Exploring Isotype Charts: “Our Private Lives”
By: Jason Forrest
Tags: Design, Dvhistory, Icons, Data Visualization, Information Design

Otto Neurath was an educator, so he understood how vital education was essential to the character of its culture. “The Young Population ages 13–20” is a visual index of children in school and in the workforce. Each page is identically designed but the difference between them is stark.

Children in Britain go to work far earlier than American children. It’s easy to understand the seated blue icons represent those in school, grey as “others” (the text suggests they are in college, a rarity at the time) while the red icons march off to work. The chart shows how few British children continue formal education after 15 and the text at the bottom points out “Less than 10% continue education after 17.”

While I have been writing primarily on the design of the charts, of equal importance is the design of the icons themselves, and this chart presents three icons that are very different in how they are read. Notice, how variations on the icon of a generic person have different meanings: seated, standing and moving. Our natural visual intelligence reads so much into each: the seated, stable blue icon, the standing transitional grey, and the red, armless child walking away from the school. Designer and artist Gerd Arntz took great care in adding subtle details to each icon to communicate the nuance of a story without being too explicit. Each section is then aligned under additional icons representing ‘school’ on the left, and a box on the right for ‘occupation’ such as agriculture, manufacturing, and justice.

This Isotype chart acts as a followup story to the preceding chart by exploring the grey figures representing the “other”. In this chart, each blue figure represents 1% of a million citizens attending a University. Each mass of hollowed-out figures becomes a background population, arranged as a sort of unit comparison and silent majority fading into the background. The student icons are now active, marching off to study at the university, their color inherited from the previous chart as the blue for ‘at school.’

Like in other charts from this book series, this design creates an easy to compare story by summing and organizing the populations into rows of equal groups. Since the Neurath’s had already understood a general 1:3 ratio between the populations of the two countries (as discussed in “Population and Livestock”), they continue to use this design to show the relative difference in student populations, not the difference in the total quantity.

Lastly, the placement of the students and population icons conveys a very different meaning than our previous charts. By overlapping the students and group icons we read the chart as an integrated population. This meaningful detail reinforces the overall story as a cultural portrait and demonstrates how nuanced the relationship between the chart design and the overall message is.

The British employ far more private services than those in the US. By aligning the blue vs black under the explanatory icons, the point is clear. While the aggregation of commercial vs private is a bit all-encompassing, it’s an understandable division of labor, illustrated by the icons for white-collar (desk, coffee) and service industry (barber), vs maid and cook (vacuum, oven) on the right.

While the systematic nature of Isotype cleverly outlines data with an objective, Otto and Marie subtly position each chart to explain why the two cultures are similar or different. In illustrating the different educational expectations in the previous two charts, “Personal Services per 200 Population” suggests a reason for children leaving school to join the workforce is to become private servants. If we extend the story back to the chart “Sex Distribution in 1930”, we can assume many of these domestic servants are likely women due to the gender surplus. The associations and connections created across charts are essential to the educational concepts of the Isotype charts as a series.