Assignment 1

Week 1

Podcaste notes:

​The part of the podcast that stood out to me was how they questioned the data - around how many people were tested, how many people were tested positive and how many people they had the capacity to test. I think these were a crucial part to questions while thinking about how to design the way the data is presented to the intended audience. It’s important to think about the context for the intended audience - in this case, the general public - if the data is just presented as numbers without this other information it is easier for them to assume that the numbers are low and things are going well. Presenting the number of positive covid cases along with this information might help the audience know that the number of positive cases are low because the number of tests done are low.

I think as people working on designing the ways important data like these are presented to the public, it is important for us to think about how the data is collected and its limitations. It is also important for us to think about ways the data can be misunderstood by our audience to think about ways to represent the data with enough context to ensure there is a lesser probability of the data being misunderstood. Presenting the data with the limitations in testing capacity and the numbers can help the audience also question these issues and raise their concerns and learn more. I think data visualizations are a really interesting way for people to gain understanding on things happening around them and if data visualizations are designed and presented responsibly, it can help educate people about things affecting them and maybe lead to people coming together to make a change.