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Like most people, I spend very little time thinking about HIV and AIDS. The impact of the disease on my personal life is minimal. There is now no one close to me who has it or talks about it. I have been told stories like the ones by an ER doctor friend who was on the front lines when the ‘mystery disease’ surfaced in New York in the 80′s. But other than a few stories and documentaries, my thoughts of the disease are few and far between.

Subsequently, when I read about AIDS and encounter words like resistance, prevention and epidemic, I think of them in the abstract. They have meaning but no real presence. However, since the December 1st World AIDS Day campaign caught my attention, I thought I’d examine the scope of one of those words: epidemic. And,  since I have been exploring information design, which is concerned with using design to make the complex easier to understand, I put the two together. Is there a way information design can help me better understand the scope of the AIDS epidemic?

I often visit popular sites on the subject such as Flowing Data, Gapminder and that of recognized expert, Edward Tufte. Somewhere among these, I came across a site with a beautiful portfolio of maps and graphs and spent a few minutes reading. Visualmotive is the ‘personal playground’ of Chris Mueller, programmer and artist. It is a collection of his (her?) projects and articles about cutting-edge technology, information visualization, and maps.

Images in the Visualmotive portfolio are quite beautiful. One of them, a thematic map of the Eastern United States,  was constructed with something called the UUorld Visualization Engine. UUorld (pronounced ‘world’ – ha, ‘a double U’) promised to ‘explain the world with maps’. There is a free version for the Mac, PC or Linux. It has access to organized data sets, exports to standard formats including Google Earth and can produce maps in 2D and 3D, even video. So I downloaded and installed it. It was a welcome surprise to find organized AIDS data from the 2007 CIA World factbook. Since the UUorld application is relatively intuitive, I was able to produce maps of the AIDS adult prevalence rate anywhere in the world in just a few minutes. Here is the map for Africa.

Very easy to produce, but now comes the hard part. Correlating this data with other data to make this useful. What I know from this map is enough to ask questions. 37% of adults in Botswana have HIV. But how is this possible since Botswana is touted as having one of the highest average economic growth rates in the world, about 9% per year from 1966 to 1999? Or, that the HIV adult prevalence rate of Egypt is lower than that of the U.S. Who knew? Or, that there is no data for Western Sahara. Doesn’t the CIA operate there? Or, that the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, mistakenly labeled here as Zaire, has a lower adult HIV rate than neighboring and peaceful Tanzania.

Now I have a new tool to envision AIDS as an epidemic. The next step is to find out what’s being done to combat it.

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AIDS, epidemic, information design