Sketching the World: An Icebreaker to Working With Data
By: Valentina D'Efilippo
Tags: Infographics, Data Design, Design Process, Workshop, Dataviz

Congratulations, you have just completed your rapid prototype with data! Now we need to test its effectiveness in capturing and communicating insights.

In my workshops, participants swap their completed maps and test the effectiveness of their sketches. The debriefing is a fundamental part of the exercise to observe what is understood, what questions come up, what stood out, and how others have responded to the same task. Where does the journey of discovery begin — do we start reading the map from the title, the key or do we jump straight into exploration? Do I find myself on this map? Has the creator represented the country where I am from? If I read ‘visited many times’ without a numerical value, do I interpret this as five times or 100 times? How much does my concept of ‘many’ differ from theirs? As creators, we must be aware of the many ways our readers will consume our displays. Things we imagine and the responses we form all depend on our own understanding of the world.

So consider asking someone else to read your map (or feel free to share it with me on Instagram #sketchingmyworld) and take note of their decoding process. Go back to your map — refine and iterate. You may even consider re-sketching your data without a map. In fact, not all geo-tagged data requires a map!

The sequence shows how a participant sketched a data-driven story.

Key Learnings

Over the years, I have used this exercise with children, students and practitioners as a democratising and empowering process/tool. Everyone can do it: sketching is fast, easy, and inexpensive.

Some maps created by kids (age range: 8–14). To introduce younger audiences to dataviz, I have replaced the world map with the home. It’s been a lot of fun to see kids sharing data stories and sketching their worlds.

I believe data sketching frees the mind from natural constraints (the button-pushing or the pixel-shifting). It allows us to focus our attention on meaningful relationships within the data and it can potentially lead us to unexpected places. Your hand is closer to your heart and mind than any other visual analysis tool. And in the process of sketching, you will find yourself, the place where you come from, and your understanding of the subject, and unleash your creativity. It’s on paper where we are most free from technical constraints, and we can think of novel ways to present data insights that transcend the user interface of a rendering tool.

A map drawn from memory isn’t so different from the data-driven presentations we create as designers. Even in the most objective attempt to map a dataset, we cannot completely remove our biases. Maps are inherently subjective — no matter how detailed or scientific, they reflect one’s world view and the age in which one lives. As Peter Turchi wrote ‘there is no such a thing as objective representation’. Think about the Mercator’s map, which is still one of the most popular maps of the world. Its geographies are distorted by a projection that was designed for a particular purpose — sailing — so its distortion increases closer to the poles (Greenland appears to be almost the size of South America but in reality, it’s nine times smaller!)

Ultimately it’s important to spend time strategically considering how to approach the task at hand, rather than jumping head-down in the execution because as creators we decide what stories truly matter. Dataviz is more than rendering numbers with dots and lines or colourful infographics with bold numbers. Effective data displays engage our audience and communicate insights. We have a great responsibility in influencing others and guiding them in understanding the world by reshaping their own mind maps.

Finally, if in the process of creation we can collaborate, discuss and test our visualisations with potential audiences, we will certainly end up with a reacher encoding that captures multiple perspectives and challenges our own preconceptions.