In class we covered briefly how the Olympic Games use data visualisation to demonstrate many different things such as which country has won the most medals, the stats for who they think is going to win a certain event and where the specific venues of each event are.

I decided to look at the Reuter graphics website as they did a lot of data visualisation for the most recent Tokyo 2020 olympics and look at the different type of data they visualised and how they visualised it.

I started off looking at how they visualised where each event took place. This is something I want to add to my own dashboard but struggled to decide how I wanted it to be visualised as building a map turned out to be more difficult than I thought. Reuters displayed this really simply by using a map of Tokyo and the wider area with pin points to demonstrate where each venue was going to take place around Tokyo with the bigger/ more important venues such as the Olympic village and Olympic stadium being labelled too!

To visualizas the data won by medals, they used just a standard table with the axis outlining the country, how many gold, silver and bronze medals they won and the overall medal total. What I also really like about this table is the interactive elements it has such as when you click on each medal type, it highlights which country won the most of that medal. At the top of the table there isn’t much difference for each but the further down you scroll, the more change there is.

Another aspect I really like is the illustrations to visualise each sport. The olympics is of course a world wide sports competition and there is so many different languages spoken so using illustrations or in fact the Olympic pictograms is a great way to visualise each sport and what it entails. From these illustrations it is very easy to tell what the post us such as athletics is a runner, archery is a woman with a bow.

Overall I find it so interesting how Reuters and the Olympic committee visualise data so it can be understood and accessed by a worldwide audience without any problems. As designers we must design for everyone’s needs and understanding and this is a great example just of that.