JONAH CONLIN

Designer's Dreamscape is a visualization of data from the 2019 Design Census, a survey of roughly 10,000 designers conducted by Google and AIGA.

For this project, our team visualized written responses to one survey question: "What are the most critical issues or challenges currently facing the design industry?" In their responses, designers disclosed not only the pressing issues for the industry but also their wider thoughts, anxieties, misgivings, and hopes. Taken together, these responses are a wonderfully rich portrait of the issues and ideas that are percolating in the design field.

Using Python's NLTK package, I parsed the responses and identified 11 of the most commonly used words. Working with my team, we devised a visualization where each keywords is represented by a circular form on the website. By clicking on a keyword, users can explore what designers had to say about the issue and the semantic connections to other keywords.

In the Future section, users can write their own vision for the future of the design industry and see what past visitors to the site have envisioned. Over time, we hope this project will become a repository of positive visions for the future.