This post is by Jenny Ramaswamy of the Google Creative Lab. Jenny is a
Marketing Manager on the Creative Lab's Data Arts team. Outside of work, Jenny likes to go on
adventures to remote international locations.
Like it or not, Americans have a
date with the IRS today. In a few hours, our tax forms will have been sent in... yet most of
us will still be left wondering, “How will the government spend our money?”
In February, we launched
the Data Viz Challenge to answer that
very question. The challenge was a five-week competition that asked developers to visualize
how our federal income tax dollars are spent. We received more than 40 thought-provoking
entries that each take a unique approach to making this data more accessible to
taxpayers.
Take a look at the variety of visualizations in this short
video:
The entries ranged from quirky and fun
to serious and academic. Some were as simple as a receipt, others showed us how many
minutes or days we work to cover public spending.
One even rendered the data as a
cityscape and invited people to climb the towers virtually.
In the
end, our jury
selected Anil Kandangath’s “Where Did My
Tax Dollars Go?” as our Grand Prize winner. As the jury noted, his entry is
information-rich but elegantly designed, and at no point while interacting with the
visualization do you lose the “big picture.” Anil’s entry is a great example of how data
visualization can take boring, complicated, but critically important information and make it
accessible to everyone. Congratulations, Anil.
Thank you to all of the entrants and our
partners Eyebeam and Whatwepayfor.com for making this possible. We
hope these submissions help you better understand where your tax dollars are spent—and even
inject a little bit of fun into your tax day this year. Happy filing!
