Concept
For this assignment, I selected the data from the London DataStore by King’s College London about “London Average Air Quality Levels”. The data shows background average readings for Nitric Oxide, Nitrogen Dioxide, Oxides of Nitrogen, Ozone, Particulate Matter (PM10 and PM2.5), and Sulphur Dioxide over the course of 9 years, from January 2010 to Aug 2019. I wanted to represent the readings in the form of particles of varying sizes and colors with a background color of sky to show how these air pollutants exist around us and the level of impact they make.
Code
I started off by representing the pollutants’ readings using points on the normal canvas size but as the number of categories for pollutants compared to the number of months(rows) was small, I used map( ) to space out the particles across the y and x axis. I used ±random(1, -1) to cause a vibrating impact for the particles to kind of show them as molecules vibrating in the air. I also used map( ) to set the size of particles according to their recorded quantity in the air. For the other display, I displayed data as a continuous vertex which formed a diagonal line in the middle to display the net decrease in the quantity of pollutants in the air.
[Click mouse to change data representation and move mouse for date display]
The values increase top to bottom and that’s why the size of particles at the bottom is greater than that at the top. The size of particles depicts the magnitude of the readings, larger particles represent more quantity of a certain pollutant in the air. All seven pollutants that are recorded have different colors as well. The month and year is displayed along the bottom when the mouse moves within the column range of one data value.
Reflection
This particular assignment was fairly easy to work with because the majority of the tasks were performed by already existing table functions. It was interesting to see how simple data could be used to create such visual representations and experimenting with the same data caused different results. I think I would want to make the display more aesthetically pleasing and interactive next time.