7 Best Data-Driven TED Talks to Jumpstart Your Creativity

Data visualizations do a fantastic job of helping us understand our world, and people are finding inspiring news ways to visualize data every day. We’ve selected seven awesome data-driven TED Talks to help spark your creativity!

1) David McCandless: The Beauty of Data Visualization

Data journalist David McCandless turns complex data sets into beautiful, simple visualizations that uncover previously unseen connections and patterns. His answer to information overload? Good design.

2) Aaron Koblin: Visualizing Ourselves … with Crowd-Sourced Data

Aaron Koblin is an artist specializing in data and digital technologies. He believes data can make us more human. He is famous for his project ‘Flight Patterns’ which visualizes every airline flight over North America in a 24-hour period.

3) Nathalie Miebach: Art Made of Storms

Artist Nathalie Miebach takes weather data from massive storms and turns it into elaborate visualized sculptures made of wicker and colored beads. These sculptures, accurately based on weather temperatures, wind speeds, and water patterns, then become musical scores for a string quartet to play. She uses art and music to make data both tactile and audible.

4) Jamie Heywood: The Big Idea my Brother Inspired

When Jamie Heywood’s brother was diagnosed with ALS, he devoted his life to fighting the disease. They created a website, Patients Like Me, where people can share and track data from their illnesses, charting their health over time. The website brings comfort and a sense of community, improves patient outcomes, and enables further research.

5) Chris Jordan: Turning Powerful Stats into Art

Artist Chris Jordan’s work is about the behaviors we all engage in unconsciously, on a collective level. He makes large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mind-blowing data about our daily lives.

6) Anne Milgram: Why Smart Statistics are the Key to Fighting Crime

In 2007, Anne Milgram became the attorney general of New Jersey. She quickly realized her team didn’t have answers to the most basic questions about who they were putting in jail. She knew she needed to push for data-driven policing in the U.S. criminal justice system.

7) Hans Rosling: Making Sense of Too Much Data

Global health expert and data visionary Hans Rosling knows how to make data sing. His big personality brings global trends in health and economics to life. Watch Rosling de-bunk myths about the so-called ‘developing world.’

We hope you found these data-driven talks as eye-opening and interesting as we did. Did we leave out your favorite data TED Talk? Or, do you have any fun tips for increasing data creativity? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!