The 2013-14 State of
the Future is a compelling global thematic report produced by the
Millennium Project based in Washington, D.C. Researchers from
around the world collaborate to collect and provide a diversity of opinions,
then distill and integrate those data to forecast the future. It’s a thought-provoking read into the
advancements and challenges of the humanity and what the future might hold for our
7.1 billion people living together in this interconnected world.
For such a special report, the graphs are quite rudimentary
(download the 2013-14 State of the Future report here). There’s such a wealth of
information in this 243-page report that can yield many different
visualizations. I think this report can
benefit tremendously from a team of data visualization experts who can produce
beautiful and meaningful graphs befitting this fascinating report. For my part, I’ve visualized the different
indicators that together compose the State of the Future Index (page 5).
The data for this viz has both breadth (25 indicators) and
depth (215 countries and from 1972-2013), however, the data is not uniform
because it is not available for all the years and for all countries. So
there’s a small hiccup in the viz when changing from some indicators to
another.
For example, data for indicator ‘Life expectancy at birth
(years)’ ranges from 1972-2012. But for
indicator ‘Internet users (per 100 people)’, data is available only from
1990-2012. So when the indicator is
changed from ‘Life expectancy’ to ‘Internet users’, the world map might
disappear.
The solution is to scroll to the next available year and the
world map will reappear.
Since this report is for futurists, I’ve used the Forecast
function in the ‘World’ graph to predict the next 6-years trend for the
indicators using 95% prediction intervals.
In addition, the ‘World’ graph shows how the world population is doing
for each indicator. There're more winnings than losings so we are making progress over the years, albeit at the expense of the environment!
As an
optimist, I believe the future is bright and promising ahead.
