MYDS Award 2023. Data tells stories
Summing up the results of the DataViz contest
Data is wonderful! It generates insights for us, helps develop businesses, delivers socially-significant information to people, entertains, distracts, and allows us to look at things objectively. And stories based on data are twice as wonderful! Projects that combine beauty, history, and data will touch almost everyone.
In 2023 the Make Your Data Speak DataViz Award shortlist included many excellent entries in the “Data Art and Data Storytelling” category. Our incredible juries had to work hard to find the winners, but even the prize-winning entries were only slightly ahead of other excellent projects!
Also, we had a Business Dashboard nomination — you can read about it here: “MYDS Award 2023. Oh, dashboards, my dashboards!”.
You can view the entire shortlist at the following link.
We want to show you the prize-winning projects!
The awards in the Data Art & Storytelling category were presented at the Make Your Data Speak conference by Nikita Rokotyan, winner of the World Data Visualization Prize, and in the Business Dashboards category by Pradeep Kumar G, Information is Beautiful bronze medallist.
A huge thanks to Nikita and Pradeep for supporting our competition!
So, who are our heroes? Data storytellers whose projects were not only interesting and beautiful, but also all of them shed light on socially significant topics!
In the Data Art & Storytelling category, the jury’s scores were almost the same:
Martina Dossi took the gold with a story about the work of the charitable organization Bridges to Prosperity. Bridges to Prosperity (B2P) works with isolated communities to build trail bridges over impassable rivers and create lasting connections to essential services and opportunities.
The project is about the rural-urban nexus brief and highlights the results of an internal study on trail bridge population catchment in Rwanda, conducted on six bridges.
The visualization consists of 4 sections, one per page. The first page introduces the study, the second — explores the surveyed population in terms of socio-demographic characteristics, the third page focuses on the connections made possible by each bridge, and finally, the fourth and last page summarizes the main purposes for which people use the bridges.
Take a look at this elegant project, each part of this static poster is filled with interesting diagrams and visualization techniques. You can examine it for a long time, discovering new details. In addition to the beautiful visuals, the project involved a significant analytical effort, processing and presenting a large amount of data!
You can explore the project and all its elements at the following link.
Second place, just 0.25 points behind, went to Nicole Klassen with UNDP energy visualization. This project was created in Tableau and includes both analytical insights and a beautiful sunburst chart in the top left corner, which presents the data in an elegant and eye-catching way, drawing attention to the project.
The accelerator labs, which the project is dedicated to, point out grassroots innovations that move us towards a more sustainable planet. It is the world’s largest and fastest learning network on sustainable development challenges. Located in 115 countries and in 5 regions, the labs tap into local innovations to create actionable insights and reimagine sustainable development for the 21st century.
Between 2020 and 2022, the labs collaborated with 359 contributors, each with their energy solution. The project is interactive, so by hovering over any part of the sunburst chart, you can learn more about the regions where the innovations came from, the energy sources they address, the sustainable development goals they target, and the themes of each innovation. In addition to the beautiful diagram at the beginning, the project includes interesting visualizations and data slices. You can explore the entire project by following the link.
Third place goes to Silvia Romanelli with a prediction of sea level rise by 2090. “Sinking” is a static project with elegant contours of islands resembling the world under a microscope. The pleasant, calming color scheme of the project cannot hide its disturbing internal message.
The global average sea level has risen about 8–9 inches (21–24 centimetres) since 1880. But sea level rise at specific locations may be more or less than the global average due to local factors. In much of the Pacific Islands Region, sea level is reported to have risen at a rate 3 to 4 times greater than the global mean.
This visualization shows the level the sea could reach by 2090 around 13 Pacific Island Nations, based on research by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Four possible scenarios are drawn by the IPCC, depending on how much action will be taken against climate change in the coming years.
You can take a closer look at the islands on the project page.
The Audience Award is worth a mention! In addition to the hard work of our juries in selecting winners from these impressive projects, there was also a free vote on our contest website for the project with the most audience appeal. Martina Zunica’s Tech Skills Migration Infographic, an incredible data storytelling project, won the award with its distinctive feature of complex and captivating color coding.
The following analysis provides us with an overview comparison of skill migration data, focusing on tech skills, which are among the most coveted and needed in the professional landscape, especially in recent years.
More than 100 countries with at least 100,000 LinkedIn members, spread across 148 industries and 50,000 skill categories, were analysed.
Take a look at how succinct and interesting the flow of skills is presented using an alluvial diagram. It’s also amazing that the preferences of the jury and the audience diverged here!
You can see the project here.
Look at these projects! They reflect the issues that concern people all over the world, and such projects help to draw attention to important topics. Unfortunately, raw numbers rarely touch people’s hearts and minds, while one beautiful and interesting visualization can achieve more than a dozen scientific reports. Therefore, thanks to the people who understand how important it is to convey socially significant data to the public.
And data storytelling performs an essential function here!
If you are interested in such projects, we invite you to participate in our contest next year! Create something beautiful, show it to everyone!
And may the data be with us!
