Gathering Data

As a class, we collectively tracked our induvidual houses' electricity usage over one day. We then formed groups where we visually represented this data using pins and thread (as shown in the images above). Some groups represented their data in time, however my group represented it by appliance, and the colour of string representing each person. Each induvidual had to circulate their colour string around the appliances' pins once for every hour they had the appliance on in their home. Eventually the strings built up thickly (especially for heavily used appliances like lighting and the TV) to form a rainbow of different colours.

Class Excersize

- As with many diagrams, it is hard to encorperate all factors. In our case we didn't factor in wattage or efficiency in appliance.
- On a small scale, (like a group of 5) the string ideally needed to be thicker to observe the differences in various houses energy consumption easily
- Inaccurate timing. We rounded up times to the hour- in the case of a telephone for example, rounding up the hour of usage would severly alter the data.
- At first glance, because this diagram isn't conventional, it is hard to observe the scale what the string represents without a key.

After this, we swapped groups to observe, interperate, and alter other groups' diagrams. Below are images of what another group did to our diagram. Although im not sure as to why they added additional string between the appliance icons, they did add a telephone icon to demonstrate the contrast in highly used appliances like lighting and tv's, compared to items like a telephone which arent used as often.

Critisisms and evaluation.

Swapping Groups

above is my own induvidual diagram using string and butterfly clips. Using the same concept as my group example, i rotated the string around the butterfly clips, however this represents the wattage instead of time. The y axis of the chart is the number of hours the appliance was on.

Below is an example of how data can be displayed typographically. Each country on the map has typography written in the regional language. This kind of map helps people visually see and fathom world wide data readily.