Puerto Rico Exports Complexity:
Finding potential in disregarded public data.
Product Data narrative with static visualizations for mobile phones.
Content An easy to understand five-minutes overview of how Puerto Rico’s main exports perform with respect to Harvard’s Product Complexity Index.
Tools
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Rawgraphs
Excel
Project Overview
The Growth Lab at Harvard University publishes many rigorous economic analysis and visualization tools that enable countries to understand how they are affected by global economic dynamics and their inherent opportunities to stimulate economic growth. These can be found at The Atlas of Economic Complexity.
But what about the countries or territories that don’t appear in these analysis? Are they in disadvantage?
Puerto Rico is one of these territories that have been left out of these rigorous and powerful methods. Either because the data has been deemed unreliable or it has been kept within the aggregate of the United States of America given its Commonwealth status. Whatever the reason, Puerto Rico has become invisible to this potentially transformational information.
The purpose of this project was two-fold. From the narrative perspective, to create awareness and cultivate critical thinking in the topics of economic development, many times considered complex and difficult to understand by the general public. From the data usage and analysis perspective, to seize the opportunity of using disregarded information and transform it into something useful despite its gaps and “uncertainties”.
“I am obsessed with value added, I want my visualizations to have a tangible purpose, for them to be useful to a community or engage them in an emotional way.”
The result was this data narrative that takes the audience through a quick and easy overview of how Puerto Rico’s three main export categories perform in terms of Harvard’s Product Complexity Index.
This project was a final deliverable for an academic course in the MFA in Information Design and Data Visualization.