Reimagining Mobility in the Bay Area
Background
This project was a final group project for Seeing is Believing: The Power of Persuasive Data Stories, a course I took in the fall of my junior year. For this project, my team and I wanted to tackle a project that examined a topic at the intersection of social justice and mapping, and we decided to examine an issue close to home: the Bay Area transit system. The issue of access to public transportation is something that plagues the United States, and so understanding the failures of a place like the Bay Area that has a decently extensive transport system is an important first step in understanding the issues. For this project, we compiled data from the U.S. Census Bureau, local transport organizations, and the transit companies to understand differential access to transport and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ridership in the area.
For this project, we had two deliverables, both of which are shown above: one, a slide deck accompanied by a presentation that we presented in the last week of classes, and an infographic that condensed the graphs in our presentation onto a printed sheet of paper that we could hand out to our classmates.
Reflection
I'm very proud of this piece, as my contribution was in analyzing the Census data as well as visualizing the storyline that my group and I put together. In this project, I learned a lot about how stories can be powerful tools of communicating science; placing a person a viewer can empathize with invokes an emotional response towards the story that you want to tell, whether it's outrage at an injustice or at the joy of solving a difficult problem.
We decided to go with a pink and red color scheme, sampled from the California state flag, and utilized a combination of different modes of presenting data. The entire presentation was completed on Canva, which had recently put out new tools for data visualization, and gave me and my groupmates a chance to learn how we could harness these new methods. This was also a great way of learning to cut down on unnecessary words and pictures that, per what we learned in class, increase the visual load and distract a viewer from your primary point.
More than anything, this project—a data story—was a great help in formalizing and understanding a lot of the principles of design that I had started to understand but not have words for, and sharing how to apply this. Part of this class included a presentation in which we had to teach our classmates how to produce a simple piece of data visualization, and I think that this project could be a great way to adapt that concept into a full lesson on how to use Canva's built-in tools to create a modern, effective data story. However, since Canva has added new tools into their product, I would love to revisit this presentation to see how I can expand the presentation even further, using animations and transitions that are markedly missing from this presentation to connect information across slides.