IXD104 – Week 9 – Visualising Data

This weeks lecture showed me how significant data is in the modern world and how it is all around us. I noted a few different information designers that we were shown in our lecture and had a closer look at them and their work, starting with

Giorgia Lupi:

Giorgia Lupi is an Italian information designer, a partner at design firm Pentagram, and former co-founder of research and design firm Accurat. She is a co-author of Dear Data, a collection of hand drawn data visualizations, along with information designer Stefanie Posavec. Giorgia Lupi and experimental musician Kaki King used their art to understand and communicate the information that was missing. Due to King’s daughters lack of platelets she would bruise easily so the two artists decided to make these bruises into a piece of art.

Lupi structured a non-linear timeline, where each one of the white petal-like elements indicates a new day. Days are grouped in sections: the moments between the child’s admissions to the hospital for blood tests, and the days that felt more monumental in King’s family’s experience. Thus, in the visualization, a new group of days started with each a lab test.

Red dots at the beginning of the group represent the platelet counts from the test results. The normal range of platelets in the blood is 150–400. At the beginning of the recorded period, counts of 1, 7, and 30 appear; numbers that have powerful meaning and trigger deep emotions. Lupi then incorporated King’s observations of her child’s skin, experimenting with ways to visually depict the symptoms of the disease through the use of different drawing materials. She used purple and green splotches to represent the intensity of bruises on the child’s body: the bigger, more intense and more colorful the splotches, the broader and deeper the bruises.

Stephen Wildish:

Stephen Wildish has a habit of collecting everyday items and then presenting them to you in an easily digestible viewing experience, with his popular slogan ‘Take two tablets of Stephen’s art twice a day until symptoms subside.’ To me his work was the most interesting as he took pointless and random pieces of information and designed them into interactive and thought provoking graphics with some silly ones thrown in also.

David McCandless:

 David McCandless is a British data-journalist, writer, and information designer. McCandless is the founder of the visual blog Information Is Beautiful. Early explorations into the synergy between data visualisation and his work as a journalist led to the development of Information Is Beautiful and the subsequent publication of his book of the same name.

Jer Thorp:

 Jer Thorp is a Canadian data artist from Vancouver, British Columbia. Before becoming a data artist, he was originally trained as a geneticist. He holds an adjunct faculty position at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Todays lecture gave me an insight into how to properly structure data through an infographic style piece of work, and being able to make the data interesting through the use of icons and suitable colour. I now will use what I have learned to help me sketch my initial plans for my infographic while also narrowing down on a potential topic for the poster.