Week Four: Effective Data + Design

After reading Data + Design, I immediately remembered an example of a particularly effective combination of data & design I had seen several months ago, an interactive map of major South Asian migration flows. What particularly makes this infographic effective is it’s place within the context of the entire website. Striking-Women, “an educational site about migration, women and work, workers’ rights, and the story of South Asian women workers during the Grunwick and Gate Gourmet industrial disputes,” seeks to highlight a facet of history that is not well known or often discussed in mainstream circles (Striking-Women). The homepage of the site highlights four distinct issues: migration, women and work, rights and responsibilities, and strikes. Each section includes an introduction, relevant historical background, and present-day issues. The migration section is the only one with an infographic. This infographic allows the user to explore various migration flows by allowing users to click on a specific migration flow to learn more about it. For example, by clicking the solid blue arrow that leads from South Asia to Canada, a webpage replaces the map and details the history of “Post 1947 migration to US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.” I found the map not only educational, but visually striking as well. I could see why “Maria Popova…said that data visualization is ‘at the intersection of art and algorithm’” (Data + Design). Laid out like a physical folded map and highlighting several specific countries, the different colored arrows illustrate movement otherwise invisible or ignored. In many ways, this map harkens back to the “native essence” of data visualization—especially answering questions of “‘Where am I?’ [and] ‘How do I get there?’” This map and it’s included informational pages helps to illuminate the reasons why one finds large numbers of South Asians in the UK and the Gulf States, among other countries.

Finishing Data + Design helped me understand the sheer amount of work that must have gone into the map of South Asian migration flows, as well as the well-thought-out nature of it’s design. The reasons the site creators chose specific colors, fonts, and arrows became clearer to me after completing the design section of the book, as I never would have thought serif would be more distracting to readers than san serif! I also was able to note the slightly 3D nature of the map after reading about the dangers of using 3D. However, in this cause 3D seems to help solidify the nature of the map as a map creating the appearance of folds. I am now excited make my own data visualization!