We recently had the honor of contributing to Google’s Think Quarterly publication. The infographic design is based on data from the Happy Planet Index 2.0, first published in 2009. The Index was developed by statistician Nic Marks, and started as a way to create a better alternate indicator for GDP. Marks explains that, “thinking that GDP isn’t a very good measure for societal progress, the idea of the Happy Planet Index was to create a vision of how success for a nation should be judged — through sustainable happiness — then to create an indicator that showed progress towards that.”
The innovation of the Index is to examine the correlation between happiness and sustainability. Life expectancy measures objective years, the concept of happy life years reflects the fact that it’s no use creating good lives now at the expense of future generations. “We need to think about the cost of creating those good lives,” says Marks, “and that’s where the ecological footprint comes in.”
The Index gathered data on life expectancy, ‘happy life years’ and ecological footprint, then crunched it together to rank countries by how efficiently they created wellbeing among their people. See the entire layout from the publication below.
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An ongoing discussion at Column Five HQ is ”What if social media manifested itself in real life?” It’s a question that addresses much of our personal and professional lives and can be characterized as constant noise, new trends, and the occasionally absurd, among other things. And while most of our commentary tends to evolve into abstract tangents, we decided to focus on one application of the hypothesis. We settled on the idea of “What if you lived in an apartment building with social media?”, but that proved to be a mouthful. So we simplified this title to “What if social media sites were your neighbors?” Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.
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In their 1991 Pulitzer-winning book The Ants, E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler described an ant colony as a super-organism – a vast social network. The ants in the colony communicate with each other by following chemical trails left by other ants. As we browse the web today, we are provided with social proof of quality by sites that let us know what our trusted friends have liked or shared recently.
When we made some of our first forays into the social web, in an attempt to promote a now defunct blog, we did what most anyone did in 2007 – we tried to figure out how to leave enough bread crumbs around to entice people who we certainly don’t consider to be ants to actually come to our site and then share with their friends to point the way back to the content, and all signs pointed to one place. We heard exciting mythical tales of a beastly site known to send enough traffic to wreak havoc on servers (which sounded like fun for some reason). Back then, if you figured out what worked on the mysterious creature known as Digg, you were able to send your content for a cascading ride to linkbait glory.
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We have really appreciated everyone who is staying connected through our Infographics newsletter, and we are happy to bring fresh infographics to you for the iPad and iPhone with our brand new Infographics app, which you can download for free. If you have a chance to check it out on an iPad, that is definitely the way to go for the best browsing experience, but the iPhone version will give you some mobile eye candy as well. This is version 1.0 and there are a lot of new features in the works along with a version for Droid coming soon. Please let us know if you like it (or what you would like to see improved or if you notice any bugs) in the comments below.
Click here to install it for free.
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Looking back over the past 75 years, much has changed, but if we look at yesterday’s techniques for clear print communication and sharing information, what worked then is still what makes sense today. These 12 vintage illustrations from 1940′s copies of Fortune magazine highlight how graphic communication has changed, while revealing the valuable and clever techniques that still communicate clearly today.
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