San Francisco Transit: The Good, The Bad, The Quirky

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San Francisco’s iconic streetcars and cable cars help make the city one of the top tourist destinations in the world. As San Francisco Municipal Railway (MUNI) celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2012, we would like to take this opportunity to incorporate what we have learned from INFO 247 to explore the fascinating history of San Francisco transit.

One unique aspect of the system is its diversity of fleets, which is rarely found in other transit systems. In our research, however, we didn’t find a visualization that recount history from this viewpoint, which led us to create a visualization that does so.

In our design, we used a metaphor from actual transit maps (drawing examples from Ford’s London Tube map and Vignellie’s New York subway map). Each vehicle type is represented by a “route” and important events are plotted along the route accordingly, much like stations along a train line. In addition to text descriptions, historical events are illustrated with vivid photographs that complement our narrative. The user can also let the narrative unfold linearly (by using auto-play) or non-sequentially (by toggling particular vehicles/events). At the end of each “route”, the user will also see interesting statistics, current status, and future plans.

By combining stories, historic images, and eye-catching design, we hope that our visualization brings the charming history of San Francisco transit to life.

Team: Fred Chasen, Raymon Sutedjo-The, Charles Wang

See the visualization here »

Infographic: Hot Summer Down Under

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During the last lecture, we saw an example from the Australia Bureau of Meteorology which shows the extreme temperature in Australia this summer. The visualization above, found on a Tumblr blog of a sustainable cities website (thisbigcity.net), is an extension of that idea. It shows information such as temperature, flood, rainfall, and heatwave records in various places in Australia, which altogether explains the “angry summer” that the country is experiencing.

The key information is fairly straightforward. The temperature/flood/rainfall records are quantitative measures that are comprised of the new record (all broken in 2012/2013) and the previous high record. However, I did find the use of icons slightly inconsistent. The flood and rainfall icons are both comparative–they’re each made of a smaller icon and a bigger icon to represent the previous and current record, respectively. The temperature icon, however, is illustrated as only one part (thermometer) with the previous and current record information displayed on the side. I’m not sure why the designer used a different icon logic for temperature, especially since the information displayed is of the same structure.

My biggest annoyance is with the heatwave records, which are spattered all across the map with no discernible logic in their placements and seemingly random typographic hierarchy in terms of size, color, and typeface. Instead of the current placements, these icons could be placed at the bottom together (as 1-dimensional stats) to give the main visualization a little more breathing room.

Overall, the visualization can benefit from some content restructuring. At the moment, the graphic looks crowded and every item is styled in a manner that demands the viewer’s attention (big and bold types, bright colors, icons, etc). While the information conveyed is quite straightforward, creating a little more hierarchy in the visualization–through higher contrast between items and generous use of white space, for instance–will greatly help its narrative flow and convey the idea better.

–Raymon Sutedjo-The, 3/4/2013

Source: http://tumblr.thisbigcity.net/post/44546064005/australia-one-of-the-most-urbanised-countries-in