Global Warming Map – Review ptI

This is the first half of a two part review.
I did a skim review last month of the Foreign office’s recent Google Earth project showing the effect of 4 degrees average temperature rise. In short, its a great topic to work with but they could have done much better in terms of geoweb usability.

Background
The project was originally produced as a 2D map which has been transferred to a Google Earth plugin and GEarth file presentation with more data. Click on the image to get to the original

I’ll be reviewing the presentation in the GEarth plugin (visible on the main page) and the theGEarth file which is linked to from the main page.

I’ve been in contact with the Kirsty Lewis the project manager (I’m not certain of her exact role) who’s commented on a draft of this review.

Press: Its got a lot of press attention e.g. this piece on channel 4 news.

Review Pros

Icons: The ‘Impacts’ icons (round and multi-colored) are clear, clean and use good symbols so the user can guess what they represent before actually clicking them. I like the use of color as well, by choosing less intense colors they’ve allow differentiation between impact layers without being overpowering.

Topic: Climate change is a global problem so Google Earth represents a good choice of medium. I especially like the overarching approach they’ve taken: ‘what will be the effect of a 4 degree rise in global average temperature’, because certainly here in the UK with our damp, cold winters a 4 degree rise in average temperature seems attractive if you think of it only in a shallow manner.

Acronyms and Jargon: Throughout the project both videos and maps, they steer clear of science acronyms and jargon which is good to see in a science communication project.

Review Cons
Use Points not Areas: The project marks areas with a colored ring and provides an icon of the same color nearby that can be clicked for more information. Thus we click a tap icon to find out that droughts in southern Europe are becoming more common. It would be better to give specific examples of droughts at several points as you could have then involved photos and a human scale story of the global problem. E.g. show a photo of a Farmer in Spain with dry soil running through his fingers and a personal story about how his farm is being affected.
Kirsty commented that she thought that this ‘specific location’ approach would lead to users incorrectly thinking that climate change is completely to blame for specific problems and that explaining the concepts would be complex and unwieldy. I see her point with this, climate change is often one of a number of factors producing a problem such as arid farms and climate change actually affects the probability of drought in a given area, it’s incorrect to say it produces droughts. However, I think you could add caveats that would work around these issues without overloading the content – I explain the issues to 14 year old students in 5 minutes using a betting analogy.

Multiple Areas at the same time: Another problem with the area approach is that its confusing to show multiple overlapping areas at the same time as can be seen in this screen shot of the GEarth plugin version:


There are multiple solutions to this confusing view, e.g. annotate areas with a color fill and white border and allow only one layer at a time to be viewed, I’ve produced a mock up below:

of course, it’s easier still to use points instead of areas as I recommend above.

Kirsty’s answer to this is that the circles make the point that areas are overlapping. That’s a fair point but you need to make it less visually complex when first viewed by a user. The circles would work better if they were introduced added one by one in a GEarth tour with an audio narrative (a concept I explore in in a book chapter).
She also thinks that its important that the GEarth presentation is visually similar to the original map so people understand the links between the projects and that removing the circles would severe that link. I think she’s correct that branding is important but that doesn’t mean you have to re-use all the details – just keeping the icons set is enough to link the GEarth and Map presentations in the user’s mind.
second half next week…

Next Climate Change Talk

Here’s the latest release from a series of climate change talks I’m doing, this one discusses the Gulf Oil spill, the Athabasca Oil Sands and climate change:

Unlike the earlier ‘Is the Earth a Super Organism’ talk I’ve released so far in this series, this one is completely based in GEarth. It’s 10th in the series but I’ve released it early as:
  • The spill is still ongoing
  • I wanted to have a go at a talk completely in Google Earth to showcase my ideas of what a well designed tour should be like.
I’ve made a Prezi to link to other resources beyond the scope of the talk:
Good Design Points: A few reasons I think this is a well designed tour:
  • The tour covers views across a range of scales, this is where a tour really beats a traditional PowerPoint presentation
  • Simple Flights: The flights between segments are simple and fairly slow to give users chance to process the movement and work out where they are being taken.
  • Scale: I included Nelson’s column, the outline of Great Britain (twice) and a 5 mile long at various points to fix a sense of scale. GEarth is very good at helping users grasp the scale of things.
  • Annotations: I use lots of annotations to draw the user’s eye to the correct part of the screen.
  • Dateline: Because the inbuilt GEarth dateline is too small I included a custom dateline indicator.
Things I’d like to fix:
  • Dateline is too small: I fell into the classic trap of looking at GEarth on a large screen then reducing down to a 640 wide movie clip – you can’t read the text easily.
  • Audio Hiccups: There are a few audio hiccups that I’d like to fix but these aren’t easy in Camtasia without affecting the video. I’ve got to get a better mic too….
  • Better Images: There are a ton of better images I’d have liked to have used but I haven’t got the time to ask permission. Every image used is cc marked and that limits choice.

Work Flow: To produce it I imported models, images, overlays etc. into GEarth then I recorded a tour visiting all the locations as I wanted. Using the pro version of GEarth, I then recorded a silent movie of the tour which I imported into Camtasia. Within Camtasia I added the audio section by section, using freeze frames to extend the movie where needed and cutting footage to fit the commentary. I also added ‘call outs’ the red annotations which work in addition to annotations I’ve added in Google Earth. Its not an elegant technique but it avoids issues to do with GEarth tours such as not being able to review changes easily and needing to edit kml code rather than use the Camtasia graphic interface.

AGI report: State of GI in 5 years time.

This was a report predicting the future of GI in 2015. It’s a good summary made up of opinion from a broad spectrum of GI experts. Of particular interest to me was the section on cartography and visualisation (p 18 main report):

“However, it is not clear if cartographers or visual designers will have more influence in these [challenges of 3D visualisation] developments.”
is an intelligent point to make, I see far more visual designers playing with maps on the web than I do cartographers embracing the new GeoWeb tools so it will be interesting to see who influences the development of augmented reality applications the most. However the quote,
“The contrary view is that we may see the death of the conventional 2D map by 2015”
is just plain silly. History is littered with examples of new technologies that were predicted to kill older technologies and didn’t. Fax machines were killed by email but theatre, radio and ovens were not killed by cinema, TV and microwaves respectively. There is lots to be said for a 2D generalised map, augmented reality on phones may be dominant by 2015 but don’t expect the 2D map to become extinct.
Cartography and Visualization by Mackness is a separate report which the main report summarised. He brings up a good point about the importance of zoom:
“improved capacity to model geographic spaces at multiple levels of detail. Data modelling at multiple scales to support ‘intelligent zoom’ – hugely facilitate map based tasks associated with small devices (with small screen real estate) ”
zoom is important and I think it even goes beyond his mobile devices – its very useful on PCs too.
But I was disappointed that whilst he thinks “maps as interface”, will be more important to the public in the future he doesn’t identify usability of maps as a possible impediment to the development of GI. With each new function developers get to wield in map making there is a slew of bad implementations that are a result of ignoring usability issues, IMHO this is definitely an impediment to effective use of GI tools.
GI and Climate Change: Moving onto the section in the main report I was pleased to see some understanding of the importance of usability being talked about:
“Increasing sophistication in the analysis, presentation and understanding of uncertainty issues, for example how to communicate probabilistic [sic] based information sets. This issue is particularly relevant for scenario forecasting such as climate change or flood risk analysis, where there are increasingly sophisticated datasets availability [sic]”
I agree communication of difficult to understand spatial data to the public will grow in importance. Much the same point is made in the section on renewable energy.
The Data Deluge: Finally, in this section the report talks about the cost of data going down which produces the problem of a data deluge for the public:
“This means that rather than being able to let “the figures talk for themselves” it becomes increasingly important how the information is presented and telling the story associated with the information in a compelling way. This does not mean however to filter the information, to protect it, or to otherwise impede its release – that would be counter productive. Rather the increasing availability of GIS tools and “geoweb” enthusiasts mean that there is a wider pool of people who can be partners in understanding and communicating the issues.”
Google Earth Tours are already an answer to ‘telling the story’ for the amateur enthusiast and I look forward to seeing them and other similar technologies become more popular as ways to dissect public data.