World population growth

Back to work

Project purpose:

Provide insight into world population growth

Customer:

None (passion project)

Background:

We all know the world population is growing. But how fast exactly? Which countries are growing fastest? These were some of the questions we would like the answers to.
Through this interactive data visualisation our aim was not only to show the growth of the total world population, but also the growth of each individual country.

Audience:

General public

Solution:

Techniques:

UI Design
Development

Process

Research

Concept

Design

Development

An important first step in realizing this data visualization was researching and analyzing the available data. We found a very usable dataset that contained all the countries' population numbers since the sixties. We then linked this data to the actual country in the world map so we could then access a population number for each country shape at every year. By comparing a country's population to that of the year before we could calculate a growth factor and linked this in turn to a color coding scale. Green meant positive growth and red meant negative growth. This was the foundation of the visual, which we further built upon by adding several functionalities such as selecting and tracking specific countries through the years, filtering the world map based on population numbers and combining that with a certain time period.

Result

The resulting interactive map was quite powerful. The huge dataset we had acquired suddenly became very easy to interpret. A user can scroll through time and easily and intuitively 'read' individual colors or get a more general idea of population growth. A very interesting and unexpected result was the way certain outliers (relatively high or low growth numbers) became very easy to spot, and could often be linked to certain events in the area. Wars, famines and mass migrations became visible. This proves a valuable point about the power of visualizing data; it gave insights into the data that a user would have never found by looking at the dataset alone.