The purpose of my poster will be to inform viewers about the benefits of becoming an organ donor. When I got my state identification, I had no question about whether or not I wanted to become an organ donor. At this current time, there are over one hundred thousand people on the list waiting for a new organ and, on average, eighteen people a day die from waiting (American Transplant Foundation). There are some misconceptions about what happens when someone becomes an organ donor such as people thinking the doctors would not work as hard to save an organ donor’s life. This poster can hopefully show that all the amount of organs and how much help (and how much more help is needed) organ donors provide.

The data that will be used in my poster is located on the U.S Department of Health and Human  Services website and was collected by UNet, created by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which is an “online database system for the collection, storage, analysis, and publication of all OPTN data pertaining to the patient waiting list, organ matching, and transplants.” It everything one might need to know about the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). It has national, state, and regional data that consists of filters such as donor type, donor age, donor ethnicity, donor gender, donor by death, etc, from as far back as 1988 to the present (it is constantly being updated to the minute). It also has transplant data, the waiting list, waiting time, and percent transplanted. I specifically need data only about donors and transplants, as well as waiting time and deaths. The U.S.  Department of Health and Human Services already has an infographic from a couple of years ago but I plan to go more in-depth than it does. OPTN Data.

It might be a problem to export all the data because it’s interactive data that I can change based on the filters I have chosen but I DO have access to the data. So a step in production will be to find a way to get the data in friendly format. I will use Processing and Illustrator as my main tools to create the visualization. These programs are located on my computer and it will be printed at school.

PDF: Organ Donations Comp