“I’m excited to see how we can use these tools to make complicated data more digestible to the community and sometimes even fun.”
We’re an interconnected nationwide team, but we each have our own reasons for being passionate about the work we do. This month, get to know Doreen Gui in our Oakland office.
Read the transcript:
Businesses are growing their new development at a place that will attract more customers and provide more benefit, and it’s the same idea for transportation. When choosing those new land use developments, we’re providing the option and the benefit to the most people.
My background is in civil engineering, and I chose the major partly because I was born and raised in Shanghai, China where I was very spoiled by the transit system there. There’s usually a metro train coming every 3 minutes, so I never got in the habit of checking the schedule before. And when I turned 18, I almost didn’t want a driver’s license, which is very different from the experience in the US. So it just got me very interested in how transportation plays a role in people’s life and how it can shape the city and areas around it.
I am going to visit Amsterdam soon and I’m super excited about that because I always hear how they designed the city for bicyclists. I think I’m an average biker who bikes at an average speed according to Google Maps. I’m excited to find out how slow I am compared to the real bikers!
While traveling, especially on international trips, I often don’t speak the language. I may or may not have data on my phone, I might not have the transit app that tells me when the trains or buses are coming, and sometimes I don’t even have a transit pass. Sometimes it’s stressful, and sometimes it can be smooth if the system is well designed and intuitive. That experience just reminds me—whether it’s a big transit system we’re designing or a little report we’re publishing to the public—to always be mindful that we’re communicating with the broader audience.
One of the biggest challenges in my work is both lack of data and too much data sometimes. Everyone is familiar with the lack of data part; sometimes we just really wish we can have access to the volume data, speed data, or ped bike activity data so that we can do a better analysis, but for the opposite situation sometimes it’s also challenging when we have so many metrics across multiple data sources. If they point to the same story, then it’s great, but sometimes they don’t. They might lead to different results and point us to different directions.
For us, our job is to understand those different data sources, where they got their data from, what their methodology is, and be able to see and tell what are some outliers that might cause those discrepancies. So there are a lot of tools we’re using in my recent projects, including text, figures, data dashboard, animation, and sometimes even interactive maps. I’m really excited to see how we can use these tools to make complicated data more digestible to the community and sometimes even fun for them to click around and learn more about what we’re doing.