The Art of Insight

Chapter 10The Good Fighter

with Amanda Makulec

Figure 10.1: “The Mental Mindgames of Measuring Milk”

Medium / https://medium.com/nightingale/the-mental-mindgames-of-measuring-milk-3401113788d6 / last accessed June 19, 2023.

Design […] does not matter because it is pleasing to the eye, even though we applaud its beauty and its purpose and its presence in our lives. Design matters because of the why, not the what; the sentiment, not the acquisition. Design matters because people matter.

—Jessica Helfand

In March of 2020, Amanda Makulec, a bridge‐builder like Allen Hillery (Chapter 9) an educator, and executive director of the Data Visualization Society, released the results of a home experiment. As someone with reasonable experience feeding babies, I found it endearing. Amanda was curious about the true capacity of a variety of baby feeding bottles, pump bottles, and breastmilk storage bags (Figure 10.1.)

While feeding her first baby, Amanda had perceived that volume measurements of bottles and bags vary widely, particularly when volumes are small; the same 100 milliliters of milk in one bottle may magically become nearly 120 in a bag. Amanda tested and confirmed her hunch with a non‐representative sample of 25 bottles and bags, the latter having the highest variance by far. She explained that she had a good reason to be curious: “1.5 oz is very different from 2 oz when ...