Thinking outside the cube

To my colleagues in economics and political sciences at the Harvard Kennedy School, I am the guy who makes pretty pictures. Although trained as a physicist, I build and design beautiful maps that depict the internal architecture of complex systems in nature and society. These maps, called network visualizations, enable us to transform an amorphous mass of data into colourful and inhomogeneous structures of patterns and connections that are relatively easy for people to recognize and remember. Their complex structure appeals to our pattern-recognizing brains, in sharp contrast to the same data appearing in a spreadsheet or scatter plot.