Family, with its most common and conventional definition, is formed by two (married) parents and their children (also called “nuclear family”). As time goes by, the societies in the developed countries became more acceptive of divorce and co-habitation and the attitude to marriage has changed; it provides more freedom for individual to handle the change of life / family situation. Nowadays there are more terms to name different family structure. In this project we would like to provide a platform to look at the statistic data on this topic in a visual and interactive way.
Family patterns are built with rectangles / triangles in different colours, which also represent family members and their relationship.
Overview
0%
Family
in Germany
Data based on the research (published in 2013)
Stief- und Patchworkfamilien in Deutschland.PDF
Remark In order to cover most of the family types, we apply this earlier dataset into the visualisation instead of the dataset from the recent Mikrozensus, in which the nuclear family and stepfamily are not distinguished.
Comparison
0
in Germany
Timeline
SOURCE OF DATA

Population in families / living arrangements: Former territory of the Federal Republic /New Länder, years, living arrangements
Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis)

Anzahl der Alleinerziehenden in Deutschland nach Geschlecht von 2000 bis 2015
Statista GmbH

Design process

Information visualisation is a powerful way to communicate abstract data. With its interactivity, user can explore the information space and discover relations and patterns. The topic itself is pictorial enough that we could come up with the visual concept very quickly at the beginning : Patchwork family. We have been striving for a meaningful way to present our dataset. We encountered challenges i.e.. putting different family pattern (composed by geometric components) in volume to present quantity and make the collective patterns readable and analysable. And we had to compromised on the time when it came to the data scope. We could not find a dataset which meet our intention (different type of family in 2015). In the end we used an earlier dataset to demonstrate our concept in the Overview section. We apply another interactivity and presentation for the dataset with broader time frame in the Comparison and Timeline section.

Evaluation

We hope that this platform would stir up interest to explore and user would find it helpful to gain insight from the data visualisation. As evaluation, we would like to know more about user behaviour on this site. Please feel free to give us some feedback and feel free to share this site around.

Copyright 2017 | Feedback
Course: Information Visualisation (WS 2016/2017 21FVId-AM Advanced Media)
Advisor: Prof. Marian Dörk | Author credit: I Hong Cheng, Kang Zheng Oo | Fachhochschule Potsdam