Jina Lee, Claire Yoon, Ray Pai | Spring 2021 | Data Visualization

How might we explain the misconceptions about design challenges through data based on the type of industry they are in?

In it together is a reflective experience in which visitors are able to see the challenges that designers in their domains are facing. Through the AIGA Census data, 9,429 designers participated in informing what is currently going on in the design field during 2019. The interactions encourage our visitors to share their own concerns in their work and allows for a collaborative "posting board" for designers to empathize with ot, share resources, and learn that the problems they face are shared by their peers: we, designers, are in it together.

Getting Started

Initially, all teams were given the AIGA census data and also the 2020 Design System survey to synthesize a concept that we wanted to target. The two data sets touched up on different aspects of designers now. Some of the sets would have qualitative while others would us personalized messages to answer the questions. The project started off with us jumping straight into exploring the data. Several tools were tried in order to analyze the data consisting of:

We found that Tableau was the most intuitive and efficient in helping us find trends in the data, and we highly encourage future designers to try Tableau when they start their data analysis. Due to the large amounts of data, initially, it was difficult for us to scope through and find correlations. However, after we scoped down and decided on a certain narrative about what we wanted from the data, we were able to narrow down on specific sets and move forward.

A key takeaway from this experience is that data can be used to storytelling however you would like by being able to strategically choose what to show and tell. This mindset was something that we had not considered during the start of the project as we kept trying to incorporate all the varying types of data. Now that we are aware of these tips, it is much easier for us to help narrative a story through data!

Here are our first drafts of data!

Here are our first drafts of data!

Here are our first drafts of data!

Here are our first drafts of data!

Here are our second drafts of data!

Here are our second drafts of data!

Here are our second drafts of data!

Here are our second drafts of data!

Brainstorming

Before getting to a more solid concept, we looked at potential factors about a designer's work and process to synthesize. In this phase, there was a meta analysis by looking at key words and themes from the data to help us start to piece things together.