Knaflic emphasizes the importance of understanding context before beginning a project. Context refers to the intended audience, the audience’s needs and wants, and which aspects of the data one should communicate. Our contextual knowledge originated from our meeting with Eddie Gisemba. Thanks to this meeting, we were able to identify our audience (Oberlin Administration and the Board of Trustees), as well as their wants and needs. In our case, the “what” that the “who” wanted was to understand the overall state of health and wellness on campus, identify high risk groups, and identify problem areas and risk factors. At that point, we as a class moved on to the “how” by splitting into preliminary groups to analyze data from a variable-centered approach. Ultimately, however, it was decided that a person-centered approach would better suit the wants and needs of the audience, and so we altered our methods. Members of the groups changed, as did the groups’ areas of focus. This gets at a later point of Knaflic’s, which states that showing familiar work/data to a fresh pair of eyes can improve clarity. After our new teams formed and we began approaching the data from a new perspective, we quickly realized that using risk groups would allow for easy communication of the…show more content… I think that the assignment to bring in different visualizations of the same data was incredibly enlightening and important as I think it helped solidify that bar graphs were the way to go in most of our cases. Additionally, we were mostly consistent with color in the final report. However, I also know that in the report, labeling of tables and graphs was inconsistent at best, as was referencing them in the text itself. However, I think that primarily comes down to communication combined with the poor timing of Spring Break, and it is a lesson to learn
