Enabling a Fact-Based Worldview

Hans Rosling's brainchild, a nonprofit called Gapminder, uses interactive design to render global statistics comprehensible. Economic development needs to take a lesson from Rosling. Visit his wesbite and see what I mean.

In the late 1990s, Dr. Hans Rosling became frustrated by the x-axis, which -- as all middle-schoolers know -- is the part of a graph used to measure time. But for Rosling's global-development students at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, it was also the obstacle to their understanding of the health and economic trends that were shaping the globe.

"The students didn't have a fact-based worldview," says Rosling, who helps kick off this year's TED conference -- that's technology, education, and design -- on Feb. 22. "They talked about 'we' and 'them' the whole time -- and even the official terminology of 'industrialized' and 'developing' countries failed to communicate that there is a continuity from the world's poorest nations to the richest."

So Rosling did what any medical doctor and public-health researcher who had spent countless hours playing video games with his children would do: He enlisted his son's help in creating a short animated movie, with floating bubbles representing nations' progress along both health and economic indicators. The y-axis measured child survival. The x-axis measured gross domestic product per capita. And time was time, with each passing second ticking off the years. The size of the bubble represented population; it floated up and to the right for improving health and wealth; it floated down and to the left for failing economies and societies.

"FACT-BASED WORLDVIEW." "When the bubble started to move, people got very excited!" Rosling gleefully recalls. His students sat bolt upright as he began calling global development as if it were a horse race: And there goes China down the stretch, while sub-Saharan Africa continues to fall farther and father behind.... "It was a tremendous breakthrough in my lecturing," reflects Rosling.

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