My idea for the Mainstreaming Information project is to create a visualization of the amount of rats and bedbugs throughout New York City. This idea came to me when I read that there are 6 rats per person in the city, and that sort of freaked me out. After a bit of research, I found out that there is plenty of data on this subject, most notably the NYC Health Rat Information Portal and the New York vs. Bed Bugs website.
The project would start with a simple animation of an uneasy person with 6 rats on his left and a bunch of bedbugs squirming on his right. The user would then click on one of the two sides, which will take her to the in-depth visualization.
 
The visualization will consist of a map showing the concentration of rats or bedbugs at different focuses in New York City. These are:
- The five boroughs
- The many neighbourhoods in a borough
- The subway stations in a neighbourhood
- A single person at this subway station
The focus will change by zooming in and out, through simply clicking on or off the area of interest. This zoom will be accompanied by scattering or flocking of pests as the numbers get adjusted.
The rat or bedbug concentration will be represented as a bunch of animated critters moving around the territory they belong to. Since these numbers are in the millions, the amount of pests shown will be scaled according to the number of people living in the area of focus. For example, if 1 000 000 people live in Manhattan and 5 000 000 rats live in Manhattan, this could be represented as 100 human sprites vs. 500 rat sprites. Each rat sprite will be randomly generated by combining features from a library of ears, eyes, bodies, tails, etc… The rats and the bedbugs will each have their own unique behaviour, representative of their real counterparts.
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