The TTEITI Project: why should I care?
De Alpha op zijn kop
15 augustus 2019
The TTEITI Project: making things interactive without programming
26 november 2019
In October 2019 TEITI published a story on the challenges in the oil and gas industry in Trinidad and Tobago. We developed all the illustrations and (interactive) data visualisations. It was a fun, interesting and slightly stressful project and we will share our experience in a couple of blogs.
The briefing
So on the 7th of august we got an e-mail from Kerry Peters if we wanted to work on a project for TTEITI. He would write a compelling story based on the word version of the full report and we would make the story visually appealing. He also wrote that they wanted to publish the story in a tool called Shorthand. This looked like an easy to use tool, so we agreed to using that as our medium. He also sent us the draft report he would base his story on, which included all the information and data.
Why should I care?
So you might think that we had all the information we needed to start our part of the project: making things visual. At least that was what Kerry expected. But unfortunately we cannot visualise data without knowing the context. We explained that if you want to tell a story with data, you need to know what the angle is. Hanspeter Pfister, a Harvard professor once explained it like this:
“The information is the ‘what’, the message is the ‘so what’– the ‘why should I care?’”
This is a barchart with information, but it doesn’t tell a story yet. This barchart is clearly the ‘what’.
If you add a title, some color and an image, the same data will tell a story, in this case about the Dutch love for ‘kroket’:
Look and feel
As Kerry needed time to find this angle, we figured we could at least start with developing a general look and feel. We made a sketch of the general structure of the page:
