Cured by Infection

We are constantly surrounded by data in many forms but we hardly ever take the time to analyse it properly. Lockdown has had a massive impact on people and the planet in both positive and negative ways, which can be communicated easily through data visualisation. I felt that it was important in a time of uncertainty to focus on what the pandemic has changed for the better, starting with air pollution.

During lockdown, I collected data that showed the air pollution levels in Beijing from January 2020 to January 2021. I wanted to highlight the contrast in air pollution from before the pandemic started to the country being in lockdown, meaning no transport, vehicles or factories were operational. The change over the year is drastic, pollution levels were dropping and as a result, the population was exposed to clean, healthy air which made breathing easier and meant 'at risk' groups could enjoy the fresh air without it potentially having an impact on their health.

Red shows the month with the highest pollution levels, while blue shows the lowest, and black is an average between them. Using Processing I created data visualsations that would accurately show the difference in pollution levels as everything is created with real data. The collection aims to highlight a big change that has happened to the planet during lockdown strictly through visuals. Everything in the data visualisations is driven by data and presented in a minimalistic way in order to deliberately draw focus to what the data shows and can tell us without having to plot precise numbers and figures. The final designs were taken from Processing and finalised with Adobe Illustrator.

Traditionally data is numerical but I felt that my work expresses the data well visually without there being any real need for the values to be showing. I believe that the design can speak for itself and show data in a visual way rather than always having to be a series of numbers.