Insight

ICYMI – Weekly roundup of best bits Vol.19

How much will the average national rent get you?

appfolio + Column Five

With property rental prices varying wildly across the UK, your fixed budget could probably procure you a mansion in some areas, or something more akin to a shoe box in the capital. It would appear that our friends across the pond face a similar dilemma, as this infographic from appfolio and Column Five beautifully illustrates. $769 will likely get you 285 square feet in San Francisco, with an apartment in Detroit offering almost triple the space for the same cash. This could all be very useful information the next time you are considering upping sticks.

Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas, while water supplies last

Pro Publica

As the city of Las Vegas sprawls ever further across the desert, Lake Mead is showing signs of being slurped dry. As of May 2015, levels had dropped within 12 inches of triggering a federal emergency, and the city is currently building a third drain intake to ensure it can still draw water as levels drop further. This all sounds quite alarming, however as visual thinkers we want to actually see the effects for ourselves. Luckily, Pro Publica has quenched our desires by producing an animated time-lapse interactive map using 40 years of satellite imagery, allowing us to survey the landscape and see how it has radically transformed in just a few years. Those lush, green golf courses sure do look pretty, but maintaining their appearance sure does come with a hefty cost, it would seem.

How to dress like a boss 

Mashable

The retail industry seems to be dragging behind a little when it comes to utilising visual content, but this week we’ve finally stumbled on some inspiration.  Macy’s & Mashable developed this simple slider infographic to show “How to dress like a Boss”.  There’s 6 Boss personas and not one female, ouch. Other than that we cant help thinking there’s scope to produce something more useful here e.g. click on clothing items tie to discover more.  e.g. how to tie a windsor knot. That will keep the dwell time at the very least 😉

Can you lose your job to a robot? 

Planet Money

We are not very far from seeing Ex Machina becoming a reality. Robots are already replacing humans, at least in some cases. This nifty interactive from Planet Money drills down the possibility of losing your job to a robot. Fortunately it still seems that we are keen to keep humanity in mental health and social workers with only 0.3% chance of being automated. Telemarketing is the one most likely to be done by robots, with all that cold calling annoyance, we are not surprised! :p

Isochrone Maps of Europe – by Train

Petar Kerpedjiev

Although there are times when they test our patience, we always find there’s something wonderfully endearing about whizzing across the countryside on a train, and thanks to the Channel Tunnel we can roam further than we ever could before. But how long would a rail excursion from London to Frankfurt actually take? Peter Kerpedjiev, a PhD student at the University of Vienna has all of the answers, and his series of exquisite isochrone maps show journey times between key European cities. Amazingly, Londoners can reach many areas of Germany faster than they would some parts of Scotland. That is, of course, if everything is running on time.

Atmosphere

Google for Work

We tuned in to Google for Work Atmosphere: think creatively & innovate boldly this week to come across some inspiring talks from IDEO’s Co-CEO Tim Brown, Google’s SVP Laszlo Bock and Airbnb’s CMO Jonathan Mildenhall. Besides gaining insight on disruptive innovation, we were really astound by Google’s visualization tool that captures Twitter and Google+ conversations in real time! It shared some similar characteristics and purpose as the Bubbleized tool we demo’d in November @Visualized albeit we appreciate how they’ve brought this to life via a super slick interface and using colour to distinguish topic conversations. We’re excited to see how this can be developed further.

What is decriminalisation of drugs?

EMCDDA

Of course, neither us or anyone we know has ever had anything to do with illegal drugs. We do however often hear terms such as depenalisation, decriminalisation and legalisation used in the media, but how many people actually understand what they all actually mean? We don’t think there will be any confusion if everyone would take just a few minutes to sample this animated information video from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. It may not feature stylish visual effects or a snazzy soundtrack, but it is informative and elegant in it’s execution, which is exactly the sort of information design we get high on.

Five years and 311 cities later 

Uber

Uber summarises your current trips via email to mark their 5th anniversary.
It’s pretty basic, but just shows what can be done with a small dataset. Whilst enabling Uber to push the fact their service is available in x amount of countries, YOU haven’t visited yet.