Georgia Food Data
Utilizing data visualization techniques to engage and educate users on the issues of food insecurity in Georgia. As Data Analyst and UX Designer, my focus was on visualizing fact based insights in way that encouraged empathy and understanding.
The USDA defines a food desert as “a low-income census tract with a substantial number or share of residents with low levels of access to retail outlets selling healthy and affordable foods”. When this project was in progress there were more than 75,000 people living within a food desert in Cobb county alone. The issue is not rooted solely in low food production. The prevalence of food deserts also illustrates a societal tendency to provide fewer resources to communities of a lower economic status. Our goal for this project was to humanize this data and make residents of Georgia more aware of this issue and its social implications.
DISCOVERY PHASE
FIND AND ANALYZE THE DATA
Our dataset was collected by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and contains information on food access levels in counties across the U.S. It has over 275 variables, covers every state in the U.S., and is separated into multiple sub-datasets based on topic (access, restaurants, food insecurity and economy). As data analyst, I used Tableau to make meaningful connections within this dataset, locating the information that would be relevant to our scope.
IDENTIFY TARGET AUDIENCE
We believe that any organization or individual studying food access would be particularly interested. Additionally, we hope to attract anyone interested in the historical impact of income and race on policy making and economic development.
STUDY RELATED WORK
Looking at related work, gave us the opportunity to learn from the strength and weaknesses of other projects. It helped us fine tune our focus and create a unique experience in our application.
DESIGN PROCESS
The initial discovery phase allowed us to follow a consistent and sharpened design process that focused on displaying the most digestible and impactful content for our users. We decided scrollytelling was the best way to do this. As our UX Designer, I used Figma and Tableau to map out our design concepts and data visualizations.
ALTERNATE DESIGNS
FINAL OUTCOME
It is easy for people who live near or in cities and towns to assume that everybody lives with the same access. We wanted a way to tell the story of those we’ve left behind, and to visualize, geographically, where people are most insecure and what those areas’ demographics are. We use a scrollytelling approach to first display the sheer number of people in Georgia impacted by food insecurity. We use Clay county as an example for how some counties are significantly worse than others, and that its residents are at a higher health risk. We then allow the user to explore a map to see the demographics of all the counties in Georgia, which are colored by their food insecurity rate. The map uses a zoom feature when a county is clicked on, which gives the user a side-by-side view of the focused county and its demographics.
You can visit the live site here.
Github: https://github.com/cs4460/Food-Desert-Viz
