We Love Dogs

Context

Most of us find it very easy to talk about how much we love and adore dogs. Many of us even have them as pets. Dogs truly are one's most loyal friend. But, even then, we have so many stereotypes towards different dog breeds. Some are aggressive, some are boring, some are too energetic, and so on.

Design Process

I had worked on a project related to animal adoption for my Major Studio class. This was my primary source of inspiration to choose these data sets. I collected the data for reported dog bites in NYC and dog licenses in NYC from NYC Open Data.

I wanted to observe if there was any correlation between which dogs are preferred as pets and which dogs have the most reported dog bites. Here, the reported dog bites were used as a measure for the perceived personality of the particular dog breed.

I considered different forms of visualisations where I would show all dog breeds possible. But I wanted to focus on some of the stark differences. Hence, I chose the top 5 breeds in both data sets. I also avoided including the unknown data for a better depiction.

Final Tool

Reflections

During my research for Major Studio, I learnt that Pitbulls are the most stereotyped breed amongst dog breeds. They are considered aggressive and harmful and in some parts of the USA it is illegal to have them as pets.

When I saw that the most reported dog bites were those of pitbulls, it made me wonder if they are reported because they are pitbulls or if they really are as aggressive as people claim to be. In this data there was no way to verify the circumstances in which these incidents occurred.

As opposed to this, Yorkshire Terriers had the least reported dog bites and most number of licenses, which means more people prefer them as pets. This could also be because they are smaller and in a city like New York, where apartments are small, it is the more convenient option.

The part of the assignment which involved finding the data and deciding how to use it was the toughest. I tried to look for many different types of data before I found this one. Once I figured out how to represent the data for one breed, it was very easy to replicate the same for others. I also faced difficulty in accessing the whole data from the JSON file. Initially, it would only calculate upto the first 1000 data points. Once I was able to solve that issue and create a basic structure of the p5.js sketch was clear, it was a very smooth process. I also used cute images of dogs as a way of showing their docile side and remind people that they don't mean any harm.

Credits

The data was collected from NYC Open Data. The images for the dogs were by Andrew Sterling, Lucia Macedo, Alicia Gauthier, Kanashi and Daria Turchak on Unsplash.