Our latest piece for GE (ge.com/visualization/annual) explores 120 years’ worth of their annual reports, spanning the years 1892-2011. The initial idea was to look at how words were used over time: plotting the emergence and disappearance of themes over more than a century of history.

The layout depicts all 5,480 pages of reports in a single display. The 1892 report, just 18 pages long, is seen on the left, while the newly released 2011 report weighs in at 146 pages on the right. (With the exception of the front and back covers, we show “spreads” or pairs of pages together, just the way that you’d read them in the originals.)

Clicking on one of the terms on the lower left highlights all relevant mentions of that term across all of the pages. Selecting a highlighted page shows the text that surrounds each word, and clicking on the page displays the actual spread.

In addition to the terminology changes, we were also excited about seeing design trends, since annual reports are a kind of bellwether of graphic design. When viewing a cover, you can also move left or right to see each year one after another.

The collection reveals a fascinating history of not only GE as a company, but also the country as a whole. The reports directly address national and world events—economic depressions, world wars, the space race, energy crises—and the challenges they brought to the company, its investors, and its consumers. Reports from 1915 and 1944 mention GE’s production of war goods at the request of the government. The annual report of 1945 describes how GE provided parts for the atomic bomb, which has “…brought to mankind a potential source of power heretofore unavailable and almost inconceivable.”  The 1973 report, reflecting on that year’s oil crisis, notes how “the energy challenge has several special facets of meaning for General Electric.”

When and how watchwords emerge is another piece of the story. “Technology” was commonly used beginning in the 1960s. The first mention of “Innovation” in 1949 pertains to the clock radio—“Nearly 1,000,000 sets of this popular postwar innovation have been produced”—but the term appears often, especially in chairman’s reports, from the 1980s on.

Even in its earlier years, GE was an international company, and the reports depict the rapid growth of its international businesses in later years. In the 1970s, the more modest “International” starts to lose ground to the all-encompassing “Global,” terminology that reaches notable frequency in the reports of the 2000s, as “globalization” became the word of the day.

Changing sensibilities also meant that words were used in different ways, and in some cases we decided to preserve these alternate uses. In the 1890s and through the first decades of the twentieth century, the term “economy” is used to describe the efficiency of processes, people, and machines rather than national and global fortunes. The 1894 report notes steps being taken to mitigate losses suffered in the panic of 1893: “Special attention has been given to the supervision of credits, economy of administration, and the improvement of factories…” Not until 1946 does a report stress that reducing coal and oil consumption in the production of electricity is of “tremendous importance to the national economy.”

On the visual front, black-and-white text and simple graphs give way to full-color photographs by mid-century. The 1945 report, which covers the company’s transition from wartime to peacetime production, is markedly longer than the wartime reports and is the first to include photographs.

In a number of instances, the sentence containing the keyword isn’t even the most interesting thing on the page.  “Health” leads us to page 17 of the 1952 report, where a delightful kitten paws at the “first 27-inch aluminized picture tube.”  (the same size as the flat panel monitors used in the development of this piece.) “Lighting” shows us the amazing “‘Partio Cart,’ a complete outdoor cooking center on wheels” along with party-goers in classic 1960 fashions.

“Wind” takes us to 1981, where a scientist works at a massive computer with a hood (p. 9) that makes one grateful for the portability of modern laptops. “Global,” as in “brutally Darwinian global marketplaces,” will lead you to page 4 of the 1991 report, but the real gem is CEO Jack Welch’s explanation of why he has been on a crusade to remove bureaucracy and layers from GE:

“Layers…insulate.  They slow things down.  They garble.  Leaders in highly layered organizations are like people who wear several sweaters outside on a freezing winter day.  They remain warm and comfortable but are blissfully ignorant of the realities of their environment.  They couldn’t be further from what’s going on.”

Over the course of his leadership at GE, Welch turned the previously matter-of-fact chairman’s letters into spirited declarations of GE’s goals for the future.

Searching for the term “Appliances” provides a particularly amusing look at fashions and gender roles throughout the years. The term takes us to page 20 of the 1967 report, where we are introduced to appliances in the new yellow “Harvest” color, “supplementing the fashionable Avocado and Coppertone colors which are marketed in addition to white.”

In 1961, a Betty Draper-ish housewife pours her husband a cup of coffee and displays the “many other electrical servants the Company brings to the aid of homemakers.”  (In 1976, on p. 11, a husband in bellbottom jeans is finally pouring himself his own damn cup of coffee.) “Appliances” also suggests GE’s global reach, even mid-century: in the 1959 report, p. 7 has photographs of Nixon and Khrushchev visiting the kitchen built by GE in Moscow.  The caption notes that the kitchen was designed “not as a dream kitchen but to show what the average American expects to find in a new home.”

Later reports illustrate GE’s efforts to become a more diverse and global company. A search for “Technology” yields a statement about the company’s support of educational programs designed to attract women and minorities to engineering (1976, p. 26).  People of color begin to emerge in photographs of employees at work and of consumers using GE products. In the 1950s and 1960s, women in the reports appear most often in the kitchen, making dinner and washing dishes; by the 1970s they are pictured running machines and heading divisions—and one, Gertrude Michelson, has joined the board of directors. Her retirement is noted in 2001 after twenty-six years of service; compare that board of directors (pp. 38-39) to the board her first year (1976, p. 25).  The 2000s in particular reflect a concern with making products that benefit consumers around the world. Searching for “Cancer” brings up p. 29 in the 2011 report, which describes GE’s $1 billion commitment to improve cancer screening in under-served areas such as Saudi Arabia.

The piece allows users to discover these details while speaking to a larger story: how the history of GE has reflected the history of the United States. It shows how their inventions and innovations, from a better light bulb to a jet engine to an energy-saving refrigerator, both impact and are influenced by the changing lives and demands of American—and, increasingly, global—consumers.

(In a future post, we hope to add more details about how the piece was built. We had less than two weeks to go from working prototype—with thousands of unretouched scans—to production—with all 5,480 pages and over 5,000 text excerpts! Features were limited as a result, and the process of scanning, cleaning, and annotating all of the data took center stage. More later…)

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been building two interactive installation pieces for the lobby of GE’s headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. The pieces are part of the GE Works campaign, which describes and organizes the company’s work with four verbs: Powering, Curing, Building, and Moving. Our job was to show how data can illustrate these first two activities.

To share the installations online, we created a pair of videos (seen above and below) that capture how the interactive pieces work and what they depict.

For the “Powering” piece, we worked with data about the location and power output from 713 GE gas turbines during fifteen days.

For “Curing,” we tracked 125,530 CT and MR scans conducted using GE equipment during a 24-hour period. Aesthetically, the pieces had to work from a distance in the physical space of a lobby, which called for some different design decisions than an online tool would require. Still, we wanted it to be clear that the pieces are informed by real data, generated by machines at work in the real world. Real data has structure, and this structure informs the design.

The difference between generative art and a visualization based on real data is that with the latter, the viewer can visually decode the piece. Order, shape, size, direction, and color all have meaning. The dots originating from the globe in the “Curing” piece, for instance, represent the locations where the scans took place.

In the “Powering” data set, we discovered that turbines located in the same area work together for efficiency and sustainability. Globally, there’s no intentional, overarching structure to how the turbines fire up. Yet patterns emerge when turbines sharing time zones turn on and off at the same time. You can see these correlations in the final piece: the illuminated lines rolling towards the center at the same time indicate turbines turning on in unison. This wouldn’t happen with artificially generated data.

We chose each design element to best highlight what the data represented. The designs either evoke thoughts of the actual events and actions that the data signifies (turbines turning on, electricity being generated) or show a story of time and scale that is otherwise difficult to grasp (what do 135,000 scans really look like? What do they look like when spread across five continents?).

The designs also allow for different perspectives in a single interface. The globe in “Curing” shows the geo-location of the scans; simultaneously the timelines indicate the number of scans occurring each minute. The wheel in “Powering” shows the correlation of turbines turning on at the same time that it shows each turbine’s location and power output. This ensures that no data point is presented without context that lets an audience put it in perspective.

Even if these visualizations are small stories, just short glimpses into a larger story of activity across the world, they still reward the audience for taking an interest and a closer look. They make accessible actual numbers and output that would otherwise be buried in a spreadsheet.

The pieces are now being displayed on a large touch screen wall in the GE lobby. They were also on display during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.

We turned to our friends for the soundtracks: for Powering, Gloobic produced From there to, and Oslo electric by Eric Gunther is the backdrop for Curing.

Last week a small Fathom delegation ventured to Washington, DC, for the Health Data Initiative Forum. More on that shortly.

At the airport newsstand, we were pleasantly surprised to find the most recent issue of Popular Science! For the July 2011 issue, we created a visualization of energy supply and consumption in the United States.

The design is based on reports issued from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as well as the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

In making this piece, we were amazed to discover how much energy is lost in the production and distribution of energy. In transportation alone, the United States loses 75 percent of its energy during the combustion of fossil fuels. Electricity production is hardly better, with a 68 percent loss during production and transmission along power lines.

We wanted this piece to highlight the story of energy loss, and the startling inefficiencies present in the United States energy infrastructure.

We gave a previous web design project a face-lift earlier this year — a rare luxury amid the rapid pace of design work these days. Since creating the site last year, GE has been amassing an inspiring collection of data visualization projects on their Making Data Work blog, and the expanding volume called for a slight update in layout and architecture.

There’s now extensive room for growth on the site — both in projects and categories — and we’re looking forward to seeing it!

We just launched TriTrack, a tool for triathlon training, on the behalf of GE and British Triathlon Elite Team Partner.

Signing up is free and takes a few seconds.

TriTrack stores time, pace, distance, and diet for your exercise program…

…and visualizes your progress.

The thickness of the colored bar indicates how much distance you covered in each training session. The slope of the line tells you what happened to your pace over time. If your pace improved, the line will slope downward. A steep downward slant means you rapidly improved your pace. A slighter slant shows that you improved steadily over time.

You can also see Pace and Level of Exertion, Pace and Quality of Sleep, and Pace and Diet+Nutrition. Each colored bar represents a day.

Level of exertion is represented with a color spectrum that goes from blue (lower exertion) to green (higher exertion).

How quality of sleep corresponds to your training is shown by green bars for the days when you reported better sleep the night before. Blue bars show poorer quality of sleep.

For nutrition, green bars indicate that you checked off all the diet and nutrition benchmarks mentioned on the training entry form (three square meals, five servings of fruit and three glasses of water). Blue bars show days where you reached none of these benchmarks. The gradient in between, indicate that the three goals were partially met.

Also tracked by TriTrack:

- Time Trained per Week

- Total time (in minutes) per week that you’ve spent training.

- Time Trained per sport per week

- Time (in minutes) that you’ve spent on each of the three activities—swimming, biking and running.

While building Stats of the Union, we went through a large heap of sketches. Some were mistakes. Others looked good, but didn’t do the job. While a favorite design can be worthy of endless defense, more often—killing is key.

In 1916, the British writer and English professor Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (pen name Q) coined the term “murder your darlings” in a lecture at Cambridge University, UK.

“Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament…. Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

If something is a darling because it makes the creator feel clever and impressive—it has to go. That’s what the audience should feel and it goes as much for design as it does for writing. But sometimes a piece is a darling because it has something special that can be useful in a different context. That’s why we don’t actually murder our darlings. We keep them in the basement.

In what we hope is the start of a tradition, we’d like to share some of our Kill Darlings from recent projects. Things we liked, but didn’t quite make it out the door in the final version. For Stats of the Union, we wanted to share our process of arriving at the final color palette—a task that left dozens of designs on the cutting room floor.

Our challenge was to arrive at a color palette that showed off geographic trends in the data. We were seeking to minimize flattening in the final piece. While it might be easy to distinguish between “high” and “low” on a map, we wanted the subtle gradations between “slightly high” and “really high” to also be apparent.

We started with spectrums of a single hue, but ultimately decided they didn’t have enough contrast to show the highs and lows in the data properly. We moved to the split color spectrum that exists in the final piece. It became immediately apparent that interpolating through HSB color space was a bad idea. As was this brief black and white episode.

Other color pairings worked more successfully together, but were not balanced, such as this green and purple option. Other combinations had unavoidable connotations already attributed to them.

Finally we settled on blue and green for their ability to sit next to one another without one of them stealing the show. Shifting the background to a true black seemed heavy-handed on a monitor, but in testing on the iPad itself the colors practically glowed.

Our first iPad app is now available on iTunes.

It’s called Stats of the Union, and we built it for GE as a tool to look at health stories in America.

Stats of the Union is powered by the Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI) report from 2009, which consists of data from federal agencies including the Census Bureau, Department of Health & Human Services, Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency.

With all this data you can look at population, risk factors, and indicators of health. Zoom in to get the specific data for a county. Zoom out and compare your county to an overview for each state or for the whole country.

You can go directly to any story you want, but it’s interesting to first get an overview of U.S. demographics. See where the population is dense, old, young and learn where America is predominantly black, white or Hispanic.

Then get an overview of the nation’s health: life expectancy, causes of death, poor or fair health and sick days.

You can break out health indicators related to birth (low birth weight, premature births etc.)…

…or see specific causes of death (homicide, car crashes, heart disease etc.)…

… or look at patterns of at-risk groups for health related problems (unemployment, major depression, recent drug users etc.)

Under “Diseases” in the navigation bar, you find statistics on certain diseases (E.coli, Salmonella, Hepatitis) as well as preventative procedures (mammograms, flu shots etc.).

Under Risk Factors, you can view prevalence of behavior (no exercise, few fruits and vegetables, smoking) as well as access to health care professionals and health insurance.

Your previously viewed stories are saved under “History.” If you’d like to share a story or use it in a presentation, click on “Snapshot” and it will be saved to your Photos folder.

Watch the Stats of the Union video and see how it works!

Here at Fathom we hit the ground running in 2011. We wrapped up a touch screen installation for the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in January, helping our friends at GE shine the spotlight on all of their Ecomagination initiatives. The GE booth — a small city block is the more apt description — was an eco playground of residential wind turbines, electric cars, Wattstations, and energy efficient appliances.

In Powering the Kitchen, GE used its home energy monitors to track five major sources of kitchen energy use — refrigerator, range, dishwasher, overhead lights, and plugs — in a typical American household for one month. We built a tool that let visitors dig deeply into this information, and learn how the things we use every day impact our total energy use.

Here’s the piece in action at the trade show!

Patterns in our energy use arise at varying scales. First there is a single day, where you can see that energy spikes during daylight hours, but remains at a steady base level even in the middle of the night when nothing is on. The fridge, for example (red), is constantly cycling on and off to maintain a consistent cooling temperature.

Zoom out to an entire month, and see the same fridge energy use played out over a longer time period. Its easy to see how the fridge accounts for the largest chunk of energy used, followed by overhead lights (green) and plugs (blue).

Next zoom in on the appliances themselves. It was a revelation — for us at least — that the level of energy consumption for each appliance is not regular over time, but has peaks and valleys depending on a host of other factors.

There’s a lot to learn, too, from looking at just a single appliance. In this particular home, the dishwasher (purple) gets used about once per day, but it actually has differing energy needs depending on the settings used. In terms of cost, it represents a fraction of the overall energy use of the kitchen.

There’s also a version of Powering the Kitchen that has been adapted for the web.

In the fall of 2010, GE partnered with the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health to conduct a sweeping survey of health perceptions within the Saudi population, as well as trends in eating, beverage consumption, and fitness habits among Saudi consumers. We developed an online tool that not only presented the results of this study, but continues collecting survey responses from visitors to the GE Middle East Healthymagination site.

Take a look at the Saudi Health Survey over on the GE Visualization site.

We were particularly excited to work on this project, not only because we have developed a bit of a crush on health data, but because it was our first opportunity to do a piece in both Arabic and English. Part of the Saudi Health Survey included data on influential health products in the Middle East, so some of our initial research focused on brand imagery, which we used to inform our color and typography choices throughout the project.

As we progressed, a fascinating challenge emerged: not only did we have to design for characters that read right-to-left, but our entire concept of visual hierarchy had to be flipped along with it. Our realizations ranged from the obvious (page designs anchored to the upper right!) to the not-so-obvious (qualitative options in order from poor/fair/good become good/fair/poor). View this in action by clicking on the green button in the upper right (English), or the upper left (Arabic) to toggle both the language and the orientation of the interface.

More than in previous projects, we also relied on iconography that was general enough to translate across two languages.

It should also be noted that this project would not have been possible without our counterpart team of designers, translators, and developers in Saudi Arabia who were invaluable resources in making sure our visualizations translated to other cultures and other languages.

We just finished a project in conjunction with NBC News and The Gates Foundation related to education.  The national scorecard allows parents to locate available school performance data, compare schools within districts and see state results. Do you know what state has the highest high school graduation rate in the country — or the lowest?

The scorecard was also featured on the Today Show last week:

Vicki Phillips, director of education for The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the PTA’s Byron Garrett show how Scorecard software can make a big difference in understanding your child’s education.