Liuhuaying Yang, the data visualization expert at the Complexity Science Hub, wins first place of the World Dataviz Prize 2023 in the interactive category.
Her work Four Seasons: How Has the World Progressed in Recent Years “uses the metaphor of a tree in different seasons to spotlight different aspects of progress.”
The prize is awarded by Information is Beautiful and the World Government Summit, which provided the datasets and concepts. This year, the competition focused on the past, present, and future of society and governments. Hundreds of designers and developers from all over the world created data-visualizations that tell a story about the data.
Beautiful and elegant
Yang’s “beautiful and elegant visualisation” illustrates how the world has progressed in recent years. Each season emphasizes a different aspect of development. Spring is a time of growth; summer represents prosperity; fall is a time of change; and winter is the season for preparing for crisis.
Additionally, each tree illustrates how the world stands in the present (branches), the past (roots), and the future (sky). “The roots show global performances over the past 10 years, as the past provides foundation for the present and future just like roots of a tree,” explains Yang. “The sky visualizes the buzz of 20 development and 18 innovation frontiers from seven categories. And development and innovation are like the sunlight and rain that provide energy and water for a tree to grow and flourish.”
Metaphor
“I always find it fascinating to have a metaphor in data visualizations. And a tree is easy to start with, because it can work well with hierarchy dataset,” points out Yang.
“I also recalled the conversations with Fariba Karimi and Samuel Martin-Gutierrez about the illustration for presenting the first-mover advantage on gender disparities, where we tried to explain things based on tree, root, and sunlight, and this idea was originally from Dániel Kondor,” recalls Yang.
“A good visualization narrates a story. When I was experimenting with the tree idea for this project, I wasn’t satisfied with the narratives or the stories in the work. But while shopping for a jigsaw puzzle, I saw many versions of ‘four seasons’, and that was my ‘Aha’ moment.”
Jury
The works were judged by a panel of creative and industry leaders led by David McCandless from Information is Beautiful: Alberto Cairo a journalist, designer, and scholar who teaches visualization at the University of Miami; Amanda Makulec a data visualization designer and executive director of The Data Visualisation Society; and Gurman Bhatia an award-winning data journalist based in New Delhi, India.