Datascapes

Category: Experience Design | Tool Type: Immersive Workshop

Making decisions for yourself is hard. Making decisions for an entire country during a global pandemic is much, much harder. To feel confident in any decision, no matter the magnitude, you need a clear picture of the relationship between all the elements at play. But how do you get a full picture when the elements are incomplete and constantly changing?

One way is through a datascape. 

Our datascape breaks down the factors influencing perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours in bite-sized pieces you can easily build upon. The visual format reveals often-missed connections between service design, access, and demand, to paint a clearer picture of the root causes of behaviours and attitudes.

This digital playground makes remote decision-making collaborative, fun and engaging, allowing facilitators to guide people through a workshop or participants to explore in a self-guided journey – kind of like a choose your own adventure game.

Ready to ditch the data maze and enter the datascape? You can view the tool here on Miro.

How you can apply it

While this datascape was created with an immunisation focus, you can create your own and adapt it to fit your research project needs. Here’s how.

Break it down

Break each piece of data into a simple headline message, highlighted on a single card. Then, design visuals for to increase retention.

Compare

Place conflicting data points next to one another so stakeholders can discuss the distinctions, gaps or merits of each and rationalise which figures they want to use.

Use metaphors

Simplify and connect epidemiological and behavioural models using a fictional metaphor: Threats-borough, the Village of Vulnerability, Demand Lands, etc.

Guide from data to decisions

Guide managers towards key decisions from the data: which counties were the largest priority, which population groups were most vulnerable, what was the behaviour prioritised for each group and what were the largest barriers?

Engage stakeholders

Embed stakeholder mapping in the analytical process to understand who is collecting data and who is responding to which pieces.

Connect global to local

Use the stakeholder engagement process to make more strategic connections between global expertise and resources to local needs and decision makers.

Crowdsource the unknown

Leave space for lived experience, informal data sources and updated data so the story can be both rigorous and realistic and the datascape can be a living, dynamic tool rather than something that becomes outdated with each new piece of data.