I’m a Japanese, American immigrant, Christian, urban, 21 year old heterosexual male... How does that change my design work?

…How do we situate the world around us as designers? What perspective informs our creations? In the UT Austin course “Perspectives in Design” we explored these questions and relearned who and where we are.

This is Project 1: Data Visualization with Cathryn Ploehn.

Brief

Agaves, Pecans, Squirrels, and Pigeons. Warm, unpredictable weather. This Central Texas ecology is where I SITUATE as a designer. The self-labels mentioned above also help me see my position and some factors that create my perspectives.

I’ve chosen the CHIPS dataset, a geological survey of the Colonias in the Lower Rio Grande Valley region, along with further research by Danielle Rivera. The PURPOSE of this dataset is to quantify the living conditions caused by decades of injustice. Danielle adds to this by contrasting it with the voices of 5 non-profit leaders in the area to show that the truth of impoverished communities are still overlooked in the data.

In order to ATUNE to this dataset, I sketched a “flow of feelings” of how one might experience this data:

Although I have never lived in the Colonias, I have visited on multiple occasions and served the families there. This gives me a more human RELATIONSHIP with the data, and the hopes that my visualization would push me and the audience to hold more weight for a distant human life.

Visualization

“El Nopal” (cactus) is a significant resident of both the Austin area and the Rio Grande Valley ecologically and culturally. It also has the ability to grow virtually exponentially, and produce “Higo Chumbos” (prickly pears). Because my dataset concerns the livelihood of entire communities and still requires visualization of key thresholds, I chose to use the Nopal.

After selecting a living condition factor to examine, the viewer can then see the number of Colonia communities in each county that have access to that factor, visualized through the growing Nopales. The bright colored prickly pears can represent key thresholds such as percentages of the Colonia population, time stamps, or even hyperlinks to stories.

My hope is that the optimism of growing improvements will cause a hopefulness that the numbers can’t.