Showcasing the nine category winners of our first-ever disaster data and map design challenge
By: Marena Brinkhurst, Jocelyn Michele West and Simone Balog-Way
Imagine you live in a beautiful city in the Philippines, in a lush river valley. You know that the area has a history of seasonal floods and typhoons, but how well do you understand and talk about the risk that these natural hazards pose? Where is your nearest evacuation point? How will you get there? How do local officials plan for evacuations to ensure everyone has somewhere safe to go? These were the key questions at the heart of RIESGO, the grand prize winner of the 2019 VizRisk Challenge, hosted by the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the Understanding Risk Community, in partnership with Mapbox and the Data Visualization Society.
The challenge
The first-ever VizRisk Challenge started with a question: how could we use maps and data visualization techniques differently to more creatively and effectively communicate the risk of natural hazards and disasters? To explore this, we launched a global call to data visualization professionals, designers, developers, and researchers.
The challenge was designed to appeal to both experts and beginners, including those who maybe were familiar with one aspect of the challenge but new to another — exposing data scientists to designing interactive visualizations, or web developers to the data of risk assessment models. This made the challenge both unique and not for the faint of heart!
The dozens of projects submitted by a total of 42 participants from 25 countries use data and geographic context to tell compelling stories about risk, deconstruct past disasters, and inspire possibilities for a safer world in the future. The international panel of expert judges faced a tall task in evaluating the many thought-provoking, captivating designs, finding winners in a total of 9 categories.
All winners are showcased below. The full list of submissions is available on the VizRisk website.
GRAND PRIZE:
RIESGO, by Briane Paul V. Samson and Unisse C. Chua
“We hope to further improve on not only the tool but also the underlying analysis behind the risks involved and possible suggestions on policy and disaster preparedness and management in the future.” — Unisse Chua
Read their blog to learn about their motivation and process for this project.
CATEGORY WINNERS
Best city, national, and regional-scale visualizations
Participants first had to decide which data they wanted to work with — not only selecting a location of interest, but also identifying sufficient sources of quality data on hazards and vulnerabilities from which to assess risk. Participants were invited to start with datasets with help from World Bank teams for four locations at different scales (Monrovia, Liberia; Chiang Mai, Thailand; Nepal; and the Caribbean) but could also opt to choose their own location and data of interest, using open data and the ThinkHazard! portal as much as possible. Prizes were awarded to the highest scoring visualizations at three scales.
Best city-scale visualization
Winner: Mount Agung, Bali, by Rizki Fadhilah, Hanfie Vandanu, Aulia Arfida, Mahendra Aulya, and Rooseno Rahman D
This team dove into a custom location and hazard — volcanic eruptions on the island of Bali, including manually digitizing the location of tourist sites in the districts close to Mount Agung. Read their blog to learn about this project.
Best national-scale visualization
Winner: ur-scape Nepal, by David Neudecker
This project used datasets from Nepal suggested for the VizRisk Challenge, combined with further data on likely travel routes created using Space Syntax analysis extension in QGIS, desktop geospatial software. Read the blog to learn more about this project.
Best regional-scale visualization
Winner: Ecosystems4risk across Africa, by Louise Schreyers, Pierre Lacroix, Karen Sudmeier, Christian Herold, Pascal Peduzzi, and Antonio Benvenuti
This team also chose a custom location and datasets, exploring the intersection of forest management practices and flood risk across the African continent, using forest coverage data and flood population exposure. Read their blog to learn about this project.
Best Data Analysis
The first step to any effective data visualization is finding the compelling insights or narratives buried in your data. This can be a long and exploratory process, as many VizRisk participants discovered, even with VizRisk resources.
Winner: Hurricane Maria’s impacts in Dominica, by Karen Barns, Ji Su Lee, Nicole Paul, Tim Arioto, Tamika Bassman, and Angela Wilson
This team used OpenStreetMap data to fill gaps in publicly available datasets so they could explore data analyses to inform recovery planning in Dominica.
“We were simultaneously overwhelmed and excited about the amount of publicly available data we were able to find, even if there were significant gaps between the datasets. The challenge was finding a story to narrate through the data to tell a compelling and impactful story” — Karen Barns, winning team, best data analysis
Read their blog to get the details on their data analysis techniques for this project.
Best visual design
Visualizing data on a map provides context that helps make data more accessible and relatable. But maps can also introduce new visual complexities, making the design of the basemap an important part of the design process. Many challenge participants took advantage of recommended resources and the styling control available in Mapbox Studio to create custom basemaps to complement their datasets and amplify the message of their visualizations.
Winner: After The Quake, by Sabine Loos, Karen Barns, and Arogya Koirala
The design of this entire project is stunning, though our judges especially appreciated the thoughtful selection of color palettes for data layers and the complementary custom map style.
“Another thing we learned about were all the ways we could make good color palettes.” — Sabine Loos, winning team, Best visual design
Read their blog to learn about their motivation and process for this project.
Best interaction design
Making a digital map-based visualization opens up a ton of options for letting your audience explore data in an interactive way. But too much interactivity can also be confusing and obscure the clarity of a visualization. Challenge participants applied best practices from suggested resources to create streamlined, coherent interactive experiences.
Winner: RIESGO, by Briane Paul V. Samson and Unisse C. Chua
Also the grand prize winner, this project effectively combines several interaction formats to communicate the results of their risk analysis, with an overarching “scrollytelling” interaction that sequentially presents viewers with additional interactions including hover, pop-ups, overlays, and layer toggles. Read their blog for more on the design of this project.
“We have at least 9 data layers going into our map. (Phew!) With that in mind, we thought of having a scrollytelling panel to act as a guide on how to explore the data on the map. As the users read through the story, data relevant to the chapter of the story will be shown on the map.” — Unisse Chua, winning team, Best interaction design
Best write-up
The final part of the VizRisk Challenge asked participants to explain the process they followed to create their visualizations. Not only did this have participants reflect on and explain how they created their projects, but it helps others to learn from their experiences, challenges, and successes as well as build on their code snippets, design insights, and data analysis methods. All of the VizRisk submission blogs contain valuable information about what it takes to create these finished visualizations — read them to get a headstart on a visualization of your own!
Winner: Visualizing Risk: Remotely Triggered Earthquakes, by Will Chase
Will’s blog post reads like an adventure journal through the experience of identifying a topic, researching it, collecting and analysing data, designing a visualization, and then building it. Complete with code snippets and lots of links, this blog post is definitely one to read.
“In the end I was surprised by what I was able to accomplish and I’m quite proud of it, I hope you enjoy it too!” — Will Chase, winner, Best write-up
“Even though there was a slight learning curve, we enjoyed the opportunity to expand our software and tool proficiency.” — Zarith Pineda, winner, Best beginner submission
Best submission from a World Bank-designated “Low-Income”, “Low-Middle-Income” or “Upper-Middle-Income” economy
Winner: Settlements with High Risk of Floods in Monrovia, by Ana Gonzalez
A newcomer to the field of data visualization, Ana nevertheless dove into the VizRisk Challenge data from Liberia and used Tableau, QGIS, and Excel to create a crisp interactive dashboard.
Read the blog to learn about this project.
Best beginner submission
Winner: Going North, by Zarith Pineda
Having less than a year’s experience in data visualization didn’t stop Zarith from building a map and data dashboard using Esri’s Web AppBuilder with a custom Mapbox basemap to explore how natural hazards in Central America may be precipitating and contributing to human migration.
Read the blog to learn more about this project.
A growing community
A huge congratulations and thank you to the over 260 people from close to 60 countries who participated in the 2019 VizRisk challenge — from tuning in to webinars, to attending in-person events, to joining the (ongoing!) discussion in the Data Visualization Society Slack, to following the weekly newsletter. We are inspired by your enthusiasm to be involved in these important conversations about disaster risk and we look forward to continuing the discussion at the 2020 Understanding Risk Forum in May and in future data visualization challenges.
“It was definitely engaging for us and really propelled us to master things as fast as we could. At first, I though the social media posts were a bit cheesy because I’m not really used to posting progress reports of any of my works. However, I must admit that the traction that our posts gathered from the community really boosted our morale. So thank you!” — Briane Paul V. Samson, grand prize winning team
“Our firm regularly hosts mapping sessions to contribute to Missing Maps projects, in which we collaborate with other volunteers around the globe to trace satellite images in OpenStreetMap in areas inhabited by vulnerable populations. Experiencing the challenge of working with limited datasets first-hand in the VizRisk Challenge further reinforced our team’s existing commitment to contribute to the open data movement.” — Karen Barns, Best data analysis winner
A very big thank you to our panel of judges:
- Simone Balog-Way (GFDRR)
- Vivien Deparday (GFDRR)
- Swati Sachdeva (UR partner, Liberia)
- Nama Budhathoki (UR partner, Nepal)
- Lyn Baron (UR partner, Dominica)
- Lo Benichou (Mapbox)
- Allan Walker (Mapbox)
- RJ Andrews (Data Visualization Society)
- Tyler Wolf (Data Visualization Society)
And a big thank you to all our VizRisk mentors who supported participants throughout the two months of the challenge: Elijah Meeks, Amanda Makulec, Robert Christie, Alli Torban, Anya A’Hearn, Brian Davidson, Christina Chortaria, Dan McCarey, Dan Swick, David Mora, Dom Brassey, Grace Doherty, Laura Gillen, Megan Danielson, Mikel Maron, Mila Frerichs, Sam Gehret, Deven Diliberto, and Scott Farley.
And finally, thank you to our partners, GFDRR and the Data Visualization Society.
Announcing the winners of the VizRisk 2019 Challenge was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.