Understanding my city through dashboards. How hard can it be?

Abstract

This paper describes research into how current city dashboards support users' sensemaking processes. It uses criteria identified in previous research concerning visualisation and applies these to a number of city dashboards that are publicly available and hence considered to be seen as a potential communication tool. The paper briefly describes the context regarding dashboards and gives a broad overview of how visualisation design can affect sense-making processes. Finally it lists the initial results of a 'at a glance'-style review according to a number of sense-making criteria.