This artifact is a data visualization that I crafted as the final project of a class called Seeing is Believing. The goal of the class was to introduce students to the rhetoric of data visualizations and the final project was aimed at applying the theory learned over the course of the quarter.

For this project, I chose to make a dashboard on the European Union in order to inform a lay audience on the benefits/pitfalls of international cooperation through a case study. As a result, most of the rhetorical choices I have made aim at grasping the audience's attention, as well as presenting the data in very a concise and streamlined manner.

Although this may not be clear when looking at the below document, all visualizations are interactive. The user can simply hover their mouse over the visualizations to see more information about the data points. Throughout the dashboard, I use this feature to allow the audience to go deeper in the data and to  grasp attention.

Designing this dashboard, I think that I learned the value of storyboarding. Having a clear outline and a defined progression to reach the end goal or actionable item really focuses the scope of the project and directs some of the story points by providing a goal for each data visualization.

First, I decided to use the a visualization to address the context of the EU: it has various different intertwined groupings, and not every country takes part in all subgroups. The first interactive map allows the audience to understand the different groups that span the EU, and how they relate to each other. This also makes the whole dashboard more accessible. Here, I use colors to show the first grouping of the EU, and the interactive feature allows me to add onto this map all other groups of the EU, such as the Schengen Space and the Eurozone.

Then, I decided to highlight two key aspects of cooperation using once again interactive graphs so that the audience can explore the data. To further grasp attention, I decided to add flags as data points in order to add color to the graph. The flags also allow me to reduce clutter by removing annotations that highlight specific data points.

Finally, I close on the limitations of the EU, so that the audience can understand some of the limitations of the European Union and be exposed to both the positive and negative sides of cooperation.

Throughout the design process, I wanted to make sure to include only information that the audience needed to know in order to avoid clutter. I also decided to use color to make the dashboard more visually appealing and to highlight important details, especially in the short paragraphs next to each visualization.

If I had the chance to redesign this artifact, I would take my choices one step further to grasp the audience's attention better while making the information clearer. Potential revisions might include resizing the scatter plots to somehow get rid of the two clusters of flags in the bottom left corner.