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Airbnb is a hospitality service that enables people to rent a place to stay in a multitude of locations around the world. This service is much less expensive than hotels and can be more accommodating to needs as it is renting another individual’s room, home, or even an igloo instead of a single costly hotel room. The data from all of the online transactions was recorded and Rachel Binx turned it into a work of art.
Rachel Binx is an American data visualizer, developer, and designer. She has worked at Stemen Design and NASA and is also a co-founder of Meshu and Gifpop. While working at Stemen, she was assigned to create a visual representation of all places people have traveled to and from utilizing Airbnb. Her design utilized data from Airbnb’s top 50 markets listed in a circular pattern. Lines were then drawn in between locations with the thickness of the lines being dependent on the number of travels between each pair of locations.
Originally only designed to be on a presentation by Airbnb’s CEO, it turned into this abstract design that is both visually pleasing and informational. I really admire her design as it shows data in an interesting and intuitive manor. The data taken from the travels between areas could have easily been written out in an uninteresting fashion with places listed next to their given volume of travel. This would make it difficult to quickly examine the places with the highest/lowest volume of travel between each pair. She did not only turn the data into a easily legible design, but she turned it into artwork.