This Viz For Social Good (VFSG) project focused on VFSG’s own data on volunteer submissions and non-profit partners. I chose to make data art of each VFSG project, with the goal of creating engaging visualisations that also celebrate VFSG’s community and growth.
I used the projects brief's description of VFSG’s visualisations as “beacon[s] of change” as inspiration. For each project, the volunteers' visualisations are represented by rays of light that illuminate the mission and impact of the project’s non-profit partner (represented by the layered geometric shape).
Here are the pieces for the two projects I participated in last year:
All project visualisations are in the vfsg_plots folder of this repository, and there is also a gallery of the projects on my website.
Data art is not designed to be the most effective at encoding or analysing data - for example, it’s difficult to directly compare the number of visualisations submitted for different projects using these illustrations. However, I wanted the data encoding to be apparent so each piece provides a general impression of the project's data.
Each submitted data visualisation is represented by one ray:
The corresponding non-profit for each project is represented by a geometric shape created by layering many regular polygons with the same number of sides. The number of sides is determined by the non-profit’s follower count on social media (more followers = more sides) as a rough approximation of its reach and recognisability. Smaller non-profits often benefit the most from VFSG's work since they often lack the resources for an internal data analysis team.
Tap Elderly Women's Wisdom for Youth, with a little over a 100 followers on Twitter (X), vs. UNICEF, with over 9 million followers.
The colour of each shape is determined by the project’s primary topic. I grouped the provided topics into six broader categories:
- Education (pink/orange)
- Amplifying voices (i.e., broadcasting the work and missions of other people or organisations across multiple categories) (yellow orange)
- Infrastructure, resources, and sustainability (yellow)
- Environment and conservation (teal/green)
- Health (blue)
- Welfare, rights, and equality (purple)
Examples of the above categories, from left to right:
(proper legend for the charities TBA!)
I used R for the data analysis and visualisations - the code is provided in this repo.
More details about data decisions TBA.