This was my first taste of the power of imaging software to visualize data and that power no doubt inspired me to check out computation as an augmentation or entity in art and design.  This is a brief clip of Hans Rosling from TED 2006.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeXJnOE-1gw]

It’s difficult to critique what Rosling does here but if I were to, I would say that where this falls short is that it begins to tap into the power of computation and yet remains in the format of static graphic design visualizations.  It’s like Tufte in motion.  The power of computation in visualization is, at least, to present information in a more exciting dimensions than x and y.