Design and Narrative Techniques for Urban Data Visualisation

Introduction

The impressive pace of recent urban digital technology innovation looks set to continue, with widespread implications for how people live and work in cities. Several key trends are occurring simultaneously, including the increasing availability of open data at city, national and international scales; the commercial development of spatio-temporal ‘big data’ and real-time data, including tracking, sensor and Internet of Things data streams; the continued improvement of analytical and visualisation software; and the increasing ease of sharing tools online and through mobile apps (Kitchin, 2014). The breadth of these changes has been labelled as a data revolution with commentators theorising how core urban services such as transport and healthcare are changing profoundly in the age of smart cities (Albino et al., 2015; Townsend, 2013).

Urban planning has continuously evolved in response to technological and political change (Batty, 2013; Hall, 2014). The promise of the developing field of urban analytics is to provide timely usable data analysis and visualisation to support urban research and planning, and potentially to engage citizens more widely in planning decision-making. While there are many emerging opportunities for innovation in planning, we can also identify some significant challenges as well. Digital divides are increasingly prominent, in terms of differences in demography, wealth and education that affect how different user groups engage with digital services (Servon, 2008). There are also institutional divides, particularly where urban tech companies control urban service data streams, creating tensions with public sector agencies which require widespread access.

This chapter focusses on using data visualisation and analytics tools in public-facing applications for non-expert audiences. Design and usability considerations are particularly important in these applications. While online tools using open data have the potential to reach large public audiences, careful design decisions are required to translate that potential into a reality. Design techniques including using interface metaphors, controlling levels of user interaction and creating data narratives are discussed. These techniques are illustrated using a series of urban data visualisation examples, classified according to levels of user interaction into exploratory, analytics and narrative tools. Task-focussed analytics tools are particularly relevant for urban planning contexts. Carefully designed maps and visualisations, responding to user questions with meaningful indicators, have the potential to reach large public audiences, with recent examples from transport and real-estate presented. Data journalism examples show how a clear narrative can help make data-driven articles and visualisations more accessible and engaging for general audiences. Structuring data narratives, editorial techniques and selecting more engaging visualisation methods can aid understanding and expand audiences for data analysis tools (Cairo, 2012; Kirk, 2016). Future urban analytics applications are likely to add more advanced narrative functionality, and to improve the ease of creating analytics and visualisation applications using cloud-based platforms.

Developing urban analytics tools

This section discusses approaches for developing urban analytics tools from a user perspective, including user interface structures, controlling the degree of interactivity provided to the user, and presents a basic typology of urban data visualisation tools.

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