Designing Interactive Objects & Digital Media : And Now for Something Completely Different....

Previously my intention was to use some rather dark data sets (dealing with U.S. mortality rates) however as of late, I feel that I have had a disconnect with that data as well as the process of visualizing it.

Despite my best intentions I feel that there was a growing indifference between the dataset and the work I was hoping to compose. There was a large struggle in coming up with a creative, engaging and artistic representation of my original dataset as I found it difficult to visualize my final composition. I also must say that I feel that dealing with death in 1st World Countries has been dealt with and is a sort of cliche. My original goal of the end result of my piece being, of course, a discussion of any possible improvements or solutions to the high death rate in 1st World Countries has also been said and done.

So it is with this in mind that I am completely disregarding my previous proposals and introducing a new concept with a dataset that I am interested in and excited to begin working with.

Some Back Story:

When I was in high school I took a Social Studies course in which the culminating project was to create a questionnaire for which to survey the students of the school. The survey had to tackle a problem that I saw within the school's student community...considering that my school is located in the middle of two farms and a small graveyard it is no stretch of the imagination that I saw that issue dealing with the school's morale. Yes I know, because it's such an important thing for a high school to have spirit well listen, I liked the topic so I stuck with it. Here's a picture for proof. The survey was to be compiled and looked at for any "revealing information". I was instructed to write an essay on how I, as a student, could improve or use whatever information came out of the survey in an productive way. You can download a copy of my survey here. Feel free to take the survey and add to the data set. It may be possible (with your help) to do a compare and contrast between the stress levels among High School vs University/College students.

Now I know I just finished saying that discussions on improvement are very typical, however, considering that the survey was comprised of a high school student body and not a population of 350, 000, 000+ I feel that it is a discussion that is much more plausible as well as fruit bearing.

I had a sort of epiphany late last night where I realized that I still have all of the information from the survey. So instead of writing a laborious and wordy essay, why not just visualize the surveys for a much more consistent and tangible piece of information? I feel that in creating a visualization for the surveys taken, I can bring more signification to understanding the self-esteem of high school students. It might even be the case where my school can exemplify and be represent other schools across the different boards in Ontario.

Above is a simple Excel graph of all of the average stress levels between males and females ranging from grade 9 - 12. This is quantified by a stress number scale (valued 1 - 10) where 1 is hardly stressful and 10 is an anxiety attack!! =O

With this information in the graph as well as the information given to me in the surveys I can extrapolate the stress levels among students and plot them on a comprehensive dotted line graph. I was intending on having all of the averages of males and females in tables off to the side of the visualization along with any other extraneous information I can gather to further giving depth to the visualization and encourage its viewers to compare between grades and sexes.