2010 / 365 numbers that count

365 numbers that count

Every day of the year, everywhere, numbers talk to us. Figures or percentages, numbers show every aspect of our world: from the money in your pocket to the beating of your heart. The visual representation of data is fundamental in order to convey and spread information. Numbers are often shown as diagrams, tables and graphs that, through synthesis and hierarchies, should allow us to immediately understand the nature and size of problems, as well as how to resolve them and the quality and quantity of reality.
Data should be cautiously organise through information design; the nature of numbers is only apparently objective and incontrovertible, it’s the way we interpret them – or let them be interpreted – that can lead to different results. How numbers are expressed can be used to hide our wrong decisions or evade uncomfortable facts. Our society is becoming more and more complex: even the apparent simplicity of numbers and their language has become a difficult subject to examine, and should be analysed in depth.

We have therefore chosen themes taken from “Le Monde Diplomatique” which involve us as individuals and as humans: each theme is coupled with an image, and by doing this we hope to make people reflect.

"The designers sit hunched in the drawing offices: One wrong figure, and the enemy’s cities will remain undestroyed"
Bertold Brecht