Activity: Redesigning Economist Charts
In this activity, students will look at the impact of chart elements on the clarity of the chart’s message and how changing the elements can improve the clarity of the message and avoid confusion.
Download Redesigning Economist Charts Activity Files
Running the activity as a whole class
Choose one or more examples to work through as a class using the quetions as discussion guides.
Running as a small group activity
- Split class into small groups (2-4 people)
- Give each group a copy of an original chart or the link to the original chart
- Ask each group to answer the following questions
- What message is the chart trying to get across?
- What is misleading about this chart or preventing this message from getting across?
- With the above questions in mind, how would you redesign the chart? Sketch our or use your preferred visualization software to redesign the chart.
- Ask each group to share their redesign and show the better versions from the article
- Discuss the misleading and confusing elements and if the group found something different than the article, it’s a great chance to talk about differences in perspectives and the many ways to visualize the same data
- If demonstrating a particular software, you could also demonstrate how to adjust scale and colors
- Some interesting themes that might come up in discussion: Who is the likely audience of this publication? What can they be expected to understand?
Teaching tips for Redesigning Economist Charts
- Depending on the experience level of the students, it may be beneficial to demonstrate or work through one of the examples as a class first
- In some of the charts, it is more difficult to pick out what is misleading so they have been rated as easy, medium, and difficult in the instructor notes so choose the ones that would best fit your group or use the difficult chart as a bonus chart for groups to try if they have time
- With a large class, many groups can be working on the same chart