Welcome to our first virtual design post! If you want to see more details of our sketches, please click on the link below.
Miro Link of Group1: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lQfGmro=/
And let us walk you through our brain-stormed diverge sketches and logic links in later stages. First, please take a look at our Miro board overview.
A Miro Board Overview
Our Miro board has clips and brain storm materials, 1 Diverge board, 2 Emerge boards, 1 Converge board, and one round 1 summary for now.
“Diverge” Overview
The figure below presents our sketches from team members, and we will discuss 6 out of these in the next section, so that you can see how we form these ideas.
Most Interesting Sketches in “Diverge”
Discussion:
A: The first sketch divides a circle which represents the whole group of children into 4 sub-groups, according to their contribution to elder parents in their family. Moreover, we separate male and female in those 4 sub-groups represented by the size of pie slices, and denoted with different colors.
B: The sketch uses blood vein system as a symbolic presentation of the parents — children relationship. The red vein present the transfers from children to parents, and blue vein is the opposite. The volume of the vein may represent the average level across the country.
C: The sketch use 2D-positions of points to indicate the quantity of interested variables. An arrow line with direction pointing from one point to another shows the order (ranking) of the third dimension, from smallest to the largest.
D: This sketch is composed of two triangle to represent the ratio of female and male population. The size changes with the amount of gender population. For example, as the female group becomes larger, the triangle becomes larger.
E: The area under/between the curves show the quantity of different categories. The area under the top line shows the total amount of all categories. It can be seen as a cumulative area graph.
F: This sketch divides the 4 responsibility groups in sketch A further according to their education level, which categorized by university, senior high school, junior high school and others below. Different education levels are denoted with different colors, and they accumulate and account for 100% of each group.
Combination in “Emerge”
Then we try to combine our sketches in “diverge” phrase into some complex pictures in “emerge” phrase. We also discuss how we plan to make it visualized and interactive.
The first emerge graph tends to visualize the provincial heterogeneity on China map. It is an interactive design: as your mouse move upon a specific province, it shows the summary of the children support behaviors within this province (bar chart, scatter plot, pie chart, etc…). And if you click on a specific summary, the graph zooms in. It is a standard overlook interactive graph.
The emerge picture above shows the transfers between parents and different children in the same family. And especially present the difference between children (we are considering construct a distance index). The house figure on the left should present the family size and gender composition. The vein system on the right visualized transfer between parents and children, and the red blood vein indicating the transfer from children to parents; blue blood vein indication the transfer from parents to children. Ideally, we can also see the gender and birth order difference in the final graph.
Emerge 3 consists of 2 similar sketches. The left sketch is the relationship between education level and money. The size of the circles represents the amount of people. For example, if a large amount of people with primary school education level tend to transfer small amount of money to parents, so the circle would be large. The sketch on the right represents the relationship between parents’ education level versus children’s education level, and the larger the population, the larger the circle.
This emerge figure is composite of the pie chart (left sketch), and the extended ring chart. The ring is transformed from diverge sketch on the right, and transform bars to slices of ring. This emerge has two level. At the first level, we see the inner pie chart presenting 4 groups indicating contribution and sex ratio; at the second level, the 4 groups are each extended to education sub-groups and denoted by colors. We can see both family responsibility versus sex ratio, and family responsibility versus education level in this figure.
We try to illustrate the change of transfer amount along the time. Saturation indicating which year the transfer is the biggest, medium and the least. We do not use the dynamic illustration because: (1) there are only 3 or 4 time points, so no much space needed on map if we put them together. (2) static illustration is easier to compare the order in different years and show the trend at one time.
Emerge 6 mainly demonstrates visiting frequency difference between female and male in different provinces. The China map works as the base, and we add elements on it. We transform the bar chart into coloring provinces, by only presenting which gender visits their parents more in that province. You can think of the US election map, and the Republic and the Democratic dominates different states.
In the diverge phase, we try a funnel graphic to show which gender of child account for the bigger part regarding to the transfer amount in the province. The daughters are positioned at the top half of this funnel, and the sons at the bottom half. And the length of each horizontal bar shows the difference between two genders. Then we combine another ideas that use color hue to specify the proportion that education level contributes to each horizontal bar. The new funnel is ranked by the length.
This is an interactive graph meant to show the relationship between household size/gender composition and support methods, and it can be dynamically changed as time line adjusted. By clicking on the house button in the ring, you could switch between different household size and gender composition families. And methods presented by the area on the ring also changes. And the same time, you can drag the time line at the bottom of this figure and the percentage of each methods used also change. It reflects the average at the country level.
How to Feed Emerged Sketches into the “Converge”?
At the last section of this post, we show the logical links we use to make all combinations as an integral. Our idea is to converge the combinations from country level, to province level, and finally, to household level. Emerge 1, 5 and 6 can all be visualized in a China’s map. The information contains gender inequality, the difference of money and the frequency of visiting, etc. The next level is province. Emerge 7 shows how gender effects education level on province perspective. Finally, the last level is household. Emerge 2, 4 and 8 are combined under sibling relationships, and emerge 3 is analyzed under parent-children relationship. Overall, our logic is to use a process of continuous zooming in to combine all of our sketches.
