Author
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
The designer who made global data readable, then replaced the statistics with photographs of real homes at every income level.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Anna Rosling Rönnlund is a Swedish designer and a co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation, which she established in Stockholm in 2005 with her husband Ola Rosling and her father-in-law, the physician and statistician Hans Rosling. Gapminder's purpose was to fight a specific kind of ignorance: the outdated picture of the world that most people carry around, even well-educated ones.
With Ola, she developed Trendalyzer, the software behind Gapminder's animated bubble charts, which show countries moving across decades of income and health data. Hans Rosling used these charts in lectures that reached audiences around the world. Google acquired Trendalyzer in 2007. Her focus was on design and usability, so that anyone, not only specialists, could look at the data and understand it.
She later created Dollar Street, a Gapminder project that photographs families and their homes around the world and sorts them by income rather than by country. Viewers can compare how people at the same income level cook, sleep, wash and store their belongings, whether they live in Africa, Asia, Europe or the Americas.
She co-wrote «Factfulness» (2018) with Hans and Ola Rosling. Hans died in 2017, before the book was published. The book sets out ten instincts that distort how we see the world and offers practical habits for correcting them. Dollar Street's photographs and the four-income-level way of describing the world are central to its argument.
The signature
Her method is to show the evidence before explaining it. Where a table of numbers asks for trust, a photograph of a family's kitchen, toothbrush or bed asks only to be looked at. Her contribution to the Gapminder approach is the conviction that a fact nobody can read has little value, so the form of the data matters as much as the data.
The central move in her work is to sort the world by income instead of by nationality, religion or culture. Lined up this way, homes in very different countries often look alike, and homes in the same country can look worlds apart. Many differences we attribute to culture turn out to be differences in income. That shift, from 'us and them' to 'levels people move through', is the core of the four-level thinking at the centre of «Factfulness».