here's an alligator or here's a penguin that
meets and goes and becomes friends and he invites them over to his house,
right, which is moving.
15
People have an automatic ability to take a look at situations and automatically
frame a story out of it. So I thought that was pretty interesting.
This guy takes it to a real extreme. His name is Nicholas Feltron. And he
really takes it to a real extreme in terms of recording the data around his
life. And he creates annual reports ever since 2005, he created annual
reports, all the data points that he's carried. What he's eaten, the time he
got up in the morning, you know, the places that he has been to. What's kind
of moving, however, is I think last year, his father passed away. So he
gathered all the data he could about his father, going through all his
writings, school reports and everything, and he created a report, a kind of
factual and data-driven report of his father's life. Which I thought was very
moving.
So that's our stories, the way that we tell our stories.
So how do we view other people's stories these days? Of course, there's this
guy, you know. Presenting other people's stories in a stream, you know, which
isn't the best way, I don't think, in terms of communicating stories. I mean,
they give you little snapshots of what people are doing, but it doesn't really
-- I mean, the stream, the news feed isn't the best way to look at what
people's stories are, right? I mean, it's just informational. You just
discard it if you're not interested.
Same with Twitter, right? It's not really story driven. As much as this is
the way that we engage people these days, this isn't the best way to engage
people in terms of having a stronger relationship with them. It's not really
story-driven. We want to share our stories. Whenever people meet, you know
what happened to me today? This happened to me today. And people start
automatically sharing stories. And that's how we communicate and have a
relationship with other people.
However, if you take the same information and put it into this application,
which is called Flipboard, it becomes an amazing story. Just the format, it
takes Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds and just by very simple things, you know,
bolding certain text, making them bigger, presenting them with images makes it
look like a magazine. And you automatically, just like when you looked at the
animation and started imagining stories, you start to read a narrative through
these things and you start to get really engaged.
16
Instead of just going through a news feed, you're actually being engaged by the
rhythm of the information that's being presented to you, which is vastly -it's a vastly different experience and a lot more engaging.
This is, I'm sure, some services in the states are doing this also, but this is
a mapping service in Korea, and this is the actual building that I used to work
in. I used to work on the fifth floor in this corner which you can't see. But
basically, it's like a map, and it's a street view of a map.
What's interesting is that. Is this, actually, right there. It says 2011,
August. This is when the photograph was taken, and when they started offering
this service, the first thing that I did was actually I went to the street view
of where I grew up in the '70s and, you know, of course, the building, the
house that I grew up isn't there anymore. It's been replaced by this really
ugly office building. But still, the fact that I can go back and kind of look
at how it's changed was, I thought was incredible.
What they've started to do is actually exactly what I really wanted to do, was
go back in time and see what my neighborhood used to look like and how it maps
to what I remember about my neighborhood.
So if you take a look, they've started to provide a history of all the
photographs. So they go back to 2008, August. So let's take a look at what it
looks like back then. So the building was under construction, right? Of which
is really amazing. So you can actually have a history. So this is other
people's stories, right? This is our story, but other people's stories. This
is an objective gathering of stories that you can actually input into a history
that is being gathered by, in this case, Tom communication, which is an
internet service provider in Korea.
So you actually have the data. You actually have the images. You actually
have the history where you can start to weave your story, our stories into,
which is, I thought, was really interesting.
And now, you know, of course, you can track other people as well. So you can
share stories literally at the same time in realtime, you know, with the
people, with the small group of people around you. I mean, Apple isn't the
first service to offer this kind of availability. But I mean, the fact that
it's just default on an iPhone, that's just rolling out, is a big indication as
17
to the fact that we've come that way, that far in terms of sharing our privacy
publicly with people that we want to share it with.
Four Square, for example. If you did that ten years ago, people would be
outraged by all the privacy concerns. But now people willingly share their
information. That just shows how far our kind of attitudes around sharing
information, around sharing our stories through mobile media has really come.
So this is a treasure hunt. I mean, people go on certain treasure hunts with
location-based information. So there's also geo caching where you hide certain
things in very remote locations and you just provide them some clues as to how
to find it and people go on these adventures to locate these little hidden gems
and hide things themselves as well. And there's a whole kind of gaming
industry around that.
So it's a story, it's sharing. So there's a community, there's a story and
there's an objective and that's enabled through mobile technologies.
I thought this was pretty interesting. The latest Picasso exhibition in New
York actually created this poster which maps one of his iconic figures on a
Manhattan map. I'm not absolutely sure if you actually went to these
locations, I think there might have been a QR code at each of these locations
that gives you something, but I'm not absolutely sure. But I thought mapping
something virtual on to a physical environment, I thought, was a very
interesting use of marketing, since I'm always interested in how the physical
and the virtual kind of interact with each other.
So the highest level that we can have in this environment, I think, which is
unique, which is something that hasn't really happened in the history of
communications or the history of human society really is to have a collective
story gathering automatically. The internet really allows our collective
stories to be gathered in a way that simply was not possible before. You would
have your community stories. You would have your individual stories. You
would have your photo albums. But now you have a body of data that's been
collected every day, every hour, every minute, every second that really tells a
larger, more collective story.
This is a really interesting project that was started originally, and it's
called Ushanidi which was originally started in Kenya to track presidential
election irregularities. This was started by a reporter who had a blog and she
18
was getting so many tips on her blog that she enlisted two developers to create
a mapping application that automatically took the data and located it on a map.
And that has built out into an open source mapping tool, which was used during
the Haiti earthquake to gather data.
So all these points are actual people with their cell phones reporting on these
issues. Public health, infrastructure damage, fire, menaces, security threats.
So they were actually texting to Ushanidi this repository and almost in
realtime gathering data as to where some of the biggest issues were located and
this really helped the aid, relief agencies to really concentrate on certain
areas and address security issues, address public health issues and other
things.
So this is the graph of how the density, the frequency of the texting that was
happening. So obviously, right after the earthquake, there was a huge amount
of activity and then it kind of settled down. But still, this is a collective
story. Each of these data points is a story that somebody is gathering through
their mobile device. And when it's gathered together, you can actually see a
collective story and can animate this to see how the information was pouring in
and how it was being treated.
And, you know, Steve Jobs, you know, to say the obvious, he died a couple of
weeks ago. But when you ask people how did you hear about Steve Jobs' death, I
mean, how did you hear about it?
>>:
Our test manager came down the hall and said Steve Jobs died.
>> Nam-ho Park:
>>:
Good question.
>> Nam-ho Park:
>>:
How did he find out about it?
E-mail here.
I'm not sure.
How did you hear about it?
And I don't know how they found out.
>> Nam-ho Park: In my
It was passing through
started to go down the
up the phone and doing
office, people found out about it first through Twitter.
Twitter, and Twitter, people who heard through Twitter
hall and tell other people, started e-mailing, picking
other things. But first, I think the most rapid first
19
wave of information passed through Twitter, I think.
>>: Because you're in the mobile environment, which is we're in an e-mail
sector environment.
>> Nam-ho Park: Exactly. But the funny thing is -- you know, there was a
collective gasp, you know, through the U.S. and other parts of the world when
they heard the story. Nobody was kind of expecting it to be so soon. I think
Samsung folks weren't expecting it so soon, a major competitor and a
corporation that has very antagonistic relationships with Apple, obviously. So
there was this collective gasp and people started to tell that story through
any means possible.
The interesting thing is in terms
number one. It was number five.
which is at the peak. Number one
tweets per second. Which is kind
>>:
of tweets per second, it didn't even hit
Steve Jobs' death is 6,049 tweets per second,
is Beyonce's MTV video music awards. 8,868
of interesting.
She announced she was pregnant.
>> Nam-ho Park: Yeah, exactly. It's like ah! Everybody was tweeting away
like crazy, right? So, I mean, this tells a collective story that you just
couldn't tell before. The tweets per second is an indication of what kind of
stories are really making the headlines.
You know, traditional media didn't pick up on these stories until a couple of
hours later, right? So this collective gasp, this collective ah moment is
really captured very well through the number of tweets going through the
Twitter system. And that tells a collective story that simply wasn't available
previously.
>>:
I think it's interesting that Japan beats the U.S. is the second one.
>> Nam-ho Park:
>>:
Yeah, that is kind of interesting, isn't it?
Somebody cares about the women's world cup.
>> Nam-ho Park:
I think these are Japanese people, crazed tweeting.
Because
20
Twitter is pretty big in Japan as well, right?
You would expect certain things to be pretty high on the list, but Brazilians
tweet a lot. You know, Latin America tweets a lot, so Brazil eliminated,
that's huge news, right?
So if Moses had smart phones, what would have happened? Probably he wouldn't
have wandered through the desert like this for 40 years. He would have had GPS
and would have said, okay, and God's word probably came through an app on his
smart phone. Says actually, God wants us to wander through the desert for 40
years. How am I going to communicate that to the rest of the Israelites?
Tweet it, exactly. How many tweets per second can that go through?
But the interesting thing is in the Bible, it's the story it's because there's
a rich story in Exodus and all the books that relate to this journey Leviticus,
although that's pretty boring, but anyway, you know, you have other books.
It's a story that has the richness and has the stories that we can learn from,
that we can reflect on, right?
And if that wasn't captured, then what would have been -- I mean, we wouldn't
have that rich history to reflect upon, right? So I think stories, I mean, the
mobile experience has that potential to capture those stories, and we really
have to look for deep opportunities to have the insight to be able to collect a
collective story.
I mean, obviously, this story is a very collective story. It's not just about
one man, Moses. It's about the Israelites and all the things they went
through, through the 40 years when they wandered through the desert, right? It
was a very collective story and mobile really has the ability to have a
collective impact in terms of story gathering and story telling.
This is a kind of interesting app that I recently stumbled across. So it takes
my Facebook. It takes my tweets, it takes my Flickr, it takes my blogging,
takes all those things and puts it together in a diary so I can actually take a
look at certain days and I can look at all the activities on certain given
days. It takes Four Square information as well. So if I die and my kids take
a look at this, they can actually reconstruct my life through all these various
data points collected in a single collection.
Actually, when you have a story like that I mean, right now everything is kind
21
of dispersed on Facebook, twitter, and none of these are coming together. But
if you have something like this, it really tells a very different story. There
are periods when I have nothing, and I'm thinking what did I do back then? I
was depressed. I didn't do anything because I was depressed and I just
couldn't do anything, right? Or maybe it was a family tragedy or maybe I was
doing something else. But where there are peaks of activity, I realize that
these were peaks of happiness or peaks of activity where I kids were born or,
you know, when I started a new job or, you know, so you have these peaks and
dips.
And they don't have that kind of mapping ability right now, or graphing ability
right now, but you can see the graphs happening in the future and see the peaks
and the dips within my life.
But what would happen if you plotted that in different levels? What about our
family? What about my community? What about my nation? What about the whole
world? And when you start plotting these things in different scales, you have
a richness of story that just wasn't available because the data points weren't
being collect the in a coherent way before.
So I spent one year working on the urban plan. I had the opportunity, really
incredible opportunity to work on the urban plan for Hanoi of 2030, and one
thing that I learned through that experience was looking at different scales of
the city is the way urban planners really work. City as a whole needs a
certain amount of markets, a certain number of airports, a certain number of
hospitals and a certain number of schools.
If you take a look at a small level, it needs a certain amount of recreational
facilities. And as you get smaller and smaller and smaller, all the way down
to a house, there are different needs that each of those things address, and
urban planning and urban design tries to address things in multiple levels. I
mean, thinking about just these things on multiple scales and multiple levels
is really hard. But it has to do with my life, the quality of my life when it
comes down to that. I don't want to be a product of, victim of overall
planning around a neighborhood. I want people to care about me as an
individual.
So that's what I learned through this urban planning and urban design exercise.
However, I mean, if you take a look at data, that, I mean, right now, it has
the potential to do that, and people don't think of it in different levels and
22
different scales. What does it
information? What does it mean
information? What does it mean
country? What does it mean for
mean for an individual person gathering
for the family in terms of gathering
for the community? What does it mean for the
the world?
Once you start looking at that in various different levels and being able to
manipulate that in different levels, that's when real stories start to emerge
and stories that weren't able to emerge before start to really take shape.
So this is an incredible person, Jonathan Harris. He does a lot of work with
data. This is a project that he worked on called the whale hunt. He went on a
whale hunt and he basically documented, took photographs in a very analog way,
took photographs every 30-minute interval. And when he found his heart beat
was really beating faster because of the adrenaline flowing through him, he
would actually take photographs at a shorter interval.
a whale hunt isn't a pretty sight and this is something he experienced for the
first time. This is one of the more kind of tame images. There are some
really, really graphic images, and you can tell when those graphic images
happen by the density of photographs that mapped directly to his heartbeat. So
over here is where they caught the whale and they start taking it apart,
cutting it up and you can see what he's going through just by the density of
information that's flowing through this story.
So that got me thinking, right? So this is a jaw bone. A jaw bone is up.
This is a new wrist band that tracks your health and tracks other metrics,
biometrics automatically and feeds it to your smart phone.
So it's not just about health information, but what happens if you start
mapping then to actual, like, photographs and other things in your life of when
jobs died or when Beyonce announced she was having a baby. Your heart skipped
a beat, right? And that can be tracked by this guy.
And what happens if Nielsen ratings has not just calls people up and asks what
they're doing and how they're feeling about certain television programs, but
have these devices on people, you know. What really excites people? What
really, you know, once you start mapping that kind of biodata with actual
informational data, I think that's when you start to have a different level of
collective information gathering and collective story telling which might be
really, really compelling.
23
So this is what the photographs look like on a circle. Jonathan Harris. And
another project Jonathan Harris really did much earlier than that was the We
Feel Fine project, where he scans blogs and scans Twitter for the word "I
feel..." and these are all the things that people feel.
You can actually take a look at the words, take a look at various metrics and
start manipulating the data to see how people feel, how women feel in their
20s, when it's sunny, within a certain country, on a certain date. So that's
another way of collectively looking at information.
And you can actually take a look at, you know, some of the more common words.
We feel -- I feel better was a really good one. I feel bad, I feel good. I
feel right. And you have this whole, like, long tale of people expressing
their kind of feelings. And this site really gathering that information and
presenting in a very compelling way.
So once again, if you take a look at this photograph through a plane window,
you know, you see the bigger picture, but you realize somebody's having a story
right there. Right? It's a big picture and you see the roads and you see
what's happening, but this is a neighborhood. What's happening around this
baseball yard? What's happening in this house? What's happening in this
neighborhood?
And now, with internet information and with mobile technology, you can actually
go down to that level and start seeing things in a different way on a different
scale.
So obviously, Photosynth is doing incredibly well. I can't -- I'm actually
very honored to be standing here and presenting because I respect so much the
stuff that's happening in this building.
But this is a book that I recently revisited. This is called City of Glass by
Paul Auster, part of the New York trilogy. And the story is -- it's a short
story about this man who gets visited by this mysterious woman who says, I'll
pay you to just follow this old guy around and see what he's doing.
So he follows this guy around New York, around the neighborhood where I
actually went to school, and he starts trying to make sense of what he's doing.
He's picking up things here. He's buying stuff there. He's actually walking
24
around the neighborhood in a very random way. He's thinking, actually, it's
not just random. Maybe he's actually doing something in a very deliberate way
and he starts mapping it on a map.
Maybe this looks like a hand. Maybe that looks like a butterfly or an M.
Maybe there's meaning in this. As he digs deeper and deeper into finding the
meaning of this old man's story, he starts losing his story. In the end, he
disappears, right? So that talks about what is the meaning in the information.
Once we start losing sight of the meaning within the information, that's when
we start losing ourselves in a more abstract way.
Instead of just looking at the data as it is, I mean, stories actually allow us
to have a hook, allows us to have a meaning, allows us to find the meaning in
this flood of data that we're looking at.
So this is something that, you know, somebody did on a map and if you kind of
look at the way that their meandering, it says I still haven't found what I'm
looking for. I thought this is kind of kind of indication as to where things
could be going if we don't really have a story to tell through the information
that we present.
So that's it. That's my kind of meandering thoughts about mobile and story
telling and how -- I mean, what is possible now we have mobile technologies and
have all this data and all this computing power at our disposal. Great. Thank
you.