Data Visualisation Project

Continuing on from our first day's visualisation, we had to gather data ourselves from an everyday activity and create a wordless visualisation that was non-representational of the subject matter.

As our studio is located just off the busiest street of Auckland city there were certain that there would be some trends in subject matter such as pedestrians and traffic; as we mulled over ideas in a local coffee shop we found the perfect data source for our assignment. The manager of Gloria Jean supplied us with a record of sales for the day which was broken into a variety of categories the basic of which was hot beverages, cold beverages and food.

The categories provided us with the numbers:

Hot Beverages 129 which rounded to: 58%
Cold Beverages 24 12%
Food 65 30%

We came up with a model that was simple and appealed to multiple senses, we wanted the viewer to be able to link the data with its origin without being too predictable in our display.

Our solution was a 3D model made from cardboard and coffee. We used simple circles (2D from the aerial view) or cylinders (3D) with the circle size, cylinder height and shade/ strength of coffee demonstrating the ratios in which the data was distributed.

Tufte's principles provided food for thought but I don't think I fully understood how to apply them most effectively. I liked our model as I felt it was representative of both the data and the relationship between between the values. The smell coming from our project at the time of presentation was an effective extra and really made me think of all the different media available that are effective but not typically used. I liked the simplicity of our design from the shapes through to the materials although it only worked because there were small distinctive categories within the collected data but never the less I felt it was easily understood which was our main objective.