I’m a complete nerd when it comes to data design. It holds such high importance in communicating real-time facts, that it’s hard to ignore the visual trends of the category. If you take a gander at Pinterest, you’ll see endless styles that have emerged, to decipher the numerical chaos. This past weekend, Benedict Carey of The New York Times devoted a significant analysis to the topic, in relation to perceptual learning:

And so it is in many fields, whether predicting climate, flagging potential terrorists or making economic forecasts. The information is all there, great expanding mountain ranges of it. What’s lacking is the tracker’s instinct for picking up a trail, the human gut feeling for where to start looking to find patterns and meaning.

As we become more attuned to mapping data and translating it for the masses, we’ll be more equipped to embrace and evolve into the future. Never before has the art of tracking patterns been this important.