by R J Andrews
The tiny cathedral maps cumulate into larger coherent structures, producing a story that contains many micro and macro readings: Comparisons between cathedral sizes, cruciform plans, and surroundings with the tiny maps. A distribution of cathedrals inside the yellow band of sunrises. A cluster of cathedrals on only one side of the compass.
The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning.
CARL JUNG, 1875—1961
Showing the actual building outlines, instead of representing each cathedral with a labeled abstract circle, assures that they are in the right spot. You do not need to trust that their orientation was measured correctly because the order is apparent. Any cathedral out of line would pop out as an error. Including the buildings, parks, and streets that surround each cathedral pushes the limit of how much room is available on the page. If the graphic was any smaller we might lose the cathedral. The discs give even salience to a group of cathedrals of varying size. They also remind us that each church is one piece of a bigger world. Most of the story is desaturated to spotlight the distribution of cathedrals. Yellow highlights the sun. Orange connects the inset Paris diagram to the broader story. The piece is heavily annotated. Text is rotated, arced, colored, and sized—lavishing more context wherever possible.
Confections stand or fall on how deeply they illuminate ideas and the relations among those ideas
EDWARD TUFTE, 1997
Is this information a success? That is for you to determine. I expect everyone might want to shape this form a little differently and I hope you have enjoyed seeing how I thought about telling this story.
CHAPTER
19
CREATIVE ROUTINES
When I write, I must convince myself that it's going to be wonderful. … I'm going to write it and this time, this time, it won't be crap. When I don't have that confidence. I'm in big trouble.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN, 1983
The shore of our destination is in sight. Before our voyage lands and we share a triumphant close, here is a handful of observations, tips, and quirks learned through my own work. Of course, my experience as a data storyteller has shaped this entire book. But we have not yet seen the practical daily experience of what it is like, something—in the spirit of tethering lessons to reality—we can do now.
The denouement is the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are unraveled and matters are explained or resolved. From Old French desnoer (to untie).
Day-to-Day
The first pages of this book showed Mozart's creative routine. That project surprised me. It revealed no similar patterns of activity between different creatives. Some people worked in the early morning while others melted late-night candles. Some exercised every day while others burned out their bodies with chemical cocktails. The only commonality between them was the inclusion criteria: All these creatives had a routine. There is no best way, but to make it on the list, you must have had a routine. No one can tell you when to eat. No one can tell you the best time to be creative. It is your job to hone a daily practice that works for you.
A routine helps by automating certain activities so that you do not have to burn cognitive calories on questions like what's for breakfast? every morning. Your time and energy are finite. Do all you can to direct them toward what is important to you. Creativity is a product of showing up every day and doing the work. Magical aha! moments are lovely when they arrive. But real creative production is about steady discipline, not waiting around for inspiration. You must create the time and space for the work to happen.
Because play is often about breaking rules and experimenting with new conventions, it turns out to be the seedbed for many innovations that ultimately develop into much sturdier and more significant forms. … a space of wonder and delight where the normal rules have been suspended, where people are free to explore the spontaneous, unpredictable, and immensely creative work of play.
STEVEN JOHNSON, 2016
If you are able to maintain a variety of projects and activities, you can always engage your energy with what is most interesting in the moment. However, efficiency is not the goal. Play is a critical part of the process. Others might call this experimentation, learning, or exploration. Make room to play inside your routine, and with the routine itself. Allow your curiosity to get the upper hand.
Enthusiasm and curiosity carry me through each day. When I tackle a new project I am full of ravenous zeal for its potential. I am hungry to figure out what it might reveal to others. Maybe this project will be the one to make a big difference. At the outset, my energy appears crazy, as if I am delusional or hallucinating. Well, in a way, I am. In the beginning, the creative is the only one who can see the potential. It takes loads of hard work to realize this vision to show it to others.
There must be a complete belief in any work of art—belief in what one is doing.
BEN SHAHN, 1957
Positive hopefulness is balanced by looking back at prior work with heavy self-criticism. All of my past work could be overhauled with what I know now. The duality of future-facing optimism and backward-looking criticism reflects a belief in momentum. With each new data story, my craft is getting better. I am still learning, and there is still lots to learn.
The data storyteller's success comes from straddling many different fields. To operate in all of them, you must learn from many different kinds of experts. One consequence of this is that you will unfairly compare yourself to specialists. That can lead to feeling like an impostor. Do not be too hard on yourself. Remember, you are straddling worlds to create new visions, and that takes time. Figure out how to sustain your creative process for the long haul.
Wild enthusiasm comes naturally to me. It is tamed by a humble curiosity that I have had to develop. I had to learn to recognize and stay mindful that I mostly do not understand what is going on. I realized that it was easy, natural, to just nod and go along. Accepting things without inquiry is a trap that I still fall into, every day in some way. It is an essential adaptation for navigating our chaotic world. But sometimes I have the awareness to acknowledge that I do not understand. Then I can choose when to follow that admission with the enthusiasm necessary to figure things out.
The child in me is delighted. The adult in me is skeptical.
SAUL BELLOW, 1976, after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature
To understand the unknown requires a real hunger for learning. That desire sparks a search for the information you desire. Often, what you need in order to understand can only be found with the help of others. Social intelligence is essential to the seeker of understanding. Closing my curiosity gaps requires convincing others to explain and re-explain until I can understand. You have to admit I still don't get it and press others on until you do.
Pack and Breathe
Creativity is all about making new mappings between previously unconnected things. For these intersections to occur, you first need a warehouse of material that is worth connecting. Then, you must give the time and space for the mental fireworks.
To be creative, first, fill up your mental hopper with concepts. I joke that this activity can feel like you are becoming an “overnight expert” because of the exhilaration you get while plunging into a new topic. We have access to the most incredible body of knowledge ever assembled. Most of it is free and nearly instant. You can enjoy YouTube, podcasts, Wikipedia, research papers, and digitized archives from the comfort of an armchair. Many subject matter experts are only a tweet or email away. Public libraries will let you check out stacks of book at a time. Gorge yourself.
Do your homework. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea. … Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. Yo
u can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret.
DAVID OGILVY, 1985
When is it time to swing out of homework mode? A switch occurs where your mind turns over from being curious to being so excited about an idea that you have to charge forward into making. Screenwriter William Goldman wrote about the switch from research to the flurry of creation, “Once you start writing, go like hell—but don't fire until you're ready.”But how exactly do these ideas, the aha! moments, arrive?
As you fill up your mental warehouse with material you need to carve out time and space for creative intersections to fire. This period is popularly imagined as the mental wanderings during a hot shower. Newly learned concepts bounce off one another. They collide with everything else you know, settling with or challenging preconceived notions. Physical activities like running and swimming are also marinating empty time for me. While part of my brain moves my meat vehicle around, the rest catalogs and connects concepts. There are moments when creative solutions rush in. The narrative structure of the museum chapter, for example, laid itself out while I was on a run.
Those first months are as full of research as I can make them… All this, of course, is building up to the moment of actual writing. I am getting myself as full of the material as I possibly can. When I can't stand it any more. I try and write. If the writing goes well X weeks later, I have a first draft.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN, 1983
Sleep is essential for health, but it is also a productive creative tool. Taking a nap or sleeping on it overnight creates a natural space for the brain to ingest new information. The brain filters thoughts for keeping in long-term memory. Sleep also gives you more energy to re-attack a problem. I try to sleep between loading new data and getting to know it with exploratory analysis. Why? Loading data and guaranteeing that it is ready for your workflow is a messy and draining experience. Have as much energy and enthusiasm as possible when you greet data for the first time. When possible, load data the night before.
Scientific theories are not ‘derived' from anything. We do not read them in nature, nor does nature write them into us. They are guesses—bold conjectures. Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them.
DAVID DEUTSCH, 2011
You cannot always be energetic. Learn how to recognize and aim your most spirited time to where it is needed most. Be intentional about when you attack the biggest and thorniest challenges. When your mind is tired, it is sometimes better to rest than continue, inefficient and making errors. But also, a tired mind can give you a new critical view on a design. Sleepy eyes see differently than caffeinated focus.
Remixing is a folk art, anybody can do it. Yet these techniques, copying materials, transforming them, combining them, are the same ones used at any level of creation. You might even say everything is a remix.
KIRBY FERGUSON, 2010
Whenever possible, prototype. If you disappear for months to work on a masterpiece, you risk falling victim to faulty assumptions. Instead, identify design risks early and attack those first. Before making a data-rich interactive I might first test a static map. What did we learn? What can be gained with more data and interactivity?
This whole book is oriented to the perspective of a solitary creative. It is easier to describe the process as an independent journey to the individual reader. But lots of creative data work happens across teams. The same guiding principles for individual creative routines applies to teams. Be mindful of what rhythms work and seek to improve your collective practice. Engage with enthusiasm, but remember that collaborators need space to learn, and space to breathe. Seek ways to play well together.
Throughout this book, I have not addressed any specific technology tools. File types, software, programming languages, and libraries… I use many and there are too many that I do not use. My approach to digital tools is the same as my approach to search: anticipate. In search, I expect that the thing I need exists. It is my job to find it. With tools, I assume the tool can do what I want and I just need to figure out how to make it happen. Once you become familiar with the metaphors used to organize a handful of digital tools, you can begin making good guesses about what a new tool can do. Then it becomes about figuring out how to do it. The crash between my expectations and the reality of the tool is a fertile plain for all kinds of new creative intersections.
At a project's outset, try to avoid design by defaults. It helps to have a vision for what you are pursuing before figuring out how to implement. Exploring data and presenting a data story with two different tools can help differentiate these modes.
Of course, being a technology omnivore comes at a real cost. You cannot spend all your time learning how to pull new levers, but tools change so quickly that you have to figure out some healthy rhythm of continuous learning. For me, this happens within projects. Intentionally learn how to do something new today that might be useful tomorrow.
The final daily practice I will mention might be obvious. To be a good data storyteller, you must consume many data stories. Allow yourself to become an obsessive enthusiast for the craft. This does not require you stay absolutely current with everything published every week. That would be a full-time job.
Be in touch with what gets published today, and explore how the craft got here. Use survival bias to your advantage. Most of what has come down to us from hundreds of years of development survived for a reason. Delight in the charts, diagrams, maps, and full-blown data stories from past generations. Study the masters of the past. They all negotiated a unique blend of data, tools, and problems to serve the same audience we serve: people in search of understanding. Deconstruct past work to reveal your own unique blend of technical and temporal biases.
Data stories help us understand and behave in an uncertain world, but for me they do even more. The experience of creating and consuming makes my brain feel happy.
FINALE
BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW
Press on with the work beyond fear.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL, 1961
Today's information age invites us to do great things with data. We are lucky to live in a time rich with such possibility. I hope we set our eyes toward embracing this potential. Together we can augment one another's intelligence and capabilities. Together we can strive to not only better understand the world, but also to better know each other.
In 2014, MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee characterized this spirit as racing with machines, not against them. External aids—information—are the tools that make this possible. Just as the left and right sides of our brain are spanned by the corpus callosum, information links data and humans. In doing so, information expands our knowledge, know-how, and imagination. Information expands what is humanly possible.
To expand human imagination is to create doors to new worlds. Many scientists have echoed this enthusiasm across the last hundred years. I am particularly struck by how Marie Curie, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, put it:
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery also has its beauty. Neither do I believe that the spirit of adventure runs any risk of disappearing in our world. If I see anything vital around me, it is precisely that spirit of adventure, which seems indestructible and is akin to curiosity.
But it is not just science, not just data, that shares in this adventure. One of my favorite storytellers, Charlie Chaplin, also talked about racing with machines. Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, scored, and starred in the The Great Dictator. The climax of his 1940 political satire is pure Hollywood magic. Chaplin begins his monologue by characterizing technology in a way that still rings
true:
Art after all, is about rearranging us, creating surprising juxtapositions, emotional openings, startling presences, flight paths to the eternal.
ZANDER AND ZANDER, 2000
We have developed speed, but have shut ourselves in.
Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. …
We think too much, and feel too little.
I am inspired by his optimism for technological humanism. The scene swells as Chaplin stares into the camera, gushing:
The design of charts and diagrams, representing, as it does, a synthesis of art and science, has the potential for carrying the glory of each.
HOWARD WAINER, 1997
In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man”—not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you!You, the people have the power—thepower to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
We must strive for a decent world. We must strive for a world of reason. We must strive for a world of science and progress toward a way of life that is free and beautiful for all people.
The reason we strive: To enhance the spread of ideas, to exemplify attention to detail, and to add to the beauty of the world.
STEVEN PINKER, 2014