In the Life lessons from an ad man video at www.ted.com Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider “real” value — and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life. The part about the commercial for Shreddies is not only very funny, but gives also an insight about how peoples perception of things (or life) can change just by representing things in a new way.
A powerful way to show the relative importance of amounts is to use a treemap. A treemap is a hierarchical (tree-structured) display of data as a set of nested rectangles. Each data element is represented by a rectangle that is proportional in area to the size/amount of the data element. Individual elements can be subdivided in further sub-branches.
This way of visualizing amounts is used effectively by David McCandles. His website Information is beautiful is full of great examples of visualization. I would also recommend his Ted.com video on the beauty of data visualization.
To create a treemap yourself this Microsoft Excel plugin can be used.
October 2010 the Guggenheim museum presented YouTube Play, a selection of 25 videos out of 23,000 entries. The videos are of very different nature but all very creative. Please sit back and enjoy.