When Numbers Acquire the Powers of Language

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis writes about this idea, quoting Bill James, the father of sabermetrics:

When the numbers acquire the significance of language, they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry...And it is not just baseball that these numbers, through a fractured mirror, describe. It is character. It is psychology, it is history, it is power, it is grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, it is success and failure, it is frustration and bad luck, it is ambition, it is overreaching, it is discipline. And it is victory and defeat, which is all that the idiot sub-conscious really understands. (67)

When I first started watching different TED Talks, I mostly was watching things that didn't seem to have anything to do with Technology, Entertainment or Design, the three things that TED stands for. I was watching talks by Al Gore and John Doerr about climate change and the possibilities of greentech innovation. Sure, these talks had something to do with technology, but entertainment? design? But today, I watched a super cool talk by Hans Rosling, who presents statistics in an engaging way to describe the progress made by developing countries in improving health. And it dawned on me.

People typically think of design as very simply the study of appearance. At least this is the way that I understood design. But Rosling's talk, and really all of the TED Talks, have opened my eyes to a different understanding of design. Design isn't simply about the way something looks, or about how to make things look cool and interesting. Rather, design is motivated by such principles and ideas as the democratization of information, the accessibility of technology, the interactivity of humans, the relationships between humans and nature and space. Rosling uses data and organizes it, designs it in such a way as to make it accessible. Previously, I understood qualitative analysis as being fundamentally different from quantitative analysis, anecdotal evidence as being fundamentally different from empirical evidence. But Rosling presents empirical data in such a compelling way that numbers acquire the powers of language. Data-based storytelling.

Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is a movie that stars a slideshow presentation. A slideshow presentation! Surely, that represents a triumph of design, of the ability to make scientific data as compelling and convincing as a story.

The personal computer was surely a technological innovation, but more than anything else, it was an innovation in design. It democratized the applications of technology, enabled people to interact with technology more intuitively. Doesn't this explain the success of Apple's iPod? It isn't just that the iPod looks cool or comes in neat colors, but it changes the way in which people interact with digital soundbites.

Maybe none of this is all that revelatory. But when I think about how little people typically understand of design, how little I understood, I am reminded of the scene from "The Devil Wears Prada," when Meryl Streep's character rips into Anne Hathaway's character who clearly regards fashion as a frivolous waste of energy:

This..."stuff?" Oh...ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of "stuff."