Thirst for Power Data Visualization

Client
Shehryar (Shay) Saharan, University of Toronto

Year
2025

Audience
General Population

Tools
RAWGraphs, Tableau, Excel, Adobe Illustrator

Description
Integrating freshwater usage and elections data, this data visualization aims to educate Canadians on how political parties in power may impact how freshwater is used.

Data sourced from Elections Canada, provincial/territorial election offices, and the United Nations.

Process

Ideation & Sketching
I began this project imagining it would simply communicate about water usage in Canada. However, as I began my ideation process, which involved various sketches, I became interested in how I could integrate other readily availible data, like politics, into my visualization.

The sketching phase of this project helped me to rapidly ideate and begin to form what would become the basis of this project: drawing the connection between freshwater usage and politics in Canada.

Data Acquisition and Cleanup
I acquired most of my water data using Google Data Commons, which itself sourced data from various United Nations datasets that contained information on Canadian freshwater. Raw data can be found and downloaded at the following links: Water Use Efficiency, Freshwater Withdrawal, and Annual Energy Generation (Google Data Commons, 2025). Water usage data was imported into Tableau Prep for cleanup.

Election data was sourced from Elections Canada and provincial and territorial election offices. Data was formatted and organized in Excel.

Initial Data Visualization
After I had all my data compiled and cleaned, I began deciding how to visualize it. To visualize my water data, I used RAWGraphs, which allowed me to experiment with different types of graphs based on the data that I had.

I tested out a variety of graph types and showed these to my peers as well as general audience members. Many of my trail graphs did not make it into the final piece. This process helped me gain a sense of audience understanding and perception of the data, which helped me to narrow down which graph types might work best.

In addition to displaying data on graphs, I wanted to create a map of Canada that communicated the amount of freshwater in each province/ territory using colour. Specifically, I wanted to use shades of blue to indicate the amount of water in each area, with darker blue indicating that a province or territory had more freshwater and lighter blue indicating less. To do this, I used Tableau.

Design, Layout, and Formatting

            Since I selected a somewhat serious topic related to Canadian water resources and politics, I wanted to make sure my data visualization had a clean, professional, and serious design. For inspiration, I looked at the Government of Canada website ( www.canada.ca). The website was extremely clean and professional. Everything had a white background, the design was modern and simple, and a sans serif font was used throughout. These were elements I decided I wanted to include in my data visualization.

I created an initial layout, which I then received peer feedback on. From this feedback, I learned that some of the graphs could still be made clearer. After closely examining this version, I also decided the design could be made more clean overall. I decided to go back to RawGraphs and change some of my graphs for the final layout.

Final Design and Layout

After receiving feedback from peers, I reworked my data visualizations to include graphs that were more accessible, organized, and offered a cleaner approach to displaying this data. This made a great difference compared to the previous version, allowing for an overall more readable design that could be better understood.

In addition to reworking the graphs, I also added red dots representing national parks onto the map. This was both to indicate where much of Canada’s freshwater can be found and to add a human element to the piece; people might recall visiting some of these parks, which helps make this data more real in the eye of the viewer.

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