Number Of Tapwater Connections in Rural India
Data Sculpture
Brief
To make a data visualization that is beyond two dimensions.
The Approach
Initiating the brainstorming with an inspiring article by Shobhan S., we had an idea of the output that was expected from us. Our team came up with a few ideas and amongst them, this topic was selected.Data Selection
The data of Food wastage was inadequate and outdated. Loneliness, an impactful idea to demonstrate, was rejected due to the same reason too. We were left with ideas of manifesting Tapwater connections, Plastic waste, River pollution, and Number of students moving abroad. Among the list, we had a precise and updated dataset of Tap Water connections and the idea seemed impactful to us.
Manifesting Data
Many ideas came while trying to manifest the data. We had an idea of making a map of India with the states carved into a cavity. The depth of cavity would represent the amount of Tap Water connections in each state. The idea being difficult to execute in a short span of time and the difficulty for the people to observe the data led to the rejection of this idea.
The cavity depth represents the number of rural tap water connections in the given state
The introduction of tap water to every home eliminates the need of going far to the waterbody or a common hand pump to get water. For us an earthen pot seemed to be a clever idea to be a visual unit to represent the amount of connections of each state. The idea was to pile up the amount of pots to represent the amount of absent tap water connections. For instance if a state has 45% tap water connections, the remaining 55% of them do not have the connection. Bringing that many pots was unfeasible at that time. This idea could have given the wrong idea in the minds of observers as the setup could mean the “amount of water available” not the tap water connections.
The number of pots represent the remaining percentage (absence) of tap water connections
Continuing with the map, we thought to represent the amount of connections using a water droplet. The size of the droplet would depict the amount of tap water connections. The map would be installed perpendicular to the ground and the droplets would hang from the top. The potential issue in this would have been the visibility of the data. The threads would probably obstruct the viewing of the map.
The size of droplets represent the percentage of tap water connections
Finalization Of Idea
Inspired by Matthew Lehanneur’s State Of The World, we had an idea of making something more abstract, that does not require a map of India. We had to incorporate the tap in our project and we had an idea of assembling a tap on a pipe and containers lined in front of it. The core of this idea was to mimic the feeling of a rural setting where people would line up to fetch water.
States would be aligned in decreasing order of tap water connection percentage
The transparent glasses are filled with colored water, leveled to represent the amount of connections in the given state of India. The glass is labeled with the state data on the bottom. The overall data of India is represented by a bigger container. Setting up this project on a table, we mentioned the number of households having tap water connection in a given state along with the glass of the state.
Implementation
Installation
A Project by Manav Ahire, Yukta Moryani, and Shreya Shrivastava
