Data visualisation — Design, 14–17 years
How visual form can reveal patterns in numbers without pretending the data says more than it does.
Making patterns visible
Data visualisation turns measurements into positions, lengths, colours or shapes that people can compare. A table may tell you that 42 people chose cycling and 18 chose the bus; a bar chart lets the difference be seen immediately. The design must preserve the important relationships in the data, not merely make the picture attractive.
The problem of numbers alone
Numbers are precise, but a long list makes comparison slow and patterns easy to miss. People are good at spotting differences in position and length, so designers use visual encodings to reduce that effort. This also creates responsibility: a stretched scale, missing zero or hidden category can make a true dataset give a false impression.
Choosing a truthful chart
A class records water bottles used in one week: Monday 12, Tuesday 18, Wednesday 15 and Thursday 9. First, put the days on the horizontal axis and bottle counts on the vertical axis. Use equal intervals of 5, starting at zero, and draw bars of those four heights. The chart now shows Tuesday as the highest day and Thursday as the lowest without exaggerating the differences.
Pretty can still be misleading
A common mistake is to choose a three-dimensional chart, a dramatic colour scale or a vertical axis that starts at 90 because it looks more exciting. This feels reasonable: decoration seems to make the message stronger, and a narrow range can make small changes easier to see. But perspective and scale can distort comparison. First make the quantities honest; add style only when it does not interfere.
Charts in everyday decisions
Data visualisation appears in weather forecasts, transport apps, election reports, fitness watches and climate dashboards. A line can show temperature changing through a day, while a map can show which roads are busy. In each case, the picture is useful only if you check what is measured, when it was measured and which groups may be missing.
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