Well this week Amazon finally chose not just one city for its HQ2, but two—New York and Washington. Of course Philadelphia had been angling for the site. Alas, it was not to be. So let’s work with that for this Friday post.
Credit for this one is mine.
Earlier this March the Washington Post published a piece looking at the twenty finalist contenders for the second Amazon headquarters. Specifically it explored how the cities rank in metrics that speak to a city’s technology and innovation economy.
That in and of itself, while incredibly fascinating, is not noteworthy in and of itself. Though I will say the article’s online title is neatly presented, split half-and-half with the vertical graphic showing the cities ranked.
But the point that was really neat was the interactivity that followed. Here you can see a dropdown from which the user selects a city of interest—surprise, surprise we are looking at Philadelphia. From that point on, the piece keeps the selected city highlighted in every graphic that follows.
Again, that is nothing truly surprising, but it is neat to see. What would have taken it to the next step is if each of those associated paragraphs were tailored to the specific city. Instead, they appear to be general paragraphs.
But overall, it does a really nice job of comparing the twenty cities—it’s actually fewer because both Washington and New York have multiple sites per metro area—across the different metrics.
The only part that left me scratching my head a bit was the colour choice. I am not certain that it needs the blue-green to yellow-green palette. Those colours seem defined by a city’s placement on the overall list and I am not convinced that the piece would not have still worked if they had been only a single colour, using another colour to define the selected city.
Credit for the piece goes to Darla Cameron and Jonathan O’Connell.
One of the stories I am interested to work on visualising in that mythical land of free time is a comparison of potential host cities for Amazon’s recently announced HQ2, a second corporate headquarters. In the meantime, I read this piece from the Times that attempted to decide for them.
I have some qualms with it, first that it excludes other North American cities—I would not be surprised to see Toronto win the headquarters. I have doubts that Mexico City would work, but it is possible. But my biggest problems are with the exclusionary nature of the selection. That is, within this set, cities that have x. Of the cities that have x, the cities that have y, and so on and so forth.
Personally I suspect Amazon will be looking at which cities not only fit the most requirements, but also which cities will ultimately give them the best business deal. And that I think is a very difficult to describe category.
But it is fun to try.
Credit for the piece goes to Emily Badger, Quoctrung Bui, and Claire Cain Miller.
