Context
For this project I did two different visualisations. One using XML data from the UN about global alcohol consumption and another based on CSV data from Statistics Denmark www.statistikbanken.dk) about fatal bicycle accidents in Denmark.
Idea
Alcohol Consumption:
The idea was to create a visualisation based on a traditional bar-graph but make it easy to filter, highlight and sort data. The dataset contains data on alcohol consumption per capita in all of the world’s countries.
Bicycle Accidents:
The idea with this visualisation is to make an explorable interface that does not look like a statistical tool. I wanted to try to create a more human view on the statistical data, so I visualised every accident as an individual bicycle that, when you hover over it, you get information on the person that was involved in the accident.
Design Process
My process was a bit untraditional in the sense that my primary goals with these projects were to increase my ActionScript 3 programming skills and handling complex datasets in Flash. Usually I would have chosen a more user centred design process, with a lot more focus on the user experience.
What did you learn by seeing the data in a visual way?
First of all, I learned a lot about ActionScript 3 programming and how data can be visualised. Shawn from Stamen was a very inspiring instructor, and I would definitely like to do more projects within data visualisation now that I have the basic tools to work with.