URBAN WATER EXPLORER

In 2011 Visualizing.org organized a visualization contest where visualization designers were challenged to create cutting-edge visualizations that draw the connections between all or some of the following: the rapid growth of cities, the effect of climate change and natural disasters, and the urban water system.

A D3 EXPERIMENT

This visualization started out as a very first attempt to experiment with d3, a new Javascript library specifically designed for creating visualizations. At that time the library was not released yet, and I was amongst the first users to work with the library.

My goal was to create a visualization of a dataset containing rankings of countries according to 10 factors of the 2010 Quality of Life Index. When a user clicks on one of the countries in one of the rankings, all the other rankings start rotating so that the ranking for the selected country lines up.

SCATTER PLOT AND BAR CHART

An additional line chart and a scatter plot have been added to the visualization. The scatter plot shows the relationship between usage and availability of fresh water for each country. The line chart shows the amount of urbanization over time. Both the 2 charts and the circles on the left are interactively interconnected: clicking on one of them will update the others.

The colors for the visualization were chosen so that it matches the concept of water.