Nathan who runs a brilliant blog called, FlowingData, posted a large number of visualizations focused on energy conservation today. We see charts all the time in newspapers and magazines as well as a number of interactive graphs that various media companies and organizations produce in order to have content that complements their body of text. To some degree — I guess we can consider this as value-added content.

I’ve seen many many visualizations, often very beautiful and NEC’s ecotonoha is no exception. It is very much a marketing site but nevertheless, this site allows people to interact with their flash-based website primarily by posting messages one a tree, and with every message — the branches grow. According to NEC — ecotonoha in 2007 had 117,101 messages posted. For every 100, a tree was planted.

Does this bring around change?

We continue to focus on replanting trees but do we as common folk, examine how we use and consume them? My point is that while visualizations bring our attention and focus to a level where we can easily grasp the impact and consequences of our actions — are we as individuals really moved by what can be considered as visual representations of statistics to care enough or do we simply move on to the next piece of information?

I think that visualizations help ease the understanding of a particular issue, just as graphs can aid in summarizing statistics but we ultimately need to address the source of the problem rather than simply allowing ourselves to feel a tad better by using interactive marketing campaigns designed by companies to plant a tree.

Don’t get me wrong — I love the idea and I love visualizations — they help us achieve what may seem far fetched but I feel that they don’t focus on the thing that matters — and that’s changing the way we live.  Of course … we’re free to do what we want … it’s a choice right?  Or is it…?

Make sure you check out the rest of Nathan’s list of (eco)visualizations and see what you can achieve for our home.