Data Cake – A Visual Metaphor
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A personal project that took on a life of its own…
When I first got into creating content, I was trying to figure out the process for visualising data. As part of my research, I stumbled upon a four-stage model:
- Data
- Information
- Presentation
- Knowledge
And that led me to wonder…
What’s the difference between data and information?
By following this line of enquiry, and trying to clarify my own understanding, I landed on the idea for Data Cake.
The metaphor seemed to strike a chord.
The Data Cake visual has been used in presentations inside universities, government organisations and the OECD.
It has gone into print twice – once in the intro section of I Love Charts (the book by the popular Tumblr blog), and again in an MIT textbook on Interactive Visualization.
Which was quite amusing for something that took about 4 hours to make one Sunday afternoon (including baking the cake).
This was the first thing I’d ever made that gained attention online.
I remember the day it went live — I got up every hour that night to follow its progress on Twitter. Thankfully, I don’t feel the need to do that any longer. But it was exciting at the time!
My partner didn’t quite share my enthusiasm, however, when I woke her up at 4am to tell her…
“It’s got 400 tweets!”
This was my first, ermm… taste of success (forgive me!)…
And I was hooked!
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