Scenario

Professor Rodderling signs up for a faculty seminar on infographics tools such as Visual.ly, Piktochart, and Dipity, and he gets several ideas for new learning activities in his upcoming course “Economics, Politics, and Food Supply.” In the first week of class, he shows students an example of an effective infographic. It presents charts and images, telling the story of how politics and agribusiness affect subsistence farmers. Rodderling then projects an infographic that uses questionable facts and unfounded conclusions to push an agenda and invites the class to find the flaws. The students look up statistics and uncover the logical errors, and Rodderling uses the tool Visual.ly to build a different infographic, one that accurately presents the data and ideas that the students discover.

The first assignment is a group project in which each team will use one of the available infographic tools to illustrate an incident where food-supply issues changed history. For one class session, Rodderling oversees the teams as they work on their projects. Moving from table to table, he encourages students to talk about the narrative they are trying to capture. He pulls up a chair at one table to brainstorm with the team about effective visuals to present their points. Talking with another team, he gives advice about how to represent multiple dimensions of a topic in a single graphic.

On report day, the first group talks about how a failure in food supply in Napoleon’s 1812 march to Moscow led to his defeat. They present an infographic that tells the story of supply breakdowns, foraging failures, and the death and desertion that resulted. As the team concludes its presentation, questions erupt from the class. Were there food shortages in France at this time? How was the food distributed among the soldiers? Before long, Rodderling has to intervene so the next team can make their presentation.

After all the presentations have been made, Rodderling asks what the students think was valuable or troublesome in the project. Many say the project forced them to focus on the big picture to be able to create a cohesive infographic, even as they worked with data about specific points. Several say they liked the final result because it was visually satisfying and looked professional. All agree that because the infographics were fast and easy for students to consume and critique, the audience always had something to say when a report was finished.

1. What is it?

The term “infographic” is used to describe a wide range of things, from relatively simple graphics to complex visual presentations of large amounts of data and ideas, sometimes in interactive online formats. Infographics have become commonplace in news media, research, marketing, and other venues because they can convey a complicated message or findings from a data set quickly and in a manner that reflects the trend toward visual (rather than textual) consumption of information. A new breed of tools is emerging—such as Visual.ly, Easel.ly, Infogr.am, and Piktochart—that allow faster and easier creation of infographics, enabling users without deep skills in graphic design or the software that support it.

2. How does it work?

Creating an effective infographic requires a clear conceptualization of the message or story that the graphic is intended to convey, as well as a method for translating that concept into a finished product. Distilling information and ideas into a concise message that accurately presents the data is not a trivial undertaking, requiring reliable data and the ability to effectively synthesize it into a unified concept. Tools for building infographics provide templates, examples, and drag-and-drop functionality that allow creators to focus their efforts on the concept rather than also having to worry about creating the graphic. Some tools even allow novice users to create interactive graphics, which opens up more opportunities for the presentation of information and engagement with it.

3. Who’s doing it?

The need for communicators to sift through vast quantities of information and present only the best and most important has raised the profile of infographics at all levels of education. At the same time, the availability of free, easy-to-use tools has made infographic-related projects a feasible option for a wide range of users, including students. In higher education, Piktochart lists Harvard and Cornell among the users on their product home page. At Champlain College in Burlington, one professor uses an infographic as the course syllabus, in which the significant dates are easy to see at a glance. And in a cautionary play on the concept of deceiving with statistics, a recent seminar course at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, UC Irvine, was entitled, “How to Lie with Infographics.” Throughout the term of a News and Information Design course last spring at the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State University, students built a series of infographics that were part of their final class assessment. Students used the format to explain the key concepts learned in class, recapping what they learned, retelling it, and demonstrating their skills in communicating via infographics.

4. Why is it significant?

These tools make construction simple and fast, even for those who do not see themselves as visually creative. When using the templates and option choices built into tools like Visual.ly or Easel.ly, students can focus on finding and selecting the best data to make their points rather than getting lost in the execution of the design. The nature of these tools encourages fast prototyping, allowing students to create, assess, and revise many versions of a graphic in a short amount of time. Along the way, students develop expertise in seeing the story or message in the data and putting that message into a visual form, increasing their visual fluency. As a student project, the building of an infographic can encourage research and support reflection. It can trigger conversations about the stories told by data, and it offers an opportunity to discuss the citing of sources—how it should be done and why it is important.

5. What are the downsides?

Possessing the tools to create an infographic does not confer the skills to build a good one. For one thing, producing an effective visual product requires a thorough understanding of the content at issue; for another, it may demand some design ability, although tool templates do much to mitigate this concern. As with any simple app or service, a limited number of templates within an infographic tool can result in large numbers of infographics that look very much alike. Also, having a specific set of chart types and designs to choose from can discourage users from considering alternative means of presentation that might be more effective. Moreover, there are risks in boiling information down to pithy graphics—the spare form of an infographic can more readily result in an incomplete or incorrect picture, and a creator can easily misrepresent data by accident or design. Finally, the utility provided by these tools could encourage students to believe that producing an attractive product will somehow validate hastily gathered or questionable data, not to mention the conclusions drawn from that data.

6. Where is it going?

Infographics and other curation methods for sorting and simplifying data are likely to prove increasingly valuable as the volume of easily accessible data continues to expand. At present, most infographics are static, but going forward tools are likely to support increasing interactivity. Current interactive infographics invite the viewer to click for more data, an action that may trigger a popup with an extension of the infographic, or it might show the user an explanatory video, an article on the topic, or a social media discussion of the highlighted statistics. It’s only a step from there to real-time updates from the sources of the statistics, click-triggered animation that demonstrates processes only alluded to in the infographic, and opportunities for viewers to add notes in real time. As adoption of e-textbooks increases, such academic resources could move beyond static graphics and begin to incorporate dynamic or interactive infographics that are continually updated with current data. Finally, as more people avail themselves of the tools to create them, infographics are likely to find their way into uses such as résumés and clickable tables of contents at the front of digital portfolios.

7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Tools that allow the novice to build, explore, and refine infographics make them much more viable for classroom use. Such graphics offer an elegant way to display research data, and those created by an instructor can offer presentations that are easy to assimilate, particularly for the visual learner. At the same time, they offer the opportunity to expand visual learning and thinking into fields where visual aspects of communication are not always included. Building an infographic is a project that lends itself to teamwork because the modular design means members can divide the work along logical lines. As a pedagogical challenge, students might be encouraged to deconstruct and evaluate the data of an existing infographic, then use an appropriate tool to construct a new version they believe is better. These tools provide students with an opportunity to evaluate specific presentations of data, discuss the aspects that are effective or misleading, revise the graphics on the fly, and work in a collaborative fashion to create knowledge and understanding. By analyzing content in this manner and engaging in such critical thinking, students develop higher-order thinking skills.

February 2013

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