Global Birth Rates Interactive Data Viz

Programmed Design II incorporated the creation of an interactive data visualization based on real data using only colors and basic shapes. Main goal was to find interesting relationships in the data and display them in several connected visualizations in a comprehensible way.

This project uses open data supplied by the UN about fertility rates (children per 100 women in the corresponding year) of most countries, age distribution of mothers and their total populations. Additionally, as a map based view proved to be the most readable, I used Googles coordinate data to map each countries data to its geographic center. Each datapoint was available every 5 years from 1960 to 2015. This makes it possible to see how each country changed in the past 55 years.

The user can select countries on the world map to compare them. Selected countries are added to the selection on the left side of the screen and normalized to display their population as the same radius. This makes their individual birth rates easier to compare. From there on, users can view birth rates of all years of all selected countries or get a detailed view of birth rates in all six age groups. This is of course available in all years.

Because nothing like buttons and text were to be used, I implemented trackpad gestures via BetterTouchTool.

After I found a couple of interesting data sets. I started with scribbling different screens and ways to display the data to get an idea how my visulalizations could look like. After my topic was settled I created Illustrator concepts of the complete information structure over multiple iterations. Once that was done I used JS and GSAP to build a working prototype.

This is a student project created during winter semester 2016 of the Programmed Design II course by Hartmut Bonacker and Jens Döring.