Design and Redesign: Kenneth Chen

Design Rationale

Part 1: Design

For the “Design” portion of the Design and Redesign project, I used Tableau and the Boston College student body dataset to create a line graph to showcase the enrollment patterns of the top five enrolled majors over the course of 20 years, my age, from 2002 to 2022. In order to achieve this, I sorted the data on Tableau by year for the columns, filtered the majors for the top five over the given years, and added the enrollment count as the rows. In this, I found that the lower end of the top five, which included Finance and Economics, had found significant growth over the past 20 years whereas the highest enrolled majors from the 2000s, Communication and English, had plummeted in registration. Although not depicted by the data in the graph, one could assume the change in career interests can be attributed to the higher cost of living in more modern times and therefore a higher desire to pursue more well-paying jobs. According to Boston College CSOM’s official website, the average starting salary for 2023 graduates was $84,106, with the majority of graduates working in financial services. Although official data was not published regarding Communication and English majors specific to Boston College graduates, the Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that the median salary ranges from $57,000 to $63,000.

I specifically decided to use a line graph because I found that it was easier for the eye to track the progression of enrollment numbers throughout the years as compared to something like a bar chart, tree map, or any other design. Since everything could be mapped in a linear fashion, the message I was trying to convey was abundantly clear. Furthermore, I chose specific colors to represent the various majors because of their attraction to the eye. In order to emphasize the significant growth for the Finance and Economics majors, I set their lines to colors that are most perceptible to the human eye. According to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, “yellow, green and orange ” are in the middle of the visible spectrum…and are easiest for the eye to see.” The other three majors were set to more neutral colors in order to separate themselves from the brighter green and orange that the Finance and Economics lines were set to. In this, a viewer can clearly depict the rising trend of the higher paying majors and a downwards pattern of the opposite.

Design Critique and Rationale

Part 2: Redesign

Florence Nightingale was definitely a pioneer for her time, as her work in nursing, statistics and healthcare still echo in effect almost two centuries later. Her Coxcomb chart displaying the causes of mortality in the Army from April 1855 to March 1856 served as a powerful showcase of the significantly higher number of deaths from preventable/mitigable diseases compared to war wounds or other causes. This was most likely a shock to the majority of the public, as the assumption for them at the time was probably that most soldier deaths were from battle wounds and were non-preventable. However, Nightingale’s Coxcomb chart’s wedge design created a very clear image that majority of the deaths were from preventable diseases, as the blue wedges provided a frame of reference as something a lot larger than the red and black wedges. After reading the chart key, a viewer would understand that the blue wedge represented the number of deaths from mitigable diseases, which was vastly higher than deaths from wounds or other causes. This data most likely influenced the British government’s decision to improve hospital sanitation and the military’s overall healthcare, which would trickle down to the general public, as her work pushed forth legislation for health and safety guidelines in all places.

Although the Coxcomb chart was highly successful in its purpose of sending the message about preventable diseases, it did not show the exact numbers themselves of deaths per category between diseases, wounds and other. A lot of the intricacies of the data was left out in order to make the chart more intuitive. Furthermore, understanding the Coxcomb chart requires much of the user’s attention and time to read instructions in a poor font and to comprehend what the chart was conveying. (which was understandable as this was most likely handwritten). Exact numbers could not be displayed as some of the sectors were too small to include numbers.

For the “Redesign” portion of the Design and Redesign project, I used Tableau again, but with the Coxcomb dataset to create a bar chart in order to showcase the vast difference in death between the three categories of diseases, wounds and other. A bar chart was chosen because the shape of the bars themselves instantly convey a message to a viewer’s mind of which section holds the greatest number, in this case, clearly, diseases. Furthermore, the display of numbers above each bar further solidifies the point being that diseases have the highest effect on mortality, conveying the same point as the Coxcomb chart, but in a much more streamlined manner. Lastly, specific color choices made were to emphasize the bar representing disease, as the color red correlates to the color of human blood and religiously to the devil, which catches a viewer’s attention over the other colors, which were more neutral with blue and green.