Infographic

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  Sponsored by:

  Statistics New Zealand

"CPI-DaliPie" by Keith Ng

http://publicaddress.net/keith/DaliPie.html

Description

Keith Ng's infographic presents data from the Consumer Price Index in an interactive, innovative way, creating an information rich environment that encourages exploration. Category sponsored by Statistics New Zealand

$2000 is awarded to the best visual representation of complex knowledge, information and/or data. We were looking for infographics that help us understand something more clearly and reveal information that was not initially obvious. It should also be relevant to New Zealand.

Selected judges' comments

• "The graphic is innovative in its approach and it is the first time I have seen anyone attempt to communicate the richness of the CPI in this way."
• "A genuinely innovative presentation of difficult, important data. The designer is presenting the data in a new light. He is enabling me to dig around inside the dataset and see its various constituent parts."

Keith's description of the entry:

What is driving inflation? Over the past few years, there's been a lot of media coverage of rising prices. This is an attempt to put CPI changes into context by intuitively showing the relationship between the CPI weighting basket and the changes of each group. This visualisation allows users to zoom in to every part of the CPI, to see how individual product groups have changed over time, and how they affect the higher-level groups. The "Dalipie" is a variation of the Nightingale chart. Unlike the Nightingale chart, however, both variables are dependent variables. The second variable maps to the area of each slice (if the second variable increase by 50%, the area of that slice increases by 50% - this is not the same as the radius increasing by 50%!). It's called DaliPie because it's salient effect is disproportionality. The fact that the slices do not line up jar with user expectations of what a pie graph looks like, and this jarring immediately draws attention to the graph's main feature. An element's total area and its disproportionality are immediately apparent: e.g. "This element is big/small, but it has grown disproportionately." The disproportionality is paired with animated disaggregation. You can see how each slice breaks down into more volatile slices (or conversely, when volatile slices are joined together, they average out). A lot of time has been spent on the animation because that implicity explains, purely visually, how a CPI actually works - a weighted average of changes across a broad group of items. It was a very conscious choice to use a pie-like graph. When you zoom in to a small category, even though it's filling up half the screen, the curve of it's shape tells you how big that group is in relation to the whole circle. Top-level context is retained in a way that is not possible with any other shape.

Sources

Statistics NZ Consumer Price Index. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand.