What’s a Ticker Garden?

Published July 24th, 2006 in Misc., Internet Tags: cognition, design, harvard school of design, ticker garden, visual presentation.

Hao-Hsiu Chiu, a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has come up with a gorgeous and innovative way to present stock market data:

The color (green or red) & direction (upward or downward) of a blossom indicates a particular stock’s status of ascent or descent in price compared to its previous trading day. A flying bee will show up around a flower if there is recent news of that particular stock.

As our world grows more complex and we are besieged by an avalanche of information, we will naturally take refuge in methods which simplify all that complexity.

The human mind is capable of remarkable feats. Yet we need to work with its strengths and minimize its weaknesses. This where good design comes in. For example, it is not very easy for you to instantly memorize the following 6 letters: oyhret but if we arrange them to have meaning for you: theory… then memorizing them is a cinch.

Another example would be using a visualization cue such as the height of a stalk to represent the price of a stock, instead of an abstract variable such as a number. As naturally visual beings, we can instantly understand and compare height faster than we can process an abstract number.

Ticker Garden reminds me of another neat visual presentation tool for stock market data: the NY Times’ sector grid. Since I’m more interested in tracking sectors and their relative strength, rather than invidividual stocks in a portfolio, I’m curious how Hao-Hsiu Chiu might do that.

Download Ticker Garden and try it out. Then give its creator some feedback

Source: Daily Dose of Optimism via Tale of the Tape.