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Episode #148: Jessica Bellamy
185 Plays6 years ago
International speaker, Adobe Creative Residency alumna, and award-winning infographic designer, Jessica Bellamy, graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Louisville (UofL) with degrees in Drawing (BFA), Graphic Design (BFA), Pan African Studies (BA), and a minor in Communication. As...
The post Episode #148: Jessica Bellamy appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Podcast Delays and Introductions
00:00:11
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Policyviz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Sorry this episode is coming to you a few days late. I've been a little busy this week moving offices from the west end of Washington, D.C. over to Loughlin Plaza, where the Urban Institute has a shiny, great new building. And I've been teaching a data visualization class over at Georgetown University. So that's been taking up a bunch of my time.
00:00:36
Speaker
But I'm really excited to get this episode out to you because in it I chat with Jessica Bellamy who created a social enterprise that combines grassroots organizing, research, information graphics, workshops, and teaching. She named the business GRIDS, the Grassroots Information Design Studio, and she is located in the Midwest. And so I was really happy to chat with her.
00:00:58
Speaker
I saw Jessica first at the Information Plus Conference in Germany late last year, so I will link to her talk. The video I believe is up, so I'll link to that and you should definitely take a look at it because it really was a really great energetic talk. So we talk about all the work that Jessica is doing and how she got started in data visualization and the sorts of things that she teaches in her workshops and her classes.
Supporting the Podcast
00:01:21
Speaker
Just a quick note, if you'd like to support the show, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter. You can donate just as little as three bucks a month, five bucks a month, support the show and help me continue bringing great guests with pretty decent sound quality and of course transcripts for those who may not be able to listen to the show. And it also helps me support all the other things that I need to make this show come to you every and every other week.
00:01:49
Speaker
You could also just support the show by sharing it on your favorite social media network or reviewing the show on your favorite podcast provider. So let's get to
Jessica Bellamy's Journey into Data Visualization
00:02:00
Speaker
the show. This is my interview with Jessica Bellamy from Grids. Hi, Jessica. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me.
00:02:11
Speaker
Great to chat with you. I saw your talk at InfoPlus and Potsdam well now a few months ago and I unfortunately didn't like you were surrounded by people after your talk so I didn't get to meet you in person but I'm glad we're able to at least chat on the phone. Do you want to talk a little bit about yourself and your background and the work you're doing there in Louisville?
00:02:35
Speaker
Absolutely. First off, did I, did I say it right? Like I know there's a whole thing, right? Cause it's not, it's right. It's not Louisville. It's like a little more like back of the tongues or like Louisville. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely lazy, but that's the way we practice it. And that's how you know, folks are actually from the city. That's right. That's right. That's how I know.
00:03:03
Speaker
So you're an info designer and you have your own studio and you run this information design studio there. So maybe you just talk about your background and how you became interested in data visualization and the work you're doing now. Absolutely. So I guess my interest arose
00:03:23
Speaker
Back when I was in college, I ended up triple majoring, single minoring, and doing this summa cum laude thesis because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do, but I knew that I wanted it to be at the cross section of art and design and increasing cultural competency. So I was really interested in studying different methods for creating
00:03:49
Speaker
critical conversations like dialogue that would really help people transform through uncomfortable
00:03:55
Speaker
issues such as race and gender politics and so forth and so on. And so I ended up majoring in Pan-African studies, graphic design, drawing, and I minored in communication. I wrote this thesis comparing all these different types of design to really try to figure out what was the best place to really start finding this way for social impact. And after college, the funny thing was I actually did not continue
00:04:23
Speaker
With anything artistic, I went right into going full time at this lab I was working at. During college, I worked as an undergraduate research assistant in this psychology lab called the Neurodevelopmental Science Lab at the University of Louisville. And I was there for about five years, but when I graduated, they offered me what I thought was a very delightful proposal.
00:04:45
Speaker
to become a research analyst there and that they would like teach me a lot of things I need to know about data collection, about how to work with participants, administering tests. I could work with grad students and it opened my world to this kind of academic scholarly data taking sort of scope for this realm that I definitely hadn't been as ingrained in
00:05:10
Speaker
Until I started working there and then even more so once I started working there full-time in this position During that time period. Oh, also it was very exciting to have Healthcare as a person be going from student to you know, it's all thing. It was so amazing. It was like what I get healthcare with my work and this was amazing But anyway,
Grassroots Efforts and Community Advocacy
00:05:36
Speaker
so
00:05:36
Speaker
I went into that and because I still had a very strong draw to what was going on in my community and trying to find better ways to shape how things were evolving, at least on a local scale, I joined a lot of organizations that had
00:05:53
Speaker
opportunities for volunteering and for community organizing, organizations such as Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which is a statewide organization, the Network Center for Community Change, and I started working with the community. It wasn't until I was a part of one particular project in a neighborhood that I'm from, called Spoketown, that I really started combining a lot of these fields of study and pools of thoughts that I had
00:06:21
Speaker
developed since college and this project was where Smoketown, which is a historically black neighborhood, it was starting to see a lot of changes because there was interest in expanding their urban core and so this historically black neighborhood was essentially going to go through a lot of bouts of gentrification because of the interest of developers in the area. So Kentuckians for the Commonwealth decided to be a part of
00:06:48
Speaker
collecting the comments, the concerns, the priorities of residents who were still in this community that was rapidly changing so that they could be meshed with the way the neighborhood was evolving.
00:07:00
Speaker
We collected all this data, we went door to door, and we knew we wanted to make a report that we would share with developers, with city officials, folks like that, folks with power in the way that this neighborhood was changing. And when we created the report, the funny thing was the most powerful position for that report wasn't
00:07:20
Speaker
in the hands of the developers, actually, in the hands of the residents themselves. That was the first report that I started making infographics for, but I think that helped break down the Steering Path of Information Act from a 55-question survey. Being able to make all that content more easily digestible created this opportunity for residents to be armed with the statistics, to create their own change and be
00:07:47
Speaker
the governing body of what their neighborhood could look like. Like the first time I ever saw someone weaponize the report against a council member in a public forum, I was ecstatic to say the least. I felt so energized and like I created this powerful tool and I was like, well, shoot, I should do this all the time. I should try to mobilize as much information and put it in the hands of people that are affected by the data itself.
00:08:12
Speaker
As often as I possibly can so I took a leap of faith like I'd say the little nest egg from my position at the lab and Started grids The grassroots information design studio, so I've had it for four years now, and I have consistently worked with nonprofits community groups
Social Impact Projects and Visual Literacy Challenges
00:08:32
Speaker
and all these really wonderful social initiatives, the majority of them have been local, like within Louisville and Kentucky, but I have been a part of a few national things with like Cities United, Research Generation, and it's just been a wonderful journey. That's great. I want to quick ask, so do you feel like your experience at the lab
00:08:57
Speaker
prepared you to do the data work that you needed to do in this, at least in the first social movement that you're working on in Smokedown? The perspective that most folks have when it comes to data when they see a data set is their concerns are mostly around surface credibility of it. And there's not a lot of diving deep into what that data
00:09:19
Speaker
says, right, based on the way that it's utilized in the survey or in your final document, how it's portrayed. I was able to create more critical observations with what we had collected. I do feel like it allowed me to just have a more insightful eye around how the narrative was being portrayed and what were some things that we can correlate
00:09:47
Speaker
or at least placed together to begin to have more conversations about access and assets and the history of disenfranchisement for the neighborhood itself and a lot of the entitlements that the community should have had that they don't based on neighboring neighborhoods.
00:10:09
Speaker
At the same time, when you were there, as someone coming from sort of a communications and design background, did you have any frustration with the graduate students and the senior researchers who maybe didn't have those same education and design skills? I had to make my work look more like what traditional research reports look like. If I was collecting data or had to organize or clean data for a grad student, if it looked too well put together, it was criticized.
00:10:39
Speaker
That was weird because there's an aesthetic that you have to have to be taken seriously. It's just part of the respectability politics of that world. And I just had to accept it. I do appreciate being able to see data design and organization from a different perspective than just the aesthetic realm, because I think that allowed me to focus more on the function first.
00:11:05
Speaker
I already know how to visualize something that's going to be clean and easily digested by someone who is not familiar with this type of plot design. That's one thing that I think is really interesting about information graphics and data visualizations is you have to realize that there is a visual literacy that comes with the way you form your chart or diagram or graph. If people aren't familiar with how to take in that information,
00:11:31
Speaker
it's gonna be not absorbed, you know, it's not gonna be processed by the individual. And the graphs that I began to be just more comfortable with, I do think that opened my eyes to a lot of different diagrams that I don't think I would have typically felt comfortable with. I think it also helped me to become more comfortable with information clutter and overload because some of these, you know, massive, massive,
00:11:58
Speaker
access documents and programs that we had because we were using programs like salt for linguistic coding. And when you look at all that data in the Excel sheet, that's ridiculously large and you're inputting it into access, which has so many different coded whatnots in it. I think it could be very easy to get overwhelmed.
00:12:20
Speaker
and daunted by that process and kind of just not want to deal with it. But I do feel very comfortable with way too much information, which I get from clients often, you know, and folks are like, I want to make an infographic. They may not know exactly what needs to go into it. But a lot of times I get sent like a thousand different things to read and look at. And then I have to sift through to make a one page explainer. And yeah, I think it made me really beast mode in that light.
Public Health Projects and Data Accessibility
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, I want to ask you about the infographics and the tools and the workshops that you do as well. But before I get to that, I want to ask you about the types of projects, the work that you're doing now, the social impact work, like, what are the sorts of community projects that you're that you're working on now or over the last four years or so, especially the ones that you think the information graphics that you've done in the database you've done have helped to really affect change. I think that's
00:13:18
Speaker
thing a lot of people in the field struggle with is, you know, they want to, you know, they want to make something that that helps people, you know, improve the world or affect change. And it sounds like just from that that first story you told of just as volunteer that you did that you did have an impact. And I'm curious about the sorts of things that you're doing now, in terms of the different content areas and the challenges that different neighborhoods in Louisville are having. Absolutely. I would say, leading up to now the
00:13:46
Speaker
main, outside of the Smoketown project, the two main projects where I felt like there were tangible traction, like the distance between intention and impact is a wise chasm. Instead of just aiming at intention, the ones that actually had some really great traction that was visible with even within newspapers, or I was the person that designed and
00:14:12
Speaker
helped put together the People's Guide to the Budget for Louisville, Kentucky. And so what the People's Guide to the Budget as a project was, was I was working as a Kentuckians for the Commonwealth member and we as an economic justice team within this area decided that we wanted to break down
00:14:32
Speaker
The budget, because if you look at what our city budget is, over 75% of it goes to what they call safety. And the majority of that is policing. And do I think that reflects the priorities and concerns of residents in Louisville, Kentucky? No, I don't really think so.
00:14:48
Speaker
and our affordable housing has gone down and there's so much like housing instability in our city. Well what about what are we actually doing for that? There's so many questions we were asking and we were looking at this 300 some odd page document that our city prints out every single year of where the money goes and we realized how undigestible it was but how that was a key to really start
00:15:11
Speaker
pushing the right buttons for folks to be galvanized around these issues because money, money affects everything, every, everything socially. And so when we started deconstructing that project, there was about three of us within Haganov justice team that were like going as hard as we could on it. And then, um, we were able to get a lot of folks because the Trump administration, I actually, there were so many people that joined nonprofits and community organizing work after he became president. So it was really great. We had a lot of people to help us out with this project.
00:15:41
Speaker
But essentially we created this document that broke down three really key issues that Louisville is facing and put action items explicitly to it. And it's a great report because it functions as a series of one-page explainers so that if you really are focused on affordable housing, there is a one-page explainer that you can use in your council meetings and so forth and so on. And what it led to was there were a few council members here in our city that started creating participatory budgets
00:16:10
Speaker
like budgets where the neighbors like the residents within their jurisdiction can allocate funding to whatever they want right through a process that they create and also
00:16:21
Speaker
Because we did this, we created such a stink where folks were rallying around like, we want this to change, do something that they had to actually set a calendar for a release. So before the mayor didn't have to say when he would have his draft ready, we just knew that he would create the first draft of the budget. It would go to the council members. The council members would vote on it and then it would be passed. So we didn't know when the mayor would release it. And we, and if you don't know when it's going to be released,
00:16:51
Speaker
and when it's going to be passed, then you don't know when you have time to intervene with your council members. And so an actual calendar was created, a timeline, which is great. So it created a lot of opportunities for community conversations that actually affect how our budget is shaped.
00:17:06
Speaker
And another project that had really great traction was I created a new citizens voter guide for the Kentucky Refugee Ministries. It's Kentucky Refugee Ministries partnered with one other organization that also works with folks that are coming into global from various different countries that are becoming citizens.
00:17:29
Speaker
but want to be plugged in, right? So this guide had to have very few words, very few words, and still explain the entire process of how to register to vote, how to go and vote, how to absentee vote. At one point, they wanted me to also put in the difference between Republican and Democratic parties. And I was like, if we're putting few words in this, I just don't see how we can do that. But the great thing about that project was the opportunity to work with a lot of different types of folks.
00:17:56
Speaker
Because when you think about how you render vectors, even if it's an icon that's supposed to look like a computer, or a computer looks completely different to someone who has this experience versus someone who has that experience. And color palettes matter, right? Color definitely leads to, it's connected with our culture. So like a cobalt blue can be a funerary color in some cultures, so forth and so on, like these types of nodes.
00:18:19
Speaker
And that project expanded so far that the New Citizens Voter Guide was translated into 16 different languages by the end of the project. And since then, we're working on even updated versions because that project has been around for the last year and a half, two years, something like that. And then currently, I'm doing a lot of projects that have to do with public health.
00:18:47
Speaker
There's a project that I'm working on with a data collection hub that is contracted with our public school system within Kentucky. And they release this report every year that has to do with key issues that affect elementary school and middle school students, anything from mental health, physical health, all that stuff.
00:19:10
Speaker
And what they found out from doing this project is that some people use it and some people just put it on their shelf. I mean, that's the nature of a really thick report. People love having really thick reports, but do they open it? And do they open it more than once?
00:19:27
Speaker
We've created, we're starting to develop this campaign that will help folks learn how to leverage it, maybe even make their own information design. We're actually coming up with that workshop and we're coming out with some really interesting media pieces for the web. Like they already have a really comprehensive platform that holds all this data, but what are ways that we can create vignettes
00:19:52
Speaker
to help activate the data. And so that's been a very fun project that I've come into the new year doing. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. You had mentioned something earlier about the different type of graphs and how people understand them or don't. And then you've also talked about how color and icons and all sort of the design elements play together. And I'm curious,
00:20:15
Speaker
when you are thinking about designing things for different audiences, when you are creating the graphs, how do you think about a graph that may be appropriate or easily read by one audience, but not another for, I don't have a great example of the top of my head, but like, you know, a scatter plot, for example, like for some people, like scatter plots are really complicated. And although a couple of bar charts or line charts may be easier for them to read, maybe it doesn't give them the same
00:20:42
Speaker
you know, visual of the relationship between the data. So I'm curious how you think about creating graphs that are maybe a little less standard, but maybe show the data in a better way, or just, you know, they're more engaging. You know, just just those different audiences and how you think about guiding people through these sort of different types of graphs.
Innovative Teaching Methods for Infographics
00:21:04
Speaker
I think a lot of the graphs and diagrams
00:21:08
Speaker
that we're traditionally used to seeing, I think we get from school, just from word problems and math. So people love pie charts and bar graphs and overuse them for that reason. But I do, so number one, I do think it's really important to try to diversify what type of charts and diagrams you use because if you continuously use the same sort of visual rhetoric, it may make
00:21:32
Speaker
a really important data point seemed like next to nothing because it's too familiar, you know? Because that communication strategy is always key. But I do think that
00:21:44
Speaker
Since we're now in an era where adding motion to information design is becoming more accessible through the software that's available and different strategies you can use to add motion to things, that helps educate folks on what graphs mean. Like when I think about anything that has any nesting or layer, like if it's like a mosaic,
00:22:09
Speaker
It's a type of bar chart where like sections of it's like, oh, well of these 100 voters.
00:22:16
Speaker
50% were women, right? And so that 50%, like having something grow in that, but then having all these other relational things that create the mosaic template is, I think not always easy to read at a glance, but when you're using a more narrative led through motion, through actual tangible motion, whether it's a gift or a video, it allows people to understand what story the data is telling. I've definitely seen some
00:22:45
Speaker
very, very complicated data visuals that I think are easily understood by the way that they move. Some examples of that. I definitely have seen some things on Behance from folks that are charting large amounts of data over time, even the Create Lab at Carnegie Mellon. Well, I had the great fortune of doing some work with last year. That was pretty excellent. But they were showing me their, they have this Earth, Earth lapse,
00:23:14
Speaker
or time lapse software that they've developed, where they already have a lot of data that's inputted in there through the census, but it just shows that data over time. And through the motion of showing all that data, it doesn't matter how complex it is, a narrative begins by what you see. And so even though it may seem complex, I do think motion is creating more usability
00:23:41
Speaker
and bridging some of those literacy gaps for more complex structures or just different structures of information design.
00:23:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about the other side of your design firm. So you have the social impact work and obviously the contract work, but then you're also doing infographics workshops and you also have some tools that you've created and have some work coming out. So tell me a little bit about how you approach the teaching of infographics and who you are trying to teach and how you have that work. Absolutely.
00:24:18
Speaker
Well, I kind of have three basic principles. I definitely focus on grounding elements.
00:24:26
Speaker
First, which has to do with my conscious and responsible principles of design, making sure that I talk about paradigmics and design, definitely being mindful and sensitive to the way that you're portraying stuff, disaggregating your data, algorithm, bias, all those sorts of things before we get into the next two sections, which are definitely the play and the practice. I've been trying to find as many ways as possible to make the utilitarian cost of learning something different, a little bit more easy.
00:24:56
Speaker
So that's why I created the infographic wheel, which is essentially like an infographic library to help you look through different layouts. And I'm developing new tools to, it's along the same lines.
00:25:14
Speaker
I'm not sure how deep I want to go into that because I haven't released anything about it yet, but I'm definitely combining it with some game board games that will make the learning pretty fun. So that's why I started doing monthly seminars to kind of get some of these new toys that I'm making.
00:25:29
Speaker
And then, of course, the practice, the actual application of what you've learned, that is a key component because until you actually have to critically think through these data problems, you will not, especially in a space where you have someone that you can refer to, ask questions of, get feedback from, then it's going to help you hone that skill.
00:25:53
Speaker
And I also really love the workshops because I require everybody to draw. I love it. It doesn't sound like we have them on a computer. No, I really believe that anyone could do information design. And the first thing you have to do to make sure that everyone feels like they can access that space is by making it no tech or low tech. It's the first thing you have to do. And by also
00:26:18
Speaker
Doing the play part it helps build confidence and folks drawing skills like I have a couple of drawing games that I have people do to practice their icon drawing and Everybody in the room always ends up giggling and laughing and having a good time Because of really these kind of complex ideas of what's a schema like what? What will resonate with the most minimal representation but in a gamified form so that you're not really you're not really thinking you're just literally a
00:26:46
Speaker
putting something down on a paper and realizing that it still can read. And so just to build confidence through these small practices, they're just really playful. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much it. It's been a great ride. Like I've done a lot of workshops with a variety of different folks. That's really cool. Like people from different backgrounds, mostly folks that have no creative background, but they're very interested in the genre of information design.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's really cool. I want to ask one more question. It's a little bit of a pivot, but because you do a lot of work with in your community and doing social action, it's and based off a lot of what you talked about at InfoPlus a few months ago, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on
00:27:30
Speaker
the diversity and inclusion in the field of data visualization itself. I know it's something that people talk about in the field, and I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on whether the field itself is diverse enough, whether it's inclusive enough. You know, inclusion can mean lots of different things, right? It can mean different skill sets and, you know, race and gender and demographics, but also, you know,
00:27:52
Speaker
Geographically and all these sorts of things so i'm just curious if you have any experience or thoughts on on the field itself and as it continues to grow what that means for people creating Visual content as people become more and more familiar with with data and data visualization yeah i would definitely say that
Diversity and Bias in Data Visualization
00:28:11
Speaker
the field isn't diverse enough. And I mean it exactly the way you said it. Like there's the component of whether or not the folks are people of color or how many women have been sawed, but also with who considers themselves to be information designers.
00:28:26
Speaker
I don't think that there's enough voices and perspectives or enough people that feel like they can be a part of that community. So I don't think it's very inclusive, but it's getting there. It's getting there because a lot of people are being able to find their voice in how they visualize data and information. And when I think about the homogeny of the leaders of information design and data visualization,
00:28:53
Speaker
What makes the homogeny so problematic is that there's a lot of issues concerning how much power we give to data and technology that has implicit bias built in. I don't know if you've heard of data from Black Lives. There's some great literature out there that has to do with algorithm bias. As we progress in society,
00:29:19
Speaker
There is more emphasis that technology is the most objective solution, but we're not realizing that with the data that we're using, we might be misrepresenting, under representing, exploiting, maybe devaluing qualitative and human experience.
00:29:36
Speaker
We may be just focusing too much on data that doesn't actually have anything to do, so it becomes misinformation. It doesn't have anything to do with the actual problem because it doesn't fully understand it from the way that it's been created. A perfect example of that is when it comes to policing in America, it has become more data-driven.
00:29:58
Speaker
But they're using crime data, like the data of who's been arrested, to learn more things about crime in areas. But what we know is that who gets arrested is not always the person, is disproportionate, right? It's disproportionate, like between what has to do with like drug use.
00:30:17
Speaker
black people do not use drugs more often than white people do but who gets arrested for marijuana smoking and will be sent to a penitentiary for the most minor infraction or possession charge right so if we're going to use data that has to do with arrests to start creating crime profiles then we were already approaching a very complex situation from the wrong angle if we're not even at the in the same
00:30:43
Speaker
place as the problem. We're still operating within that implicit bias. And so I do think there are a lot more voices that are
00:30:53
Speaker
finding themselves in data visualization, information design, and are starting to use the language that we're used to hearing within the data world just so that it can be accepted, which I hate that part, the respectability politics of it all. How do you really start to speak the language of the folks that are the founders of the institution so that you can help them understand so that the whole genre can change and be better?
00:31:22
Speaker
you know because it oftentimes what i find is you may figure out something that is true about a system right if but if you don't know how to communicate that then or if that fact is not received at all because of the messaging i think there is kind of a problem you know
00:31:42
Speaker
with that whole dialogue and how do we fix that? It's like I'm going right back to my summa cum laude team talking about cultural competency. What's the best way to have that dialogue? And how do we break down respectability politics so that we can all work together? But yeah, I do love that now MIT has been hosting the Data for Black Lives conference. And it even being in that space makes a huge difference because it gives more
00:32:11
Speaker
For some folks, it helps give more credence, even though the content is absolutely worthy of being heard. Yeah, absolutely. That's great. I think that's right on. And I think a lot of people who are working with data have yet to sort of understand a lot of the issues that you've mentioned.
00:32:28
Speaker
But it's great. And I'll link, of course, to the Data for Black Live site and to your site and to these various projects that you mentioned. It sounds like you're doing great work, and I look forward to watching it and seeing these new tools and games that you have coming out. I'm always a big fan of Data for the Games, so that's great. Yeah. I'm excited about it, too. Thanks so much. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. It was great chatting with you.
00:32:54
Speaker
And thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I've got another great several episodes set up for the next few months. I'm really excited to bring them to you. Again, if you'd like to support the show, please consider sharing it on your social media networks or writing review on iTunes or becoming a patron on my Patreon page where you can donate just a few bucks a month really helps me provide the great content, sound quality and transcripts for the show. So until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.