Forget the elusive white iPhone. Yi Cui, an engineering professor at Stanford University, imagines a transparent iPhone.
Together with graduate student Yuan Yang, first author on a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cui developed a transparent battery — potentially the final component needed to make fully transparent electronics. “If the batteries were not transparent,” Cui said in an interview, “then the device wouldn’t be transparent.”
Because the key components of batteries cannot be replaced or made transparent, Cui used a trick of the eye to develop the battery. He created a mesh-like framework for the battery electrodes. ”Each line in the grid is smaller than 50 microns,” he said. “When a human being looks at an object that’s smaller than 50 microns, it’s not visible. That’s how we make it transparent.”
The team found a transparent alternative to copper and aluminum in polydimethylsiloxane, a compound used in contact lenses, according to a news release. They deposited metals onto the rubbery material to make it conductive and poured it into molds to build the transparent grids. Yang created a transparent substance that served as both an electrolyte and a separator and inserted it between the electrodes, creating a functional battery. “It’s completely new,” Cui said.
Now, the researchers are working to increase the capacity of the transparent battery, which is only about half as powerful as its lithium-ion counterparts. And they’re hoping others take notice. “We’d like industry to pick up our concept,” Cui said, “and do the commercialization of these transparent batteries.”
From there, the possibilities are varied. ”Imagine you have a watch that you want to look transparent,” Cui said. “You can have your iPhone be transparent. You can have your laptop be transparent.”
Effective data visualization is about more than designing an eye-catching graphic. It’s about telling a clear and accurate story that draws readers in via powerful choices of shapes and colors. These are some of the observations you’ll find in the insightful new book Visualize This: The Flowing Data Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics (Wiley) by Nathan Yau, the blogger behind the popular site Flowing Data. On his blog, Yau analyzes a wide variety of graphs and charts from around the world–and often sparks online discussions and debates among designers.
For a brief introduction to his book’s key points, check out this video from Yau’s publisher, below. And keep reading for my short review of Visualize This, as well as my Q & A with Yau, in which he offers some fresh tips you won’t find in the book.
Is Visualize This worth reading? Yes. It’s a clearly written, elegantly designed resource, presumably intended for designers and students who want to create effective data visualizations. But it’s also a timely and helpful guide for anyone, from corporate executives to scientists, journalists to consumers, who want to understand how and why good data visualizations work.
Yau offers smart, concise observations written in conversational language about not only gathering and illustrating information, but also understanding the information. In other words, he argues that designers need to be analysts and storytellers and not just the creators of visuals. He poetically characterizes data visualizations as “somewhere in between journalism and art.” It’s a particularly engaging description, made more so by his point that the best examples are, fundamentally, entertaining narratives. They are told via graphics rather than paragraphs, but with the goal of any good story, no matter what the medium: to trigger an emotional reaction.
I asked Yau about the current state of data visualization and the secrets to successful graphs and charts. Here’s our exchange:
Why is data visualization so important today–to companies, to students, to the average person eager to understand complex information?
Data is everywhere nowadays, and there’s plenty more of it come. Companies store information about their customers and what users are doing online, so as the company, you want to know how people are interacting (or not) with your product or service and figure out how you can improve. As an individual, you should be aware of the data that’s being recorded about you. On the flip side you can use this data to your advantage to learn more about yourself, your surroundings, and what’s going on in the world. Data visualization is a great way for people to try to understand what this data is saying, and a lot of companies are hiring people who have visualization skills.
If you could name only one essential tip for designers seeking to creating a great data visualization, what would that one tip be?
It’s common for designers to jump right into creating a graphic and spend just a little bit of time looking at the data. Take a little time to understand the data in front of you, and your graphics will be much more useful.
What is your favorite data visualization (at this moment) and why?
This data isn’t directly available on Flickr, but it’s a nice example of how a little bit of analysis and better understanding of the data can make your graphics that much better. More recently, Fischermapped Flickr photos and tweets together, so you can see where people say something more often than they see something. Again, the idea is simple, but the maps are informative and beautiful.
Is “simple” the best approach to data-visualization design?
Some people think that if you don’t understand a data graphic right away, that it’s no good. Some complex datasets require complex visualizations. In general though, simpler is usually the best way to go in the sense that you should make it as easy as possible for a reader to understand what’s going on. You’re the storyteller, so it’s your job to tell them what’s interesting.
The folks at the Project for Public Spaces have created this handy guide to figuring out if your city has a future or it’s destined to turn into the U.S. version of a favela as our national economic nightmare grinds on.
Based solely on the cities with which I’ve had first-hand experience, I’d say that San Francisco, New York City, Seattle and Portland all qualify as cities that are “going places.” (Technically I’ve never lived in Portland, but, c’mon.)
Meanwhile, according to the chart from PPS (click on it for a larger version), Atlanta is easily the most massively dysfunctional metropolis ever to be un-designed by a conspiracy of developers and compliant local government. From comedian David Cross (”David Cross Doesn’t Like Atlanta” - NSFW) to peak oil theorist James Howard Kunstler (”The Horror of Downtown Atlanta“), everyone who has ever been forced to live in or visit Atlanta knows that it is a city as ill-equipped for walkability and sustainable transit as any in the U.S., with the possible exceptions of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and pretty much every other city in Texas.
Many cities are teetering right on the edge of acceptability, by PPS’s measures. Austin, Texas may sound cool in theory, but in the past 20 or so years it has become a suppurating pustule of sprawl and the bane of commuters throughout its metro area. Similarly, university town Gainesville, Florida has a marvelously walkable historic core surrounded by a not-so-tasty shell of tract homes, McMansions and cul-de-sacs.
Likewise, Gainesville was working feverishly on a network of interconnected bike paths throughout my brief stay there, and had managed to bring foot traffic back to downtown by cultivating a truly excellent farmer’s market and concert series.
Ultimately, though, all these efforts are piddling when compared to what our resource and finance-starved future is going to require: shorter commutes, more walkability, and a relocalization of just about all the essentials of everyday life. Everything, in other words, that was present in Brooklyn about the time that the Brooklyn Bridge went up. And despite that city’s incorporation into New York City as a borough, it retains, to this day, the local character that made it such a high-functioning metropolis a century ago. I may be be biased, but when I think of cities that work, Brooklyn will always be at the top of my list.
My experience is limited, however, so tell me, do you think the place you live is “Going Places” or “Going Nowhere”?
Forget the elusive white iPhone. Yi Cui, an engineering professor at Stanford University, imagines a transparent iPhone.
