The artifact
I was given the 2009 Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority Annual Drinking Water Quality Report. The original artifact was a 6-page brochure mailed to Pittsburgh residents, which included highly technical—and nearly indecipherable—information about the quality of Pittsburgh's drinking water.
Chunking the information
I began the design process by breaking down the many types of information contained in the original document and clustering these items on a large piece of butcher paper. This allowed me to make decisions about what information was—and wasn't—important to show my audience. As the original water report included copious amounts of information on various drinking water topics, it became apparent that I should break the information down into manageable chunks that could be logically grouped and reformatted.
The important information contained in the original report that I felt should be communicated in my visualization included the following: the various chemicals found in drinking water, the measured versus acceptable amounts of these chemicals in Pittsburgh's water, warnings about who and who should not drink the water, where Pittsburgh's drinking water is sourced from, how it is processed, and how to get in touch with the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority. The post-it exercise I did allowed me to edit down the information contained in the original report, and reformat it into more logical and manageable chunks.
Visual interpretation and editing information
I began sketching out some rough ideas of how I might present this information. I knew it was important to show physical context of where the drinking water was coming from—and also to keep the audience for this information in mind, so I started with an outline of the city's boundaries, with the sources of Pittsburgh's drinking water clearly mapped. I also wanted to describe the kinds of people who would potentially be vulnerable to the trace chemicals found in drinking water, as well as the levels of contaminants in the water before and after its processing:
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Digital iterations
I then began to explore these ideas digitally. I wanted to see how I could lay out all of this information in a way that was not too overwhelming for the audience, while still illustrating the important points from the original artifact in a graphically compelling and enjoyable way.
Critique and editing
After a few digital iterations, I had the information ordered in a way that I liked. I presented the following iteration to my peers and professor, and got some very helpful feedback, which included: order the most important information from the top down and from left to right, omit the faucet graphic (as it was too large, and not of the same visual language as the rest of the poster), tone down the color of the Pittsburgh map (because it competed with the information on top of it), and reduce the size and visual importance of the people silhouettes):
The final poster
After the critique, I had a better understanding of the visual hierarchy I needed to convey the important information. I came back to the poster—and revised, edited, and cleaned it up—so that it would illustrate the information in a way that was both clear and visually compelling. I realized that the most important message to illustrate was, first: that Pittsburgh's drinking water was safe, because the measured levels of trace contaminants were well below acceptable averages. And second: that people would want to know where their water came from and how it was processed. This was illustrated by the text blocks on the left, the map showing where the source water comes from, and by the glasses showing the level of contaminants in Pittsburgh's drinking water after it is processed. Third: the audience for this poster would want to see which people might be more sensitive to trace levels of contaminants in drinking water. And finally: how Pittsburgh residents could get in contact with the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority for questions about the city's drinking water.
The final poster is shown below: