These days, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed — data is everywhere, and keeping up with tech developments and smoothly moving across disciplines and sectors can be challenging. It’s good to remind ourselves that technology is just one ingredient. As communicators, we have a responsibility to untap the potential of data — big and small. To acknowledge nuance, and characterise meaning, rather than simply relay insights.
Working at the intersection of data science, storytelling, visual communication is challenging to summarise. Firstly, there isn’t such a thing as a set process. Every project is different and every dataset is a unique puzzle to solve. Secondly, when sharing my experience with others, the content needs to appeal to a broad audience: data scientists, journalists, designers, developers, students, strategists, healthcare professionals… you name it!
I show up to my in-room data visualisation masterclasses with a big box of coloured pens and tracing paper, and for my lockdown digital workshops, I encourage my attendees to find whatever they can to use during the session.
For this five-step exercise, you can do the same. Put aside a little bit of time and grab some drawing materials. This will be easy. It will be analogue. And to remove any fear of data, you will visualise a personal experience.
So, are you ready to map your world?
STEP 1: Draw the world from memory
The starting point of every project is the blank canvas — which can be intimidating. But drawing the world, in one form or another, is something everyone can visually articulate.
Let’s discuss the concept of abstraction: the process of removing successive layers of detail to capture only the essential features of a system. There are many levels of abstractions that play in drawing the world. Our first action is to decide how to flatten the planet and how to centre the geography. Most likely this decision will be based on your individual circumstance: where you are from, or where you are.
In this context, any map can be accurate, as it represents an individual point of view. However, depending on the fidelity of our recollections, the map can be more or less abstract. Simple words (labels) can overcome the difficulties in decoding the abstract borders and convert them into more tangible geography.
Different approaches can be observed in the abstraction process. Moving further away from the standard representation of the world, into a schematic of this system — we could remove oceans and just represent the land. You could, for example, represent the world as a series of concentric circles centred around your origin, or divide the canvas proportionally into continental areas.
Now it’s your turn to draw your map. Don’t overthink it, just draw the world’s geography as you remember it. And try to enjoy the process and resist the temptation to use Google!
STEP 2: Conceptualise your story and ‘collect’ data
Once we have sketched our worlds we use these maps as the matrix to plot a personal story. World geography is a useful constraint to narrow down the vast range of data-driven stories we could possibly share.
Stories vary from travel to food, hobbies, and online conversations, to the footprint of your wardrobe or how our personal worlds have changed in this time of lockdown. Moving away from a spreadsheet makes you realise that data is everywhere — in what we do, where we go, what we consume.
Now, pause. Think about the data dimensions that form your story. You will note that, broadly speaking, two kinds of data exist: quantitative (numbers, or things you can count — for example, how many times you have visited a country) and qualitative (attributes — for example, the reasons for travelling: holidays vs business trips). It’s often helpful to make a list of the variables you are going to visualise.
This classification is important to establish which pre-attentive attributes you will use to encode the data. The data properties can be visually harnessed to make it easier for your audience to spot patterns, group elements together, and navigate your map.
STEP 3 — Encode the data
Exploring how to encode the relevant data variables, we define a visual grammar we will write with. Will you use colours, symbols or pictograms to differentiate categories? Will you use area, width, length, or the intensity of the colour, to encode numerical values?
For example, if you are plotting your travels, you could map past vs future trips, the reasons for travel (business trips vs holidays), how many times you have visited a place, how strong the desire is to visit (or revisit) that location.
Think about the variables of your story. What colours, shapes, words come to mind? Let these intuitions inform your encoding system.
Finally, place any important landmarks that will capture the readers’ eyes and guide them through the insights.
While drawing is intended for finished artwork, sketching with data is for practicing, experimenting, and quick exploration. Our maps do not need to look beautiful, but they must convey a story. If you have tracing paper, this is helpful to overlay data without compromising the sketch of the map and test how many datasets can be overlaid without losing track of the narrative.
STEP 4: Spell it out
Every story needs a title. Maps are mostly non-linear storytelling devices, so the title is a fundamental entry point, a great opportunity to introduce the readers to the key insight, to create intrigue, and to invite them to begin the journey of exploration.
But to explore a map one also needs a key. This is crucial to clarify to others how to navigate the information and decode our visual grammar.
The key must be carefully considered. How do we avoid chaos? How do we guide the readers through the most important landmarks? How can we fill any knowledge gaps and leave no room for misinterpretation? All writing must impose order and explanation. The challenge is to strike the right balance between providing enough text and guidance while also allowing for some exploration. So when designing the key we can evaluate our encoding and decisions (choice of colour, scale, symbols, etc). It’s when the data is rendered that the true story may emerge.
Now that your data is visualised, what story do you see? What insights are becoming apparent? Use these observations to inform your editorial work and refine your presentation.
STEP 5: User testing — how others navigate the map
Congratulations, you have just completed your rapid prototype with data! Now we need to test its effectiveness in capturing and communicating insights.
In my workshops, participants swap their completed maps and test the effectiveness of their sketches. The debriefing is a fundamental part of the exercise to observe what is understood, what questions come up, what stands out, and how others have responded to the same task. Where does the journey of discovery begin — do we start reading the map from the title, the key or do we jump straight into exploration? Do I find myself on this map? Has the creator represented the country where I am from?
So consider asking someone else to read your map (or feel free to share it with me on Instagram #sketchingmyworld) and take note of their decoding process. Go back to your map — refine and iterate. You may even consider re-sketching your data without a map. In fact, not all geo-tagged data requires a map!
Key Learnings
Over the years, I have used this exercise with children, students and practitioners as a democratising and empowering process/tool. Everyone can do it: sketching is fast, easy, and inexpensive.
I believe data sketching frees the mind from natural constraints (the button-pushing or the pixel-shifting). It allows us to focus our attention on meaningful relationships within the data and it can potentially lead us to unexpected places. Your hand is closer to your heart and mind than any other visual analysis tool. And in the process of sketching, you will find yourself, the place where you come from, and your understanding of the subject, and unleash your creativity.
A map drawn from memory isn’t so different from the representations we create as designers. Even in the most objective attempt to map a dataset, we cannot completely remove our biases. Maps are inherently subjective — no matter how detailed or scientific, they reflect one’s world view and the age in which one lives. As Peter Turchi wrote: ‘There is no such a thing as objective representation’. Think about the Mercator’s map, which is still one of the most popular maps of the world. Its geographies are distorted by a projection that was designed for a particular purpose — sailing — so its distortion increases closer to the poles (Greenland appears to be almost the size of South America but in reality, it’s nine times smaller!).
Finally, if in the process of creation we can collaborate, discuss and test our visualisations with potential audiences, we will certainly end up with a reacher encoding that captures multiple perspectives and challenges our own preconceptions.
This is an edited extract from Valentina’s article on Medium.
