August 4, 2015

‘How We Spent It’: UW infographic designs get attention from Seattle Police Department

When UW design professor Karen Cheng collaborated with students to create an infographic from publicly available City of Seattle data and published it in a local design magazine, the result was so good they were invited to present their work to the Seattle Police Department.

Cheng, professor in the School of Art + Art History + Design, worked with design graduate student Catherine Lim and seniors Melissa Leith and Karlie Grasle to create two infographics, one on how public money is spent and the other analyzing police salary and overtime expenditures. She sent the images to the local design magazine ARCADE, which published them in July.

The work came to the attention of Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole, who invited Cheng and her students to present their work to city police budget analysts on July 17. Design graduate student Chad Hall created additional infographics especially for that meeting.

Cheng, a former member of the magazine’s editorial board, capped the work off with an essay that ran in ARCADE alongside the infographics. In “Where Does the Money Go? Two Visualizations of City of Seattle Data,” she wrote that it’s encouraging to see government providing data to the public online, where crowdsourcing can help bring analysis to help the citizenry better understand its government.

“By openly sharing their information, government officials hope to attract and enlist the help of data scientists from universities, think tanks, nonprofit organizations and corporations,” she wrote, adding that their two infographics “are examples of this kind of effort.”

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For more information about Cheng and her work, contact her at kcheng@uw.edu.