In this video, we are going to work with visualisations to go along with your project. Let us assume that you have your problem and hopefully your solution ready. Now, you have a project which will improve health and well-being in an urban context, and your project will take place in your own location. It can be the whole city where you live, or it can be a local project in your neighborhood. Either way, it is the perfect project. Now you need to make sure that other people will see the need for your project as well. And for that you will need to take a good look at your communication to see if it is as efficient as it can be. One of the most efficient ways to communicate about a new idea is to create something visual to describe your problem and your solution. So you need a visualization. And if you have some data, scientific data, to back up your ideas, it is important that you know how to present the data in your visualizations. When you give people the chance to see your point rather than just read or hear about it, you will make use of the fact that people are visual creatures. Most of the sensory information our brains get are visual. In fact, 80 to 90 percent of all the input we get from the world enters through our eyes and it all enters through the mysterious black hole in the middle of the eye, our pupil. All people have a completely dark pupil in the middle of their colored iris. Why is that? Why is it dark? It is because the pupil is simply a hole and it is helpful to think about that, think about the eye and the pupil as an endless hole you can use to pour all your information directly into the head of your audience, into their head, into their brains without them being able to resist it. It may sound a bit manipulative and yes, in a way, it is a bit unfair that visual communication is so efficient that it is very hard to succeed without it when you want to engage your audience. Let me start by showing you an example you might already know. And if you don't know, I hope you will agree that this is a very effective piece of communication. This visualization is known as the 'climate stripes' or the 'warming stripes'. The colored stripes show the air temperature for the entire globe from year 1850 to 2019. No doubt the globe is getting warmer and warmer when you see this visualization made by Ed Hawkins from the University of Redding. You can even make a visualization like this for your own country or city, dependable of which data is available on the website ShowYourStripes.info. I live in Denmark, so I just want to make the Danish one. It is indeed very easy. I'll go here, select Europe, find Denmark. And the city option is not available for Denmark, so I get this picture and I'm done. All you need is to input a single data point, where you live, and the website will take care of the rest. It is not quite as easy when you have to make your own visualisation from scratch, but let's get to it and start doing our data visualization. I have chosen to do a project about air pollution, focusing on the very fine particulate matter PM 2.5 and therefore it will make sense to find a large data set about air pollution. I have found this on the WHO website. It's the Ambient Air Pollution Database. This database is currently being updated, but we can still use the latest version of the database, which is from 2016. I'm going to download it. I have downloaded the database and opened it in Excel and I see that the first page is a note page about information about the database and the next page is the database itself. I see that it consists of 2972 lines of data. And I would like to make a visualization which will show how many of the cities exceed the guideline values for PM 2.5. This question is harder to answer than you might think because we have different guidelines and thresholds coming from different places. The WHO recommends a level of PM 2.5 that does not exceed 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has set their limit to 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air, and the European Environment Agency tops them all by setting a threshold of 25 micrograms per cubic meter. However, this high value is now being addressed and will be revised by the EU standards under the Zero Pollution Action Plan to bring it closer to the WHO guidelines. I will start the work in Excel to make the data set more manageable. I am by no means a technical Excel expert. My background is in graphic design, journalism and communication, but I can still manage to get the data I want and I believe you can do the same with a bit of trial and error. So let me hide the columns we are not going to work with. And then I scroll through the numbers and I notice a problem with some of the numbers. You see they have the decimals visible. This could be a problem later on when 2.30 could show up as 230, so I am going to format this entire column here to a number without decimals. The numbers will still be there, but they are not visible and they won't cause us any problems now. I also see that quite a lot of the cities are written in all caps and some of them are not even within the same country. I have a smart hack for this. I make a new column and I go to the top. I write 'Tirana' as I would like to see with just caps to start with. With that one selected, I can press Ctrl+E and the Flash will take care of the rest and change all the thousands of city names instantly to the thing, the way I like it. we can delete this one. Just hide it. OK, that's fine. Now the data set is ready. Now I need to find the number of cities in each of the guideline groups. For that, I use the filter function. I go up here and I write it for each of them with the number filters. I can go in here and select, which appropriate, like this 'greater than', like 10. OK. And then I select the first one. And the last one, and I can read the number down here. In this case, it is 2,116. I do the same with the other categories. There are, of course, many more cities around the world than we see in the database, but this is the biggest database of its kind and we must live with the obvious shortcomings such as Moscow being the only city from the Russian Federation in this database. Compare that with my country, Denmark, where we have five locations in the database and one of them is not even a city. It's a small harbour and an island. So no wonder that the air is fresh there. Again always remember that your visualization can never be better than your data set. So any shortcomings in your data will carry over to your visualization. But, and this is a bit strange, it will probably be hidden in your visualization and people will not notice the smaller errors in order to see the bigger picture. For the visualization, I use the free online service RAW Graphs. This is a magnificent resource for anyone wishing to do data visualizations. It is in version 2 Beta, but already beats most of the other data tools out there and it is free to use and play around with. Let me put in the very small data set and work with it a bit. You can see there's a lot of very interesting charts that we could choose, but we are not looking for something very complicated, so I just go here with a multi-set bar chart. There! Then I go down here and say that the sets are actually the X dimension. It's the WHO , the US and the EU guidelines. And the sizes are the 'clean' and the 'polluted'. Then we get a visualization like this. We can customize it here, and I'm going to do just that. I would like, let's see, I would like a bit more padding. Let's go for 60, a bit more between the bars, 5. Nice! And then we see here the EU, the US and the WHO. I could change the colors as well. I would like to do that, so I go with clean-blue. That's OK. Light blue would perhaps be even better and polluted should be gray. Let's go for a dark one like this, OK! That's basically the visualisation. It still needs some text but RAW Graphs is not designed to do that, so I 'm going to export it and I can export it as an svg-file or I can export it as an image file. I go with the svg. And I download it. Like I said, I have a background in graphics, so I will always recommend to open the svg- file in a vector editor like Adobe Illustrator or maybe the cheap alternative called Affinity Designer. And there are other vectors programs as well. Download a free trial version to play around if you haven't tried that before. The graphic design is not part of this class, but a few reminders are in place. I have taken this graph and I have then changed it a bit. So it now has more text in it, as you can see. Let's see the reminders here. I would always say pay attention to the headline. It needs to tell a story and engage the reader. It works in unison with the visualization to make the audience pay attention to your arguments. It is also a very good idea to put in text inside your diagrams. Don't let them stand on their own. This will make people spend more time with your visualization and will enforce the point you wish to make. People will read the statements and see the visualization as evidence. Visualizations can be very effective in helping people change their perception about a subject. Even people who are otherwise fact-resistant may change their mind by seeing a good visualization. Always remember to put in your sources in your visualization - too much fake news out there. So you need to be transparent about your sources. OK! The next visualization is a bit more complicated and it will make more use of the data set we had prepared. This time we are going to make something that could be used as a poster. We're going to have every city in the database shown with a circle with size and colour determined by the PM 2.5 level. Back to RAW Graph, and this time we're going to use the 'circle packing'. First, I put in all the database. I go down here and I say I would like to see 'circle packing'. For hierarchy you put in the country. Already looking interesting. I put in the cities. And I put in the size. So the size will depend on the Level of PM 2.5, also, the color will depend on it. That's it. Almost now, but I would like to change it a bit. I would like to change the colors first. And now we get a few more options here. We go with the 'diverging' so we can decide that, which one should have this color. I think that to start with, it should be very light green. So I go with that one. And it should be 10, because everything below 10 is labeled as clean. The next one could be 12, because that's the US level, so I'll make that kind of red. And then we have the very dangerous ones. The end ones and in fact, that's all. Everything above 25 should go that color. It's a bit, I would like it more dirty. So I go with the red brown. Yeah. There we are. What would be nice if we could see which country is which country, so I'll just find that. It's the hierarchy labels. There we are! And you see the problem is now that they overlap kind of each other, so I'll make it a bit bigger. You can control the size of the graphic here. I'll go with 1,200 by 1,200. Yes. And I think maybe the dots are a bit spaced apart. So I'll go to the chart. And go with a padding of -1. Let's see. Yes, nice! In fact, maybe these country sizes are a bit too small. I go to 1,100. And there we are, and now we see something interesting, all of China and all of India is unhealthy and the most part of United States of America is actually very clean. Finland is totally clean, Australia is clean, Sweden is clean. Interesting to look around. This is going to be the poster graphic. So I'm going to export it as an svg and open in Illustrator and finish it up. The visualisation has been opened in illustrator and again, this is not a graphic design course, but let me give you a few tips. The most important thing is look at these circles around each country. They are put in there to make it easier to understand the graphic, but in fact, it makes it harder because it creates a lot of frames that the eye have difficulties to travel around because of them. Look at if how it looks, if we remove them. Much clearer and much more beautiful, also. You will have much more success showing this as a poster to your audience. Always, again, remember to put in some text. I have put some text in the top here so we know what we are looking at. And we put in a legend so people know what the colors mean and the source is down there. And before you present it to your audience, I would suggest that you maybe find your own city. And for me, that would be down here in Denmark. I live in Copenhagen. There we are. That will make it even more fun to people, for people to look at because everyone always wants to see how your own city compares to the rest of the world. And you can see Copenhagen is a bit brown. So if your project has anything to do with the pollution in your city, this poster will make it clearer that air pollution is a huge problem on a global scale. And as it is a poster, it might be nice to put a border around it like this and then ready for presentation and, you know, if you live in a dark- colored and unhealthy city, it is time to do something about it.
