Contraceptives Data Visualization — Winter Kraemer Portfolio

Award-Winning Scientific Illustrator & Designer

Contraceptives vs Class
Contraceptive use, income, and education are all intimately linked, so to speak. This data visualization explores the relationship between such socioeconomic indicators on a global scale and in Canada.

Despite its status as a developed country, wealth disparities in Canada leave many without access to effective and affordable contraception.

Audience

General audience

Tools

Tableau Prep, Tableau Desktop, Excel, Adobe Illustrator

Client

Prof. Shehryar (Shay) Saharan (University of Toronto)

For a detailed description of the development of this piece, including references, please consult the dossier

Design & Development

In my first few attempts at visualizing this topic, I did not graph the data. I wanted to get a sense of how I might to transform raw data into a cohesive narrative.

I focused on finding a graph type that would suit the story behind the data. The birth control packet provided a convenient shape to host a bar chart.

I tried out a few different decorative elements, including a banner with repeating icons of contraceptives.

I excluded it from the final because it did not match the clean, minimalist look I was aiming for.

Data Processing
This piece posed a unique problem:

How do you effectively layer data when information is missing?

When data is incomplete, it’s tempting to hide gaps that may undermine credibility. But the absence of data is informative – it shows you where more research is needed, and who is currently underrepresented.

My design challenge involved combining data on education, income, and contraceptive use.

I pulled data on contraceptive use from the UN and data on income and education from Our World in Data (OWiD).

For the first figure, I used Tableau Prep to combine and clean data from the UN and OWiD. These datasets had enough overlap to be useable, but many countries were excluded due to missing data on multiple variables. Missing data on unmet need was represented with empty circles. This circumvented the issue of excluding an even larger number of countries.

Countries with full data on contraceptive use, education, and income were filled with an image of a birth control pill. This design element mirrors the birth control packet in the second figure.

Data on method of contraceptive use vs income and education was de-identified and unlinked in the Statistics Canada dataset. Since these individual-level associations were excluded, the Sankey diagrams I had originally intended to use were not possible. Furthermore, the dataset had significant ranges of error for the reported numbers and I wanted to capture this variability in my visualization.

Multiple attempts at resolving this issue can be seen in the rough sketches here.

The final solution, proposed by the client, was a collection of bar charts. These highlighted the overall differences in contraceptive use based on education vs income, along with small multiples for each contraceptive method (e.g. condoms, IUD, ...).

The charts highlight the correlation between effective, long-term contraception and higher income. That conclusion points to the link between high socioeconomic class and greater bodily autonomy.

The faded error bars represent the ambiguity posed by large confidence intervals without distracting from the narrative of the graphs. These graphs were created in Excel (left) and refined in Adobe Illustrator (right).

The final piece was originally in a vertical layout. This format was inconvenient for web viewing (on desktop) and printing, although I felt it supported the narrative more effectively than a horizontal layout. One advantage of the horizontal layout is its direct comparison of global vs Canadian contraceptive use.

Reach out whenever :^)

kraemerwinter@gmail.com