SDG data portrait

This project was inspired by the #FutureFridays initiative from infogr8. In their March 2024 edition we approached the visualization of data around the Sustainable Development Goals data. We were guided by Alice Thudt, who was art director for the World Bank SDG Atlas 2023.
I was interested in the interrelations between the different goals and in particular the role of the environment in supporting the rest of the goals ambitions. I quickly found out there is a lot of visualizations developed for SDG in many formats and for many purposes.
I wanted to work with SDG progress data and show the most recent snap-shot portrait of the world and country situation in 2023. My starting points:
IDEA: Show progress with a figure that interrelates the goals and paints them proportionally to the progress for each goal.
GRAPH TYPE: a mixture of proportional bar graph, tree map, or donut but the elements have an organic shape related to the goal. The figure element portrays the idea that nature support the rest. Exact figure tbd , eg a balance structure, a pile, a cord, a net. Something that if some elements thin out the structure suffers.
FORMAT: could be a poster with all figures as small multiples, could be a web page with Interactivity filters (global or by country, by population or by area)
DATA: got it, downloaded from the SDG Index Data Explorer. %progress
I ended up with using the metaphor of balancing stones. It suits to the purpose of interconnectivity and mutual support without having to know and show all the precise interconnections. It also sort of keeps the shape palette of the SDG circle. The only arrangement I did was to place the goals so that from bottom to top there is biosphere, society, and economy (following this idea of the Stockholm Resilience Centre).
Tools: data wrangling with Excel, construction of data portraits with D3 (code here, in case I have time to do an interactive version) and editing in Adobe Illustrator (coloured stones with the help of Firefly).
