a personal touch
43 people tried their hand at drawing theiri data in our February 2021 storytelling with data challenge.
Last month’s challenge was to draw your data: for whatever reason you found compelling, using whatever information struck your fancy, and in whatever format you chose. In the challenge prompt, we mentioned several possible benefits of sketching out a graph. As the submissions rolled in over the course of the month, we started to notice a common thread that we didn’t anticipate, and that was the choice of subject matter: personal data. Way more creators than usual chose to draw quantified self (or, in some cases, as David did, quantified pet) data.
At first, this seemed like just a curiosity. This wasn’t an especially business-y challenge, and it’s only natural that folks might pair a casual challenge prompt with a casual and light-hearted topic. On further reflection, though, something deeper might have been at play.
Sketching for brainstorming and iterating
“Sketching out your ideas” is meant to be a quick, iterative process. It gives folks a chance to try out a few wild ideas, a few common ideas, and cycle through them in an effort to refine their thoughts and designs, ultimately creating one final, clean, focused version of the visualization. Some people did interpret this month’s challenge as a “sketch your ideas” prompt, to great effect: Jennifer shared her process of exploring options for a dashboard-in-progress; Line showed the iterations that both she and her children went through for different visualizations; and Anne-Sophie contributed a Gantt chart about her own design process.
Others, however, wanted to hand-draw the final version of their visual. While sketching and brainstorming is quick-and-dirty, hand-drawing a final, production visualization is quite the opposite. Every single line, color, marker, and letter on the page has to be intentionally placed there, often painstakingly so, by the artist. In approaching our challenge this way, creators would have found themselves committing lots of time, energy, and attention to a single visualization
Creating hand-crafted final products
If we’re going to spend a large amount of time on something, hopefully the topic would be something that we liked, or were interested in; and, as many folks have said in the past (although the first person I heard it from was journalist and teacher Chad Skelton), everyone’s favorite topic is themselves. Quantified self data is not trivial to collect, clean, or analyze. (In fact, hand-collected, -cleaned, and -analyzed data was itself the subject of a previous SWD challenge.) Hand-drawn finished visualizations are not easy to plan, execute, revise, or polish. The marriage of the two, however, seems a perfect one. Not only does our innate interest in the subject matter motivate us to commit to the creative process, the final, handcrafted products speak to the time and care we spent collecting and creating the analyses. Finally, the nature of presenting something that we’ve created by hand implies a personal connection between artist and audience, an intimacy that also strengthens the bond between medium (a personal creation) and message (a personal story in data).
Many of our participants shared such personal stories this month. Jill created a visualization of “why,” the reasons she engages in certain activities or expresses certain behaviors; Robyn collected and analyzed her own experiences as a driver (or, in some senses, a chauffeur to her children); and Lisa drew a quantified-self version of how she felt about the music in Hamilton.
Drawing it all together
Some of this month’s participants managed to use sketching in order to bring personal experiences and business visualizations together. Katy noted, and shared, the increase in people sending one another letterbox flowers during the past year, while Sam brought a bit of whimsy to his sticky-note sketches of traditional corporate graphics (giving credit to the clever site Indexed for the inspiration).
We encourage you to check out all of the entries in our community, and we thank everyone who participated, whichever interpretation of “draw your data” you chose to explore.
There’s still time for you to participate in this month’s challenge, March MAP-ness! “Navigate” your way to the active challenge for more details!
Our 2021 schedule for individual learning is set! Are you responsible for representing data in your day-to-day job? Is it important for you to be able to tell stories through graphs and presentations? If you ever find yourself needing to communicate something to someone using data, our half-day virtual workshop or 10-week online course can teach you how to move beyond simply showing data to telling a data-driven story. Learn more.
Register today for a half-day workshop or 10-week course from storytelling wtih data.
