Gregory Yanick
Final project
For the final project, I chose to create an interactive visualization of Ernst & Young's Renewable energy country attractiveness indices for Third Quarter 2008. These indices, in the words of its authors, "provide scores for national renewable energy markets, renewable energy infrastructures and their suitability for individual technologies."
The report contains data sets in multiple dimensions, essentially connected to different countries and regions. There are opportunities for the user to interact at the overview level, zoom in for details, and select various overlays through a legend linked to the display space. The goal is to make an aesthetically appealing interface, represent the underlying data truthfully, and encourage exploration of the subject. The user should be able to digest the contents of the report in a visually and cognitively efficient manner, and easily draw his or her own comparisons and conclusions. The target audiences are investors and managers and executives at energy and utility companies or related industries.
Questions I wanted to answer:
Which country is leading the way on renewable energy investment?
Where are other countries ranked?
At a glance, how much are countries separated by their renewable investments?
How do all countries ranked compare to one another?
What types of renewable energy technologies are covered?
Which renewables are most popular in which countries?
I was inspired by the cartogram idea when I first saw it in lecture. I've always been interested in maps. But they have their drawbacks too, for example, "chartjunk" or an unfavorable ink to design ratio. If your primary goal is to show some relationship about countries, you may not need a high fidelity depiction of the political borders of a map. In fact, this may detract from that goal and may inhibit comprehension. I find the simplified shapes of the New York Times example shown in class to be highly effective. Given that spatial layout is such a critical part of our visual processing system, the placement of countries on a map still has value though-- especially when, as in my viz, the map changes for several data sets. It's easy to pick out with eye what changes and what stays the same.
Related to this is the effectiveness of size as a primary design element. Our eyes are finely tuned to see bigger and smaller shapes, and these varying shapes can be based on the underlying data. Changing magnifications is another effective aspect of cartograms. Countries don't need to conform to their geographic limitations because that's a lesser concern. In my viz for example, Germany turns out to be much larger than its size in reality because it has a higher ranking in several indices. So the cartogram is a good choice for answering my initial questions about relationships between countries in the context of multiple renewable technologies. I calculated each country's diameter based on the given quantitative value. The color of each country is determined by their ordinal ranking on the alpha channel range. The scale is proportional for each index.
The application also had to be inherently scalable and adaptable, because it will be updated four times a year, and it could be fitted for other types of displays and different data sets.
My viz begins by displaying the main index (the All renewables index). From that screen, the user is free to click with the mouse around to see the individual indexes. Continuity of shape and layout is kept to offload that cognitive task. The user should be able to easily see which countries are better suited for investment in which renewable areas. This application was built to be displayed on a corporate, public web site, so considerations such as load time, responsiveness, overall performance, size, layout, and color choices were carefully considered.
Source code: FINAL