The Design of Information

I don’t think I’ve ever found a reasonable use for a coxcomb chart, until now. It seemed to fit the bill for a recent project for The Foundation Center. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, they recently published a synthesis of success factors for small-scale coastal fisheries management in developing countries. The Foundation Center hired us to create an interactive visual representation of their findings.

It appears that fisheries have to balance a number (twenty, to be precise) of factors on different levels to be successful. We ended up using a coxcomb chart (or polar area diagram or rose diagram) as the base for an interactive presentation built on raphael.js. The interaction allows you to visualize how different stakeholders might prioritize the twenty factors, as well as drill down to get more detail about each of the factors.

The coxcomb overlays do a particularly nice job (I think) of showing where there might be gaps in perspective that would encourage you to bring another stakeholder to the table. Overall, I think the impression is that there is a lot to keep tabs on if you are managing a fishery.