Visualize NYC 2021
The November 2021 local election led to unprecedented turnover in city government: in addition to the mayor, 40 elected officials reached term limits. AIA New York (AIANY) and the Center for Architecture, in collaboration with MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab (CDDL), created Visualize NYC 2021, a project that uses data visualizations to explore issues in our city that were central in the local 2021 elections. The project explores four themes that are of critical importance to New Yorkers: the Evolving Public Realm, Climate Change and Resilience, Right to Housing, and Public Health.
Challenge: How can we help users navigate complex data visualizations in a way that both makes sense to users and pulls them further into the data?
Approach: We created a series of short prompts and CTAs, organized as “slides” that users can swipe through and click on as their entry point to the visualizations. The prompts on each “slide” provided the context for the project (“Who’s up for election” and “What’s at stake") and directed users into the thematic groupings of the data visualizations.
While the designers initially proposed a minimalist black-and-white design for the “slides,” I recommended we adapt graphic elements from the data visualizations as backdrops, in order to highlight the visual goals of the project and pull users in. The animations can be seen on the live site, whereas still images are featured below.
“Who’s up for election?”
“What’s at stake?”
Navigating the Four Themes
Note: I didn’t create very much of the content on this site. Many people worked on this project as part of a large team, which is fully credited on visualizenyc.net. The main areas I worked are organizing the content, QA and user testing, and UX writing for the menu and navigation of the site, as described above.
This project was a Nominee in the Activism category of the 2021 Webby Awards.