COMING TO AMERICA

Nicola AzevedoNicci CazaresPearl HatnagarVictoria LiChris Sommerfeld

Coming to America

Hundreds of thousands of people get US permanent resident cards every year

Around a third of these people decide to live in just five US cities

Where are they coming from?

Why are they choosing these cities?

Explorations Data Gathering

Final Concept

Prototypes

Design process

Followed an iterative design processDiscussed our interests and ideasPrototyped and sketched approaches

Data hunting

The US government publicly discloses counts of everyone who becomes a legal permanent residentThey track this by US region as well as country of birthWe looked at the five top US urban regions and the top 10 countries of origin for new legal residents

Laws of simplicity

ReduceOrganizeTimeLearnDifferencesContextEmotionTrustFailureThe One

Our work was informed by John Maeda’s “Laws of Simplicity”In our visualization we tried to reflect his maxim that “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful”

Visualizations

Interactive bubble diagrams, maps and timelines informed our work as we looked for the best ways to visualize and explore the dataThe complexity of data led us to strip away much of the ornamentation and to focus on visualizing the changing volume of citizens from each country

Final product

Observations & insights

It’s all really complicated—the quantitative data posed a lot more questions than it provided answers

Correct and accurate data point-level analysis of this volume of aggregated data is virtually impossible

While things stay more constant than not, there definitely are clear spikes and drop-offs

Countryman tend to follow their own—Correlation? Causation?