I admit that when I picked this topic, I already had at least a vague concept of how I want it to work. I am very much inspired by the work of Ben Fry (you can see some of it at his website at http://www.benfry.com/ in case you’re not familiar)—he is, in fact, the reason I decided to get a CS minor. I like the way in which he does information design by combining graphic design with programming skills, so that information that is constantly updated or changing can still be accommodated and made easier to process.
I wanted to do something similar, which is why I picked a topic with a lot of statistical data that, at least in theory, could be programmed to be updated as new data comes in. For this reason as well, my mental concept of how the finished product of this project should look is something along the lines of a dynamic chart or bar graph.
Because there is so much information, with levels of hierarchy where some information is more important, I want to give the user the option to add layers (or levels). I think the starting layer should be limited to just human population growth over time. Then, like adding layers of transparency paper, the user can add other layers and levels of information—more about population growth (for example, the birth rate), or information from the other 2 categories (environmental degradation and adoption rates). Some provisions will have to be made to accommodate the fact that some of this data will have different scales (for example, number of births vs. degrees of average global temperature increase), but the unifying factor would be time—for most of the data, I have been able to find at least approximations dating back to around 1900. So, it is quite possible to compare the data even across different scales.
I guess my biggest issue is not so much figuring out what to do next—I have at least a few ideas for that—but wondering whether I should’ve been exploring more options as to other, less graph-like representations of my data. That’s the one problem with coming into a project like this with more than just a vague idea of what you want to do and how you want to do it—it becomes harder to see and explore other options. That’s part of the reason why I haven’t posted as much recently; I’d been trying to take a step or two back from the project and see if taking a “mental break” would allow me to see some other possibilities for representing my data. But I guess I’ve come to accept the fact that this is the only solid representation I can foresee working for me and the nature of the information I am trying to display, and that at this point I just need to work on moving forward.
I have a few rough sketches of ideas, but my scanner is not cooperating. I’m going to try to start working more on the computer within the next few days, and I’ll post some of that work as I make more progress. For now, any suggestions or feedback so far would be very helpful.
