We had no specific knowledge of the domain. We naively thought it was an open dataset that we could visually translate like we did with Glocal Climate Change or Mapping Diversity, but no. We spent months figuring out where the data was, reconstructing its paths and finding inconsistencies. The biggest? No one knows exactly how many people with disabilities there are in Italy. According to ISTAT (the Institute of National Statistics), Italians with disabilities represent about 5% of the population. In contrast, according to the Italian Social Security Institute — INPS — people with disabilities comprise 10% of the population. That is not a small discrepancy. We have discovered that national data on disability is collected through sample surveys, which is why the figure is approximate and wildly inaccurate. But that is only the tip of the iceberg.

There are further layers of indeterminacy in the Italian data on disability, starting with the very definition of the term Disability. The most recent definition by the United Nations (UN, 2006) refers to all people with “long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which, in interaction with various barriers, may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.” This is a more inclusive definition which broadens the scope of the phenomenon to include everyone. It is also a definition that makes it very difficult to collect data about all people with disabilities, be they permanent, temporary or invisible.

Sooner or later in our lives, we will experience a condition of disability in which we will need others and no longer be self-sufficient, due at best to ageing.

In addition to the contextual problems or limits, we found inconsistencies in the publication of the data: sometimes they were in an open format, sometimes in pdf reports, or in time series with gaps of a few years… not to mention the UX of the open data website: we calculated that it took an average of 80 clicks and the downloading of 20 tables to access a dataset! An absolute nightmare, until the onData association came to our rescue and supported us in collecting, systematising, and publishing the available data in open format. Thanks to their support, the data is finally just one click away.

That complex situation also gave rise to the name we gave the project. Borrowing from the UN definition, the disability data are in a condition of disability, too. Compared to other data types, it is unable to express itself entirely or to benefit from the same opportunities due to contextual impediments. Thus, Disabled Data.

The Design

Thanks to the contribution of onData, we were able to think about how to make the data available to a broader audience, and above all, to imagine how the project could foster a debate about the more accurate collection and systematisation of data by national bodies. The project shows how it can be done: it is not sustainable that laws about and funding for disability are decided on the basis of partial and inaccurate data! And so we imagined a project that, on the one hand, could report the main aspects of the phenomenon, taking into account the fragmentation of the data. And that on the other hand, would support journalists and content creators in the production of accurate, data-based information to populate the internet with transparent, informed, and less emotion-driven content.

Fragmented data = fragmented visualisations

To identify which aspects were most essential to develop, we organised collaborative workshops involving people from institutions, from ISTAT, people with disabilities, data experts and active citizens. After the first workshops, we submitted a questionnaire to the participants to determine what the most burning issues were. For example, “Who are people with disabilities? How do they experience sports? Leisure time? Work? …and school?” These are the main themes. With this knowledge, we imagined a system of visualisation that would highlight the different aspects; and so we created data widgets for each element of the mosaic.

Beyond visualisation

When designing a digital common good such as this, it is crucial to design beyond visualisation, i.e. to offer tools not only to learn about a phenomenon but also to support new forms of data reuse, as well as to enable the production of new content. For this reason, we made it possible to download the data for each widget, embed it within another platform, or download the chart as an image, to share on social networks or within presentations and reports.

Accessible charts

We considered accessibility from the point of view of charts as well. According to our preliminary research, very few projects support the translation of a graphic for visually-impaired users. Sarah Fossheim wrote interesting articles on this subject, and extensive research was led by Zong et al.

Building upon that, we designed an algorithm to automate descriptive texts based on the graph data. The picture below shows the chart on the left and the text that screen readers narrate to describe it.

We favoured a data overview, in the beginning, followed by a focus on every single item of data, so people can just listen to the first part, in case they are interested, and then skip the details to move on to the next chart.

Engage

The impact of the project was surprising and unexpected: more than 30 national media have covered the project. Published at the beginning of November, it has had an average daily access rate of between 50 and 100 people. On the occasion of the World Day of Persons with Disabilities, we also published a simple gamification (in Italian only, sorry) to involve readers more personally, asking them to guess the data regarding disability in Italy. It is a tool with a twofold purpose: on the one hand, it stimulates people to be curious about the dimensions of the phenomenon, while on the other hand, it allows Fight The Stroke to collect anonymous data on public perception, which can be helpful in ascertaining the public’s biases and trends concerning the topic.

What’s next

At this point we’ll take a moment to relax, after which we would love to imagine the European version of Disabled Data Europe. We imagine it as an archipelago of national platforms connected by a meta-analysis of the disability data situation in other European countries. What emerged from an initial analysis is not comforting: tracking and monitoring disability is not as easy as it appeared. But it’s time to start rethinking the way we look at disability data, problematising the lack of systemised data, and realising that disability concerns us all. Sooner or later in our lives, we will experience a condition of disability in which we will need others, and no longer be self-sufficient, due at best to ageing. We are all interdependent.

Sheldon.studio

We’re a socially-focused data design studio based in Italy✨. We create informational experiences by marrying data and design. The goal? To engage more people in complex issues through simple, interactive data storytelling design.

A transmedia storytelling project to share the complex experiences of resilient migrant women while steering clear from stereotypes and cliches.

Our collaboration with IRES Piemonte began in February 2020, right before the pandemic was in full swing. The objective? To design a communication strategy for ALFa, an acronym for Accoglliere Le Fragilità. It focuses on empowering and orienting young women recently liberated from trafficking rings. In collaboration with the Prefecture of Turin, ALFa teaches tools, including language skills and civic education, crucial to thriving and working in Italian and European society.

So how do you honestly share a journey like this - the feats, the challenges and the obstacles? From the get-go, we wanted to avoid stereotypes that the media often reiterate. No leaving one's country for a better life. No boats crossing the sea. Absolutely no tired clichés. To share these resilient womens’ stories, we needed a format at the intersection of the digital and the physical 🤔. We wanted to infiltrate the online and physical fabric of Turin, where these women live and study.

Challenge accepted. Let’s start! But where?

As Gottschall reminds us in Storytelling Animal:

“[…] writers are merely drawing, not painting. [They] give us expert line drawings with hints on filling them in. Our minds supply most of the information in the scene — most of the colour, shading, and texture.

(Gottschall, 2012)

We wanted to create an outline that readers and participants could colour in themselves, drawing from their own experiences. The first step was establishing the general outlines, the common ground between ‘us’, the host society, and the world these women experience. There’s no point in hiding it. We’re different — different cultural and social backgrounds, but at the heart of it, a mother is still a mother, as is the love for a child. There’s a desire to assert oneself in every person, ambitions, fears for the future… At the core, the basics are essentially identical in all people. This is how the idea came about to collect essential stories… for example: what are the dreams of the women in the ALFa project? What do they hope for? What do they fear? Perhaps we are not so different.

How?

So we imagined a multimedia story that would rely on everyday life, the thoughts and the emotions, to build a bridge that could shorten the distance between the migrant women and Italians. A narrative reminding us that we are still human beings… but how do you build trust to collect sincere stories and step in as a trusted custodian of these stories? 🤔

In our experience in past projects (People’s Republic of Bolzano, Europa Dreaming), you need truly intimate relationships, which is a steep challenge when you do not occupy the same cultural circles — especially under a time crunch. Not everyone values reflecting or sharing their thoughts about their future, their fears or their desires 🤷. So, we needed a device that could stimulate an open conversation and facilitate the collection of qualitative data in a meaningful way without having a lack of longstanding relationships get in the way.

[I’ll leave out the part of the story where a pandemic came along and two lockdowns that effectively stopped work for a year. I’ll rather fast-forward to what we did, otherwise this will get long :)]

Show! Don’t tell!

Together with photographer Claudia Corrent and journalist Clara Attene, we imagined strategies that could stimulate conversation in a manner that was minimally invasive, but also allowed us to touch on deeper topics and issues.

And so a participatory photography workshop was born. Participants were given instant cameras to indulge themselves in the world of photography with Claudia’s support. We would later reflect on why participants photographed, for example, a pair of shoes. This was a simple, yet discreet way to generate casual conversations that could overcome the embarrassment or the shyness associated with deep, direct conversations between strangers. The idea took the form of a two-day photography session in which the women were confronted with a new profession, that of the photographer, and a new language, that of photography. After that, the workshop was repeated twice more — with different groups of women.

We collected more than a hundred photos that served as a basis for discussion and conversation, reflection and euphoria, and moments of leisure and confrontation that allowed Clara and Claudia to gather as much information as possible in the least intrusive way possible. Yet, despite everything, it was by no means easy to collect the qualitative data we expected. More time to immerse ourselves in the context and daily life of the women would have helped.

Go transmedia!

Using the material we collected, we created a transmedia story. What does it mean? It implies giving birth to a distributed form of storytelling, something that’s developed both online and in a physical space, offering different entry points to different audiences. With the photos taken by Claudia and the women’s verbal input collected and collated by Clara, we produced an online platform.

Our transmedia story is a story based on scrolling. As visitors continue scrolling on the website, it activates the appearance of captions on the women’s photographs. These photographs are a way to crystallise a shared memory of a very particular moment, historically and socially, for Turin, Italy and Europe — and more importantly for these women.

Simultaneously, we organised an exhibition of these photographic outputs in collaboration with the Circolo del Design in Turin, a public organisation for the citizens of Turin aimed at strengthening the local culture of design. This is how Be The Boss was born. It’s an exhibition that allowed us to show local citizens who the women involved in the ALFa project are and what they think — women who live within the community, but often remain unknown. The exhibition contextualised the women as both the protagonists of the images and the authors of the images. The subject and the object of the exhibition at the same time.

To crystallise, and extend, the project’s impact, we printed 3,000 postcards distributed free of charge to visitors to the exhibition. On the front of each postcard was a photo of the exhibition; on the back was a reflection by the women of ALFa with a QR code directing readers to the online story. Thanks to the latter, it was possible to close the loop in our transmedia narration.

What’s next

The project only just ended, so we are still working out the next steps as we’re jotting down this journey here. However, this project reiterated how important it is to design in an interdisciplinary manner with different professionals, but also how crucial a transmedia approach is to extend a project scope and its reach.

Yes, many things could have been improved. Spending more time with the women of ALFa could have particularly aided us in reaching greater depth and reflection on the testimonies given. The pandemic did not help, unfortunately. We want to explore the strategy of participatory photography as a way to engage a community and collect qualitative data.

We have not planned an evaluation of the impact. Yet, in the coming weeks, we will involve the different partners in feedback sessions to improve the process, hoping to repeat and improve this journey for all involved. However, above all else, we’re hoping that all the participants in the project will somehow treasure the experience and that it will be useful in some form to facing their new life in Italy.

Sheldon.studio

We’re a socially-focused data design studio based in Italy✨. We create informational experiences by marrying data and design. The goal? To engage more people in complex issues through simple, interactive data storytelling design.

Although it seems destined to become a buzzword, and perhaps it already is one, the concept of diversity truly is fundamental to the well-being of our society. A diversity of genders, cultures, backgrounds, languages etc., allows for a more consistent, organic and enriching form of living and working, ensuring the inclusion of different voices and perspectives. It is a concept that needs to be put into practice in everyday life 🧘‍♀️, starting from the workplace to organisations and institutions, so that it reverberates throughout society.

The concept becomes undeniably important when it comes to the media and all those organisations that on a daily basis tell the story of our societies. Although different degrees of diversity have been reached in editorial offices, there is still a high level of gender imbalance. It seems almost a mantra, and yet we are so far away from the finish line 🏁. And this is not something that we are saying for the sake of it. The data collected by the Lithuanian Journalism Centre (LZC) shows it through a hand-picking effort of media pieces that began in 2021 and immediately saw men outnumber women.

The collaboration

This is how the collaboration between Sheldon.studio and the LZC team was born, looking at carefully and persistently hand-collected data 😓, gathered day after day, monitoring experts’ gender in web, TV, and radio. The mere idea collecting data by hand made our heads spin 🤪, but we adored the perseverance of Dzina, Ugne, Ieva and Kranthi. We could not leave them alone in their mission 🙌! When discussing the data collection and tagging methodology, Dzina explained to us why automation was out of the picture: “The reason is that it is not possible to identify who is the expert in the article if we do not read the actual text — journalist might not use the word “expert”, and the machines would not be able to tell if the person is just a commentator or the participant/creator of the event.”

So in the early stages of the project we are about to present below we supported them by systematising the data collection to reduce the chances of error at various collection stages — and then by working on a dissemination system that could somehow return the capillarity of the data without losing sight of the bigger picture. This paved the way to the most exciting challenge in terms of design: imagining visual forms able to render more than 2500 elements on a single screen. But before spoilering, let’s start from the beginning 🎬!

The project

As mentioned, the LZC study measured inclusivity in expert selection in the media. Between July and November 2021, it monitored 1674 national media pieces, including digital articles, TV panels, and radio pieces. The LZC project started with the premise that the media operates as a tool to understand our society’s power dynamics and what needs to change about them — at the end of the day, it raises awareness on just how unbalanced Lithuanian media representation is when it comes to gender. Our contribution consisted of designing a web platform that aims to engage a broader and inexperienced audience by presenting the data and emerging statistics in a comprehensive yet minimalistic, informative and engaging manner. Beyond the platform, however, the work of LZC extends to the writing of reports based on the analysis. The reports will be shared and presented to Lithuanian newsrooms, in an effort to send a powerful message on the observed gender discrepancy to the actors directly involved in the problem.

The web design

Being the platform’s goal to present the research results, we wanted to offer two levels of exploration: macro and micro. The first one refers to showing the emerging aggregate statistics (e.g. how many experts are women, how many are men), and the second refers to the possibility for the user to explore each data point’s information. We liked the idea that this level of exploration would promote transparency and interactivity.

As designers, we were faced with some priorities and challenges. A priority was to make the web platform mobile-first 📱, following the principle that what works on small screens will work on a big one 🖥 — but not necessarily vice-versa. This matched the challenge of wanting to present the data in its entirety. So how do you fit 1349 data pieces on a small screen, each of them individually explorable? We solved this by combining the visual identity we gave to the site to the visual shape we gave to the data.

The visual identity

Our site was to be in harmony with the visual identity of LZC, of course 🧘. We looked at their logo, and — a bit at random (at least, they weren’t aware of the connection when we asked them), found that it reminded us of traditional Lithuanian crafts.

We let their logo striking geometry inspire the shape we gave to each data point. Funnily enough, that helped us kill two birds with one stone: visual identity ✔️, and minimise the space required by each data point to fit on the screen ✔️. How? A bit of play with shapes, and we found one that played with space smartly 🧠.

Despite relying on rectangular screens, we realised we could also split shapes into triangles. Diagonals opened up our creative horizon, giving us new ways to give form to a data point’s outline. We also decided to encode several variables in the same DataViz: the colour for the type of medium and the filling for gender. It is not by chance that men look empty, while women look filled shapes. When we tried the opposite, it became clear that having the whole screen filled with blank forms would let them stand out more in respect to the few filled ones.

Each triangle stands for a single media appearance, and when hovered its individual information is retrieved. We then brainstormed how to add macro-level information, especially useful for comparing media types. To achieve this, we added a text-based footer that returns the aggregate info for each medium.

But then the DataViz looked a little bit complex for our taste, so we designed around it a data scrollytelling approach, limited just to the charts. Despite the controversies that populate the debate on scrollytelling, we used it as a tool to guide the reader through our data visualisations and thus empower visually illiterate readers.

Could I have an upside-down Espresso Martini, please?

The form of storytelling we picked follows what is known as the “reverse Martini glass”. We started by offering the big picture (the foot of the glass), an intro text with explanatory information about the study. We then described how to read the visualisations and showcased the aggregate statistics emerging from the union of the single data points. We embedded this information in the scrollytelling, in what we can consider the stem of the Martini glass.

At the end of the guided narration, we let the user explore the data in full, in what opens up as a myriad of self-dictated learning opportunities: the Pandora vase, or going back to the Martini glass analogy, the cocktail-holding part of the glass.Th

Generative design for our data viz

Beyond showing the gender gaps in experts selection at the individual level, as well as at the features (i.e. show, panel, article) level, we thought we could also explore the most debated topics in the Lithuanian media, and visualise the gender composition of experts within those. Again, spiky shapes were our friends! But, uniquely from the rest of the site, in this viz we took a generative approach and coded the data viz to make it a spontaneous aggregation of triangles, taking on a new agglomerative shape at every access. Like molecules, or cells, the size of the viz relates to the number of experts who spoke about a specific topic, while the filling relates to gender.

At the end of the piece, to promote a way forward and demonstrate that diversity fundamentally is one choice of expert away, we designed an internal search engine to support those interested in finding experts. Users can seek specific topics or names and get in touch with the experts directly. Lastly, we offer a series of calls to action, sparking different kinds of contributions: applying as an expert and becoming part of the LZC database, supporting the centre’s work, or helping with future monitoring. Indeed we don’t see the finish line for the project. We designed it for its sustainability in the long term.

Design for project sustainability

Talking about sustainability, we should not forget to mention that what we designed for LZC was a reproducible, infinitely reusable web platform. The site is built so that the data visualisations are dynamically generated by extracting information about each data point and the aggregate statistics from a Google Sheet. What does this mean in practice? That if you want to make changes to the data without having to maintain the website, too, you can. And that if you’re going to re-do this next year, you can duplicate the site, the spreadsheet and just input the new data. We learned a good lesson here: provide your client with a re-usable solution → they will be willing to invest more for the project, and your design team will be incredibly proud of having generated a sustainable solution ♻️🎉.

Wax on — wax off

The collaboration with the LZC allowed us to explore and refine a storytelling and DataViz model we are looking forward to re-using and improving. We are indeed working on new occasions to extend and scale the research. That‘s how design research works, babe. Designing, evaluating, redesigning, re-evaluating. If you want to go far, go together, and perhaps listen to Myagy-san in addition to ancient African proverbs.

Well, if you reach this point, you deserve the link to the project 😘. Say hello to “Diversity matters, especially in the media” .

Sheldon.studio
We’re a socially-focussed data design studio based in Italy✨. We create informational experiences by marrying data and design. The goal? To engage more people in complex issues through simple, interactive data storytelling design.

Disseminating diversity in Lithuanian Media was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ci siamo posti il problema 🤔, ci abbiamo provato 💪, non è detto che ci siamo riusciti 🤦‍♂️

Il 10 Gennaio il ministro della Salute Roberto Speranza illustra l’ultimo decreto anti-Covid: “[…] Abbiamo raggiunto una percentuale rilevante di vaccinati: l’89,41% degli italiani over 12 ha ricevuto prima dose, i non vaccinati sono poco più del 10%. Questo 10% occupa però due terzi dei posti letto in terapia intensiva […]”. Il ragionamento basato sui dati fila via liscio, fino a quando non viene mostrato un grafico 🤦‍♂️. “Progettato dall’Istituto Superiore di Sanità […] è più forte di tante altre parole, perché a volte le immagini sono particolarmente utili e significative”, afferma il Ministro. Qualche ora dopo, i social esplodono non per la notizia ma specialmente per gli errori che il grafico porta con sé.

Quali sono? Abbiamo provato a spiegare cosa si potrebbe migliorare nel grafico, non per pignoleria, ma perché crediamo, soprattutto in questi tempi, sia necessario comunicare i dati nella maniera più chiara e accessibile possibile, senza ovviamente banalizzare o semplificare eccessivamente.

Perché il grafico è problematico?

L’uso dei dati

Il Ministro, a voce, spiega molto bene il nesso tra le statistiche. C’è un 10% circa di popolazione che in realtà occupa i due terzi dei posti in terapia intensiva (TI). Per il bene della comunicazione, perché non limitarsi a visualizzare quanto espresso a voce 🤔? Non lo sapremo mai. 🤷‍♂️
Il grafico complica non di poco il concetto del Ministro. Vengono visualizzati dati differenti: si mostrano gli occupanti in TI secondo una base normalizzata ogni 100.000 abitanti, mentre una legenda laterale, integra un ulteriore informazione: il numero in valore assoluto delle varie categorie di persone vaccinate. Perché usare i dati in questo modo? Chi ne trae beneficio? Probabilmente nessuno.

L’uso di pittogrammi

Il grafico presenta l’incidenza dei ricoverati in TI ogni 100mila abitanti, in base alle dosi di vaccino (0, <4 mesi, >4 mesi, booster): ad ogni valore corrisponde un pittogramma di dimensioni proporzionali. L’omino rosso, quello relativo ai non vaccinati, spicca su tutti: sono 23 su 100.000, rispetto agli altri di scala inferiore intorno all’1 su 100.000. Il problema principale è che la sagoma dovrebbe esserre 23 volte più grande delle altre, mentre è sì e no 10 volte. Probabilmente è stata calcolata la superficie anzichè l’altezza 📐, una soluzione che crea ambiguità anziché dipanarla.

L’uso dei pittogrammi #2

Quando si parla di persone pensiamo sia importante adottare una comunicazione quanto più inclusiva possibile. Per questo riteniamo che il pittogramma maschile potrebbe essere serenamente sostituito da una forma astratta come una barra rettangolare 📊.

Come si può migliorare?

Convinti che le critiche vadano supportate da proposte, abbiamo provato a ripensare il grafico, avvalendoci dei dati elaborati dall’ISS. Ci scusiamo in anticipo qualora ci fossero imprecisioni 🙏, l’intento è quello di mostrare una serie di possibili migliorie che rendano giustizia (visiva) alle parole del Ministro.

Uso dei dati

La prima operazione è stata quella di lavorare su dati comuni, affinchè possano essere comparabili. Abbiamo ragionato in termini percentuali, esattamente come nell’affermazione del Ministro.

Il grafico

Abbiamo preferito evitare la rappresentazione stereotipata tipica dei pittogrammi, e ragionare su forme astratte con dei grafici a barre impilate.

La narrazione

Anziché condensare più concetti all’interno di un singolo grafico, abbiamo preferito visualizzarne separatamente le informazioni. Il primo grafico mostra le percentuali dei diversi vaccinati, il secondo i posti che occupano in TI.

La narrazione #2

I titoli sono importanti, a volte pure troppo. In questo caso abbiamo pensato di scrivere un titolo parlante che sicuramente aiuta a introdurre i grafici. Attraverso l’uso dei colori, abbiamo creato un richiamo visivo tra il titolo e i grafici.

Legenda

Attraverso la grafica, un uso oculato della tipografia e dei colori, è stato possibile rimuovere la legenda, che oltre a ingombrare, complica l’esperienza di lettura. Non sempre è possibile e non sempre è una buona idea, dipende dai contenuti. Su un grafico così semplice forse è possibile.

Design

Rispetto al grafico originale, i colori distinguono i grafici, e non i livelli vaccinali. Abbiamo dato rilievo ai non vaccinati, che sono il soggetto del messaggio del Ministro, tenendo in secondo piano le informazioni secondarie.

La nostra proposta 🎉

Sulla base di quanto esposto finora… voilà! Siamo consci che la nostra proposta presenti margini di miglioramento e che possa apparire estremamente minimale e probabilmente astratta. Per questo siamo aperti a tutte le critiche, proposte e suggerimenti che vogliate darci 🙏!

Less is more

Detto ciò, abbiamo pensato di produrre una seconda versione utile alle telecamere, dove è stato rimosso tutto quello che secondo noi non era necessario alla trasmissione del messaggio. Eccola qui sotto, in tutto il suo splendore ✨

Per concludere

Speriamo che questo breve articolo possa essere accolto come contributo migliorativo al dibattito in corso sulla visualizzazione dei dati 🙏. Per ogni feedback, suggerimento, critica o proposta, non esitate a scriverci a ✍️ write@sheldon.studio

–

Sheldon.studio
We’re a socially-focused data design studio based in Italy✨. We create informational experiences by marrying data and design. The goal? To engage more people in complex issues through simple, interactive data storytelling design.

Since the Sheldon.studio team is growing, we thought of creative ways to train our junior developers and designers. We prefer not exposing our new team members to tight deadlines without giving them solid grounding 😩🤕. So, we decided to let them design tools for internal use. At least, this was our initial idea: a nice-to-have without an absolute deadline. Something that isn’t highly complex, but still tricky enough to challenge young additions to the team. Long story short: we ended with the idea of designing our yearly report, which is not an internal tool at all 🤦‍♂️.

The idea was fantastic: a long-form data report that would use storytelling to share the data of a data-design studio 😵‍💫. Or rather, it could be a fantastic idea if we had enough data. Once we sat around a table, we realized how little data we had from the previous year’s work. Sheldon.studio was founded in early 2020. At the time, we were clueless about many things, let alone the fact that we’d need to collect data for a Sheldon.studio report.

Moreover, once we looked closer at the little data we had, we realized the data was broken. Let’s consider the email traffic for each project: we could merely recover a tiny part of a year’s worth of email traffic. And it was pretty likely some of the numbers were partially wrong. For example, we had no track record of 30 emails we had exchanged about the Matera project. No record of 30 emails in one single day on one single project! What a Nightmare 👹! Are the email servers broken? We never looked into it too much… Honestly, we didn’t want to. The mere idea of faking data was breaking our hearts 🥸.

A similar thing happened with the lines of code necessary to develop our projects. All the lines of code of the entire Glocal Climate Change project (which visualizes more than 100 000 municipalities’ climate change over 40 years) fit into two pages. Does this data make sense? Nope. The amount of written code doesn’t correlate at all to the coolness of the project and all of its complexity. Yes, it’s data, but it also adds no meaning. So why use it? 😏

At some point, the initial training/educational goal of building the report gave us the lightness we needed to feel free to make something hazardous, hilarious, self-deprecating and sarcastic. Why pretend to be serious if, from the get-go, the conditions are not permitting it? 🤡

In the process of working on the report day after day ⚡️ , we realized that we could, after all, communicate a serious truth about data. We included text to stress that data is just data. How we manipulate it, present it or hide it makes it meaningful, or in our case pointless and funny 🎉 .

To conclude, we also visualised the music we grooved to in 2020: from our vinyl collection to our Spotify data. Personally, I’m very proud of the scratchable radial bump chart we made. It turns every studio visitor into a chart DJ.

While writing this article, I’m reflecting on the fact that the report was born out of a celebration of the slippery nature of some data. I also realised that it’s probably the most honest, transparent, and truthful representation of Sheldon.studio. Maybe data isn’t such a liar?

Now that we’ve spoiled almost everything 😏, experience our masterpiece in its full glory: the 2020 Sheldon.studio report.

We love you, even if you think this article is utterly pointless 😘.

Sheldon.studio
We’re a socially-focussed data design studio based in Italy✨. We create informational experiences by marrying data and design. The goal? To engage more people in complex issues through simple, interactive data storytelling design.

Repeat after me: “the numbers don’t lie” is a lie was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2013, philosopher Timothy Morton coined the term hyperobject to name all those phenomena that condition our present, often in an unconscious way, not being immediately tangible or visible. We cannot touch hyperobjects, but we can feel their effects. Global warming is perhaps the best example, but also Covid-19, for instance.

In this context, design can be a helpful tool to connect citizens with all those global and seemingly distant phenomena that affect them to foster greater awareness and hopefully activation.

Yes, but how? We will explore possible ways in the workshop organized by the Master’s Degree in Communication of the IUAV of Venice. 18 students + the teachers Matteo Moretti and Irene Sgarro, from June 28 to July 2, 2021.

Although Morton’s hyperobjects are immaterial, intangible and non-local, the ones we will design will be visible, curious, funny and sometimes annoying. They will not be far away; on the contrary, they will be close, very close, able to attract, inform, raise awareness. In the space that arises between the designed hyperobjects and Morton’s hyperobjects, our workshop takes place.
A process that relies on interactive forms of data physicalization, which draw on information- product- data- exhibit and social- design to design local and situated objects that can connect anyone who passes by them with the global phenomena they are involved in.

Hyperobjects near and far was originally published in Iperoggetti vicini e lontani on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nel 2013 il filosofo Timothy Morton conia il termine iperoggetto per definire tutti quei fenomeni che condizionano il nostro presente, spesso in maniera inconscia, non essendo immediatamente tangibili o visibili. Non riusciamo a toccare gli iperoggetti, ma possiamo percepirne gli effetti. Il riscaldamento globale 🔥 è forse l’esempio più calzante, ma anche le eruzioni solari 🌞 e le tempeste magnetiche 🧲, l’inquinamento atmosferico ☁ e così via…

I can’t see it. I can’t touch it. But I know it exists, and I know I’m part of it. I should care about it.
(T. Morton)

In questo contesto, il design può essere uno strumento utile a connettere i cittadini con tutti quei fenomeni globali e apparentemente lontani che li riguardano, verso una maggiore consapevolezza 🧠 e attivazione 💪.

Si, ma come? Lo scopriremo solo vivendo 😏 il workshop Iperoggetti vicini e lontani. Un evento organizzato dalla Laurea Magistrale in Comunicazione dello IUAV di Venezia, che vedreà 18 studenti 👩‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻👩‍💻 progettare assieme ai docenti Matteo Moretti e Irene Sgarro, dal 28 Giugno al 2 Luglio 2021.

Nonostante gli iperoggetti di Morton siano imateriali, intangibili e non-locali, quelli che andremo a progettare saranno visibili, curiosi, divertenti e a volte molesti. Non saranno lontani, anzi saranno vicini anzi vicinissimi, capaci di attrarre, informare, rendere consapevoli e, si sa mai, attivare un pubblico ampio ed eterogeneo su questioni importanti e apparente distanti. Si viene così a creare uno spazio tra gli iperoggetti veneziani e gli iperoggetti di Morton, uno spazio all’interno del quale il nostro workshop si dimena, canta e balla 💃🕺🏻. Un processo che attinge all’information- product- data- exhibit e social- design per progettare oggetti locali e situati in grado di connettere chiunque gli passi vicino con i fenomeni globali che lo coinvolgono.

🚣 🌊 🚣 🌊🚣 🌊🚣 🌊🚣 🌊🚣 🌊🚣 🌊🚣 🌊🚣 🌊

The making of

Legno, chiodi, elastici, fluidi misteriosi, adesivi, palloncini e dati in realtà aumentata sono i protagonisti degli iperoggetti che durante i primi giorni della settimana hanno preso forma, per poi scorrazzare liberi per le calli di Venezia.

Eccoci!

Siamo qui, in rigoroso ordine alfabetico: Caterina Bernacchia, Daniela Bigon, Alessandro Bulegato, Giovanni Capra, Giacomo Dalpane, Gianmarco Gallina, Matthew Mahoney, Umberto Napoletano, Francesca Palma, Giulia Pasquali, Giorgia Pierobon, Francesca Pilon, Linda Raffaelli, Lorenzo Ravagnan, Mario Sibau, Sveva Stanghellini, Claudia Vagnoni, Ester Zanus.

I docenti

Matteo Moretti
Designer e docente (Unirsm, Unibz), lavora nell’intersezione tra information design, data visualization e social design, campo che esplora sia in ambito didattico che professionale con Sheldon.studio, il primo studio che si occupa di esperienze informative.

Irene Sgarro
Progettista grafica diplomata in Design per l’editoria all’ISIA di Urbino, si occupa prevalentemente di progettazione editoriale e di design e sviluppo di siti web. È collaboratrice alla didattica e borsista presso IUAV.

Si, ma i progetti dove sono?

Sono proprio qui, qui di seguito, all’interno di questa pubblicazione, probabilmente dopo l’😚.

Iperoggetti vicini e lontani was originally published in Iperoggetti vicini e lontani on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How I learned to stop visualising and to start looking forward

The design process behind the Glocal Climate Change project taught me the importance of designing for the people, to enable them to approach complexity and to raise their graphicacy.

What is the surgeon’s work? Saving lives or cutting/sewing bodies? Both. One answer refers to the what, the other answer to the how. In that vein, what is the work of the data designer? Developing charts or enabling people to better understand? You already know the answer 😏…

It may seem like semantics, but it is a matter of focus that broadens the scope of your practice. This outcome-oriented mindset is a different lens through which to examine your work. The desired outcome should always be kept in mind, especially when it’s time to design projects about hyperobjects. Coined by the philosopher Timothy Morton, the term is a neologism to refer to all those phenomena which are too complex to be fully grasped by humans:

“I can’t see it. I can’t touch it. But I know it exists, and I know I’m part of it. I should care about it.” — Timothy Morton, 2014

Among the hyperobjects, Morton identifies Global Warming — he refuses to call it Climate Change — as the most significant. Its global and multi-layered nature makes it feel incredibly hard to impact, especially as an individual.

Then Morton continues describing hyperobjects:

“On the one hand, we have all this incredible data about them. On the other hand, we can’t experience them directly. [..]. So we need philosophy and art to help guide us, while the way we think about things gets upgraded.” — Timothy Morton

It is true. We have plenty of climate data if you bear in mind that, for instance, the first data collection on CO2 production started in 1958 due to Charles Keeling’s work. Still, it is only in the last few years that the climate issue has been highly debated and discussed publicly, thanks also to the availability of climate open data. We are not artists, nor philosophers, but as data designers, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to metaphorically open the open data, making it accessible and understandable to a wider, non-practitioner audience, utilizing it as a resource for broader climate awareness.

Data enabling

I am drawn to dataviz that moves beyond mere visualization, which relies on storytelling and interaction design hybridization. I call those data-enabling viz. These viz produce experiences that are not limited to seeing data, but which aim to connect the audience to the phenomena, build new knowledge, and finally raise their graphicacy level, explaining what the viz is showing. In other words, data enabling helps audiences approach hyperobjects.

Over the last few years, there have been three climate dataviz that especially impressed me. The first was the 2006 epic Al Gore elevator chart designed for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, who remembers it?

Then, my list continues with the NYTimes project “How much hotter is your hometown,” followed by the Ed Hawkins stripe visualisation. I love these last two because readers can get personalized visual stories about their places. For instance, in the NYTimes project, “How much hotter is your hometown,” readers are asked to enter their own information to see the climate trends of their places, places they are connected to, such as their birthplace or the place their grew up, studied, or where they had fond memories. It is a clever user engagement strategy. First, it establishes an emotional connection between readers and their places, and then it builds a personalized narrative upon that connection. People, or at least me 😉, are more open to continuing to read once they realize you are talking about something they care about.

Glocal Climate Change

In my role as designer at Sheldon.studio, we had the chance to design a project on climate change, thanks to our partnership with the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet). They asked us to visualize Copernicus’s EU program UERRA dataset, which features 40 years of temperatures from all over the European territory. Our design goal was to raise awareness among EU citizens.

We were inspired by the techniques used in the projects above to tap into the nostalgia audiences have for their places, by revealing the impact of climate change in those places. Upon review, we realized that the original dataset was about air temperatures, without a direct link to the municipalities 🤦‍♂️. Then, EDJNet did incredible work to map land temperatures to the 100,000+ European municipalities, and they also published an interesting article about their methodology. Once we visualised the resulting dataset, we were impressed by its granularity; we had an incredible data storytelling weapon in our hands! An incredible climate portrait emerged from hundreds of thousands of dots. Traditional climate maps tend to flatten data, clustering it according to countries, regions, or provinces.

Relying on granularity instead, allowed us to identify some red hot spots, usually surrounded by yellow/orange ones. It was clear that each place’s climate results from many variables, such as the land use, the population amount and density, the altitude, the terrain, the proximity to water, and so on.

We spent hours exploring the dot-verse we created 🚀😍.
Apart from that data-porn moment 😎, we realised the map was impressive, especially highlighting specific situations that would risk being flattened in traditional average-based visualizations. At the same time, we worried that readers might get lost in the climate dot-verse, distracted by the aesthetic experience instead of looking for and caring about their places’ climate. To address this concern, we thought of connecting a further information layer, supplying the climate change behind every single dot. We designed an informative page that metaphorically tour guides them through the story as soon as they click on the chosen dot. The page, which relies on a mix of data-generated storytelling and scroll-based interactions, reveals how the climate of a determined municipality changed over the last 40 years. The narration connects the location with the global climate. First, it compares the selected municipality climate with others nearby, then with the province, and finally, with its region. To foster a deeper reader immersion, we also designed a Wikipedia-like approach. All the places in the narration cross link to their respective pages on the platform, with the idea to foster associative navigation across places.

Activate your readers

Once we finished designing the informative page, we conducted internal tests to evaluate its effectiveness. It worked, perhaps too well 😓. We experienced a shared feeling of discouragement after reading that the climate of the places we cared about was increasing. Unfortunately, there are no immediate and effective solutions to climate change other than activating better-informed debate and broader awareness. Reflecting on that realization, we thought of supporting readers’ digital activism, providing them with tools to enable climate conversations or raise awareness among their social bubbles. We built every page to close with an informative thumbnail, ready to be shared across social networks. We generated more than 100,000 pictures that contained the name of the place, followed by the amount the climate has changed in the last 40 years. Readers were invited to share them to raise awareness among their social networks.

The impact

Despite our ironic and funny campaign to promote the project, none of the international politicians, VIPs, and influencers we tagged in our Instagram posts answered our calls… 😅🙈

Luckily, the data-enabling project we designed worked better than our social campaign 😏. In fact, we started collecting posts from people or local activist groups, all over Europe, who were sharing their places’ climates on their profiles. This trend was also confirmed by our online analytics: there wasn’t one page that was more visited than others, but thousands of visits spread across as many thousands of pages, each with few visits, if any at all. This trend indicates the behavior we were trying to drive: every single municipality is a page, so thousands of visitors were searching for their individual places 🙌!

What’s next?

I hope to have conveyed the most important lessons we learnt during our Glocal Climate Change design process. Based on its effectiveness, we will prioritize developing similar strategies to “hook” the readers in the next projects or leave them some tools to support them in their digital debates and promote the project. Obviously, there are opportunities for improvement on future projects. We would extend the reach with more languages. We would also update the data yearly, to turn Glocal Climate Change into a real digital resource to support broader awareness and more informed debate.

Moreover, it would be great to add a further layer of information to visualize different data connected to each place, data representative of other factors which contribute to its climate situation. The population amount and density, the cementing, the altitude, the land use, or the geographical configuration are some of the several factors that determine climate change, and that we should care about, as citizens, political leaders, or simply humans, for our future. Tomorrow will be like today, but 0.001 degrees hotter, probably 😔.

Matteo Moretti is a designer and cofounder of Sheldon.studio

Data Enabling: the Glocal Climate Change Design Process was originally published in Nightingale on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Beyond Open-washing: Are Narratives the Future of Open Data Portals?

There is growing consensus that the mere release of open data is not enough to realize the full potential of openness. What’s next?

There is growing consensus in the open data community that the mere release of open data — that is data that can be freely accessed, remixed, and redistributed — is not enough to realize the full potential of openness. Successful open data initiatives don’t simply tick the ‘open’ box but produce data that actually gets used. Open data portals, in particular, are prone to the risk of becoming “data dumps”, where the number of published datasets counts more than their quality or utility.

This is why, when Sheldon.Studio was hired by the Matera | European Capital of Culture 2019 foundation to design their open-data portal, we felt we were in front of a unique challenge. How do we create an open data portal that empowers the audience, and how do we avoid an open data dump 🤪? One month into the project, here is what we learned in the process 😎.

Knowing the audience is the first step to an audience-centered data portal.

Last year was a big one for the city of Matera, a city in Southern Italy of 60K souls whose history dates back to the Palaeolithic, as it became European Capital of Culture 2019 and witnessed the arrival of more than half a million visitors. Not only tourists but also artists, cultural workers, and social operators swarmed through the city and actively participated in more than 2400 events, many of which spanned multiple days.

Can you imagine the amount of data visitors and citizens generated during the year? We can tell you about what we received: dozens and dozens of spreadsheets, some handcrafted, some software-generated; textual reports; photo galleries and video interviews. We could simply upload it online in some repo and be done with it. Yet, since the beginning of the collaboration, we embraced the idea of conceiving something beyond the usual. We wanted to give the data back to the people who helped produce it. This meant focusing on what the audience needed to understand.

Saul Wurman, who coined the concept of information architecture in the mid of the 70s, often said: “You only understand something relative to something you already understand.” This simple, yet timeless, statement represents an essential lens through which we design information experiences at Sheldon.studio. In practice, it means that we should design upon the past experiences of our audience in order to explain something novel. So, knowing our audience was the first building block of our design process.

Another key ingredient of our human-centered design approach is the preference for simple visualizations over flamboyant charts, especially when the fancier design would entail a compromise on clarity. Other than the complexity of the data visualizations, we instead leveraged colors and animations to keep our chart designs fresh and engaging, facilitating the audience in the comprehension of hidden data patterns.

From a design perspective, we rooted our visualizations around the central theme of showing the liveliness and the humanity that characterized the cultural programme of Matera. For this reason, we privileged rounded shapes and a profusion of dots swarming everywhere, a metaphor of humanity as seen from a bird’s eye view and we decided to present some visualization using the metaphor of a pack of many separate units/bubbles forming bigger clusters. We feel that this makes the numbers interesting and more intuitive to grasp also for audiences with lower data viz literacy.

In line with our endeavour to keep the data visualization accessible and easy to parse, we devised an innovative way to efficiently integrate legends, charts and text. Readers usually struggle as their eyes ping-pong back and forth between the chart and its legend to understand what’s what, so we tried to intertwine the legend in the descriptive text above it, highlighting keywords with the corresponding colours in the chart. The idea is to spark curiosity in the readers as they note that some words in the text are highlighted, or, the other way around, to prompt somebody to read the text while seeking for the legend.

Next? Plan for different data literacy levels.

The co-design sessions with our client, the Matera Foundation, surfaced the need to plan for multiple entry points and different levels of data literacy, to suit the needs of the different types of people that would visit the portal.

A first step in this direction was to include qualitative data alongside the numbers and statistics. We strongly believe that quantitative data is just one possible ingredient to the story, especially when we are discussing social issues, and moreover if it’s important to include a broader audience. For this reason, we combined traditional data visualizations with original texts, and we intertwined the data stories with photos and statements by the participants.

In its final version, the project unfolds across 8 thematic sections and 6 in-depth micro-stories. We opted for these two different content formats, sections, and stories, to offer two different ways of looking at the data. The thematic sections stand as metaphorical chapters that disclose the main narrative of what Matera 2019 has represented, providing a birds-eye view on the core values of its organization. The micro-stories, on the other hand, drill down on specific events or issues of particular importance. So, for instance, while the Cultural vibrancy introduces and visualizes the amount and diversity of the cultural program, the connected Open Design School micro-story unveils how the project brought talented youngsters from all over Europe during the year (see pic below).

The way we decided to publish the open data in the portal is itself an attempt at suiting the different data literacy levels and needs the website’s visitors may have. All the data is published in three places, each designed with a specific type of audience in mind.

• 🤓🤓🤓 A dedicated GitHub repo that provides the CSV and JSON files (as a data geek would expect them).
• 🤓🤓 An “Open Data Centre” on the website, which is essentially a traditional open data portal, listing all the raw data files along with their metadata.
• 🤓 An “Open Data Corner” at the end of each thematic section or micro-story, which includes only the data referred to the specific section or story. In each open data corner, we decided to publish not only the raw data but also the aggregated and processed data files that we used to produce each visualization that is on the page.

We believe that the latter, the “Open Data Corner” is a core innovation in the way we designed the portal, as it empowers people who might have a lower data literacy than a typical open data user, like concerned citizens, activists, as well as journalists, to access and play with the data in a beginner-friendly manner.

Most of all, think of data as a means to an end, not the end in itself 😏.

The more we figured out how to translate the principles of human-centered design into the practice of creating the Matera 2019 data portal, the more we realized we were shifting the role data has in a traditional open data portal.

Open data portals are typically all about the data: how many datasets, how many formats, which open licenses. Open data portals are typically all about the data: how many datasets, how many formats, which open licenses. In Matera 2019 this hierarchy is flipped: the stories come first which narrate the data and illustrate what can be done with the data, then we provide the downloadable open datasets.

In addition, a standard open data portal will include mainly quantitative, machine-readable datasets. In the Matera 2019 open data portal, CSVs and machine-readable datasets are just one of the many components of a multi-modal narration, together with texts, videos, pictures, etc. The datasets are not stand-alone elements, but parts of an informative ecosystem covering the many facets and the complexity of what Matera European Capital of Culture 2019 has represented.

Finally, our hope is to give rise to a recursive process that sees data as a means to an end, not an end itself. Publishing the data online was not the ultimate goal of the Matera 2019 Open data portal. It is humans and their actions that generated the datasets behind the stories of the portal. And now that the data is published, it should serve this community. We want to see the data used as a tool to foster new human interactions and to inform new processes aimed at improving the conditions of Matera’s society.

With this goal in mind, an integral part of designing the Open Data Portal has been that of planning for its legacy. In the autumn 🍂, we are supporting the organization of a DataSchool, together with the Matera Foundation and with the participation of the open-data guru Maurizio Napolitano. The School will bring in the city a colourful variety of data-people, from data-activists, to design students, journalists, or social scientists, to design new forms of communication and services based on the data.

Through the design of the platform, we aimed to turn open data into commons, public goods generated and maintained by the community for its wealth and awareness. Our hope, indeed, is to contribute to a more inclusive data practice, which embraces a broader audience, provides diverse and faceted entry points for personal explorations, and constitutes a stepping stone towards new forms of information, knowledge, awareness, and social care.

Matteo Moretti is a designer and cofounder of Sheldon.studio & Alice Corona, data-journalist and founder of Batjo.eu

Beyond Open-washing: Are Stories and Narratives the Future of Open Data Portals? was originally published in Nightingale on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

<provocation mode on>

Thanks to COVID-19, it seems many chickens are coming home to roost. A global audience is realizing the fragility of our economic system, the importance of human relations in our daily life, and the value and the quality of the ways we spend our time. We can change our routine, our life, and our socioeconomic system (maybe next time let’s act before the arrival of a pandemic 😅). Despite the brutality of the virus’s approach 🦠, the emergency situation is forcing us to reflect on what is really necessary (and what is not) in our daily life — and that’s nothing compared to the many people worldwide living in more extreme and tough conditions than ours.

Given the dramatic situation that we are in, I have to admit I’m really fascinated by this moment: it is challenging our lives, beliefs, and society. Looking at my country, in many Italian cities we now have wonderful blue skies, less polluted air, and clear water in the rivers, which are all unintended consequences of the economic hiatus imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But we also had an incredible “infodemic” — especially at the beginning of the crisis. (To say nothing of ridiculous fake news like the return of dolphins in Venice—have they ever been there?) The main national media outlets relied on a dangerous sensationalist approach (and sometimes unverified news), causing unnecessary panic and unsafe behaviours in much of the population.

Information, what a mess 🙈

At the same time, many data people started publishing maps and dashboards on the COVID-19 that were supposed to be useful. As readers, we were rapidly overwhelmed by a huge amount of visual content aimed to explain the situation through data.

All this enthusiasm and activation are great, but given the delicacy of the situation, as designers, we should reflect twice before posting new visuals, as noted by Amanda Makulec. Indeed, many of the maps are misleading, with bubbles positioned in the centre of the country (a la Microsoft, see also) or on the principal city of a region, just because “the software works this way.” Let’s not even mention the colour scales 🙈.

Ten Considerations Before you Create another Chart about COVID-19

Currently, it is very difficult to navigate maps on mobile, with little available space to pinch, move, and touch. Since the beginning, I wasn’t really convinced by the usefulness of maps, especially on mobile. They are supposed to work as a geographical piece of information as well as a way to discover data of a specific region; a function almost impossible on mobile, which forces people to pinch, pinch, pinch, and pinch again until they are able to touch the right spot. So, no map.

The main problem is that few dashboards are designed for smaller devices. One of the contemporary ways we approach digital design is through a mind-set of designing ‘mobile-first.’ It implies that the design process focuses first on the design for smartphones, so that spaces, sizes, fonts, etc. fit the screen size and also accounts for the lack of a mouse cursor (no hover effects) and finger-sized buttons. Then, after the small screen is completed, the design focuses on optimizing for bigger resolutions.

Where are the COVID-19 Mobile Dashboards?

Just two weeks ago, I was laying on my sofa trying to understand what was going on in the world outside my apartment by seeking data through my smartphone. Are the infections increasing or decreasing in Italy and Europe? How is the German situation evolving?

… Nothing! Thirty minutes of my time wasted, trying to understand data through badly designed dashboards impossible to access on mobile.

Please, don’t judge me as a snob designer that pretends to live in a nicely designed world. I’m only asking that on such a tough and serious topic, the information be clear and accessible especially on the most-used devices; not only for the sake of informing citizens, but to support the work of journalists, decision-makers, administrators, and politicians in such a stressful period. We are in 2020, the majority of the people in the world browse the internet through a smartphone! How can all of these badly designed dashboards exist?

Our Contribution: CoviDash

The Coronavirus mobile-first open-source dashboard

I was so disappointed by the situation that I started downloading the Italian official data on the COVID-19 and started designing a simple and clear dashboard for mobile (no map this time 😁). A couple of hours later, once the mockup was quite presentable, I contacted my business partner at Sheldon.studio, Daniel Rampanelli, who is an incredible developer, and then I called Riccardo Olocco, a very good friend of mine who founded one of the most serious Italian type foundries, CAST foundry. As soon as I told them: “What about working together to a simple dashboard on COVID-19 that works on mobile??” They both immediately answered: “Yes, count me in!”

We worked on nights and weekends, obviously without meeting each other due to the social distancing. So let me introduce CoviDash: it is our first release, and we decided to publish it as open-source so it can be adopted and improved by everybody. It already supports multiple languages, so other people from other countries, cities, institutions, companies, newspapers, journalists, could adopt and translate it. It is available from the Sheldon.studio GitHub repository. After the rush, probably we will improve it, too, we still have a couple of features to add.

We tried to put ourselves in people's shoes — what would they expect in a dashboard? The dashboard opens with what Tufte calls small multiples: tiny and multiple series of similar charts, which share the same scale to allow quick-comparison. In our case, the three small multiples return a broader time span on the virus data, and hopefully next weeks they will show us the flattening of the curve 🤞. Then, we thought “numbers are important as well,” so we present first the total number, then the daily delta of the infections, the recovers and the deaths, on the national level. Then, as soon as people scroll, the same small-multiple lines are represented in a bigger size, in a single chart, followed later by the regional data, through the numbers and also encoded in a vertical histogram.

Covidash closes with a series of easy-to-touch region names that refresh the same layout with regional data, instead of national.

Why you should use it? If you belong to the 60% of people that use a smartphone to browse the internet every day or if you just need clear and accessible data at a glance, Covidash is probably for you. Covidash is not a perfect dashboard; we think there are many margins for improvement, and it would be great if you could contribute or just use it, and tell us what you think. We would love for you to help us make it better for your own needs and others. We conceived CoviDash as a digital common, so the community can benefit from it as well as taking care of it, for the sake of better information, for the wealth of the whole community.

I hope that you will consider my outburst as a provocation to start a discussion on what we could do, together: This article and our Covidash are meant as a call to all those concerned designers that would give a contribution worldwide, creating tools to support the work of journalists, activists, and citizens to provide better and more accessible information during the COVID-19 emergency. There are many ways you can act, from visualization to data cleaning and collection, to creating networks and workgroups to collaborate and share, to writing code to support designers, and spreading accurate information to reach a wider audience and increase understanding. It’s time to act together and responsibly, for the sake of more transparent and widespread information and for the wellbeing of our communities, since as Seneca wrote: “We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden.”

</provocation mode off>

You can read more Nightingale coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic here.

Hey, Data Designers: Where are the COVID-19 Mobile Dashboards? was originally published in Nightingale on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.