This week marked the move to our second project in this semester a dashboard designed for desktop or a tablet (landscape orientation) visualising data from “A week in the life”. For this project my life, I have collected data from the last week. So am now in a position to start thinking about how my data could be turned into a dashboard.
The key takeaway from the lecture itself was just how much data is around us and how we need to be able to turn raw data into a story. The best way to do this is to create charts, tables and other diagrams that make the data easy to understand and digest for everyone. We also looked at some of the dark arts of data visualisation where the method of visualisation has been used to make certain data look more impressive or more important than it really is. As designers it is important we display data honestly and whatever method of visualisation we use, it keeps the integrity of the original data intact.
This week’s lecture focused on the many different ways raw data can be visualised to make it easier to understand and more importantly to tell a story. Raw data in itself is not all that useful, it is often just a series of facts and figures. When I hear the word data it always reminds me of the definitions of data and information I covered during my Digital Technologies GCSE Course.
Data is raw facts and figures, whereas information is data that has been processed and given context and meaning.
Source (https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zphqgdm/revision/2) Last Accessed 28/03/23
Data visualisation is the method of taking data and giving it context and meaning in a visual way and there are a number of methods you can use to do this:
Source (https://www.tableau.com/en-gb/learn/articles/data-visualization) Last Accessed 28/03/23