First Place

Is the world a better place today?

Jeremy Boy (France / New Zealand), with the help of Anshul Vikram Pandey and Jean-Daniel Fekete

"Is the world a better place today?" (isWBPT) is a web-based, interactive visualisation app based on the Millenium Develoment Goals data. This visualisation for the people is designed to help users overcome three potential barriers, which are often overlooked in the design of visualisations and in the presentation of data:

• the literacy barrier: people need to understand what they are looking at, and that the graphics represent underlying data;
• the interaction barrier: people need to know whether a visualisation is interactive or simply static, and they need to know in time what interactions are possible; and
• the task barrier: people need to know what tasks to perform with the visualisation and data in order to imagine new, and interesting ways of questionning the data.

isWBPT addresses these barriers in a “narrative” introductory tour. The visitor is first invited to select a target and indicator from a subset of the data, as well as a country of interest. S/he is then shown a line graph view of the evolution of this country between 1990 and 2015 (i.e., the time period for which most Millenium Development Goals were set); and a series of simple questions ensure her comprehension of the graphic. S/he is then shown multiple countries and aggregated values, which aim to ensure her comprehension of simple statistics (i.e., means and medians). Finally, the concepts of correlation and correlation coefficient are introduced, and s/he is invited to freely explore the entire dataset, looking for predicitve relationships to tweet about.

As such, this app not only communicates about the data, it also allows visitors to explore them, and it shows them how. This can lead to new insights, and may even lead to finding new, crowdsourced solutions for making the world a better place.

Finalist

Halting the Spread of HIV

Emily Schuch (United States)

An exploration of the HIV incidence rate, which measures the number of new HIV infections as a percentage of the population.

Visualisations include a line plot of the HIV incidence rate by region, a world map of the HIV incidence rate by country with a slider to view by year from 1990 to 2013, and a heat map of the 20 countries with the highest average HIV incidence rate from 1990 to 2013, by country and by year. Predictive modeling was also explored to look for factors which may be significant in reducing the incidence rate.

Finalist

Health inequity in your city

Doohee You (Republic of Korea)

Given our focus on urban health, the project intended to elicit the magnitude of health inequities in urban areas using MDG indicators. We want to highlight that sections of the urban population are disadvantaged in accessing services and achieving healthy outcomes.

The project, therefore, focused on providing a quick and clear understanding of the current situation as well as trends, while providing benchmarks for each country to compare their performance with others. We used a pooled dataset to obtain MDG indicators and used data visualisation tools to construct country profiles. The results of this project have been acknowledged by the WHO Global Health Observatory in 2015 and have contributed to raising awareness on urban health inequity.

Finalist

"The Urban Century: Exploring the impact of "Slumification" on Development Goals"

Niccolo Cirone (Italy)

This project is intended to encourage further analysis on the difference between development policies for rural areas and policies for slums, and on how we can make sure that our development actions are can be effectives in urban environments. This Visualisation was chosen by Tableau Software as “Viz of the Day” on August 30, 2015.

Finalist

Millennium Development Goals - Indicator Correlation Explorer

Max Galka (United States)

This data visualisation allows you to explore the relationships between Millennium Development Goals indicators via two interactive graphics.

Finalist

Behind the scenes of the UN Millennium Goal Development Report

Katharina Rasch (Germany)

”Behind the scenes...” is a visualisation of the metadata behind the UN Millennium Goal Development report. It answers questions such as ”How much data is behind the MGD report?”, ”How many people does it represent?”.

Users can explore how much data has been collected about each of the millennium goals. They can learn how much of Earth’s population is represented in each of data points collected and see for which goals the UN is making progress in collecting more data in recent years. The visualisation can be a companion when reading the report or looking at other visualisations. It can be used to investigate if results presented are grounded on a sound basis of data.