So, before I start my talk, for anyone who doesn't know about me, I'll just give you
a little bit of background about myself.
I'm an American who lives in London, although, okay, I'm American and I'm British now, so
I'm dual.
New things since last year, but I work as a self-employed graphic designer and I specialize
in data-related design, so what that means is I just produce a variety of work that kind
of revolves around data visualization, information design, and data illustration, which I will
talk about more later.
So these are just snippets from past projects.
I pick circles because they make a really nice slide when they're all lined up against
each other.
So, those are examples of my projects and many of my data projects, they tend to focus
on text and literature and language, so that's one of my favorite things to work with.
But today's talk is sort of, it feels like it's a response to the data fundamentalist,
and what I mean by the data fundamentalist is that one person who's always out in the
audience when someone is speaking about data visualization, it always makes me laugh whenever
you get to the Q&A after someone's shown some really amazing proper data visualization
work, and there's always that one guy that gets up and he asks this question where he'll
find that one tiny microscopic facet of the whole project that's more of an aesthetic
decision than a data defined decision, and then they'll stand up and question it.
And then it's as though by asking this question in a public setting, they want to show the
world that they know that the designer lets emotional subjectivity sneak into something
that's meant to be rigorous and functional.
And they just want to show the world that they know that the designer's made a mistake.
And I always find that really funny, it always makes me laugh just because it's really interesting
to see how black and white some people can be when it comes to data, either every single
aesthetic choice must have a data-driven reason or the whole thing is totally flawed.
And for these black and white or, I guess, like teal and purple because I liked those
colors better.
There's objective data, and then there's subjective emotional communication, and these two worlds
must never meet.
So there's this border in between these worlds, and no one should cross them.
They should always be separate.
But of course, I think we all know that the world is a little more complicated than that,
and that there isn't really a border between these two worlds, but more of this blurry,
easy, blurry hinterland in between space that separates these two worlds from each other.
And I mean, I think we also know that most people aren't as black and white as I've described
except for maybe a select few that we could probably all think of who are quite prominent
on the internet in a variety of ways, but you know, for me, and I think this is a result
of being sent to Catholic school when I was young, is I have always seen a fundamentalist
attitude as a bit of a challenge.
So I mean, it's not the only reason why I'm interested in this, but it's one of the reasons
why it's here in this hazy, blurry in between space that I am, this is why I like to work
in this in-between world.
This is why I work with data here.
Last year at IO, I spoke about the idea of being a data illustrator or the concept of
data illustration, because I thought there needed to be a third category to sit alongside
data visualization and information design.
And so for me, my definition of a data illustrator is as follows.
A data illustrator is someone who visualizes data in order to communicate something beyond
what is evident in the data itself.
The message the designer wants to communicate is usually more emotional and subjective than
what's found in the data.
And often this data is secondary and used as an objective means to a subjective end.
So I thought designers like me needed a space to freely work in where they wouldn't be
held to these same rules and restrictions as data visualization and information design.
And I think often the intention of these types of projects is quite different anyhow.
Another slide from last year is here, and I also talked about not being able to code
and how I should really do that sort of thing.
But since IO 2012, I've just been working on a variety of data projects, and that's
me in my studio there.
Just trying to keep afloat as a self-employed designer.
However, I have been lucky enough to have a few opportunities to work on projects where
I've been able to explore the idea of illustrating with data further.
And it's these few projects that I'll talk about today.
Now the big reveal, and well, it's not really a big reveal because I kind of messed it up
by talking about it in the advertising panel that I was in.
But did I learn to code?
No, no, I didn't.
So I could go into it, but I think this is a topic for a conversation later or another
talk sometime.
But today's talk, instead of talking about why I don't code, it will be about this usual
push and pull between objective logical design and design decisions and emotional subjective
design decisions that naturally occur in the process of working with data, and particularly
in this space that I'm calling data illustration.
And so the idea of data, like the name data illustration poses a bit of a paradox.
So how do you merge the rigor of data visualization and the emotional, blurry, and subjective
aspects of visual communication into one project while still respecting the intentions of both?
So this year I've been trying to understand how to balance these two worlds, and I've
been thinking about how far you can push a data project into the realm of the subjective
before the data collapses and turns into a meaningless pile of numbers.
So instead of being completely rigid with how I work with data, I'm exploring ways of relaxing
slightly while still trying to be faithful to the data that I'm using.
So I'm trying to figure out how to balance the two, deciding where to relax and where
to be rigid.
So I'm still kind of figuring that out, and this is what I'm going to talk about.
So working in the in-between, how do you balance both sides of this blurry in-between bit,
whatever that's called?
So what rules of thumb and practices do I put into place in my work to balance these
two sides of this in-between project?
So first I'll just talk about how I respect, I try to respect the data that I'm working
with.
And it's basically everything that comes to mind when you're thinking about information
designer data visualization.
So one of my first things I always try to remember is just to be truthful and accurate
with the data.
So even if it's for a project where a data visualization isn't the main intention, so
even if it's for like an album cover or a t-towel or a t-shirt, I make sure that my
data is proper.
So however far I push into subjective design, the data is the foundation of the work and
so I know I need to treat that well.
Another thing that I try to remember when I'm creating work in this in-between space
is to just always show subtle insight and kind of show the gist of the data to people.
So it's not just about taking the numbers from the data and generating quite a random
indecipherable shape and form from them.
I think that the viewer always needs to be able to read what they see.
So I don't expect the reader or the viewer to be able to use the many of the visualizations
that I create in a very rigorous and academic way and, you know, for me, that's okay.
But I do think that there are different levels of insight that you can take away from a data
project.
So even if that insight is small, I still think it's relevant and important.
But I do hope that a viewer is able to take away with every project that I create a sort
of subtle insight that washes over them in this kind of quiet, light way.
So just so they get the gist, and that is enough for me.
So as long as I achieve that, then I feel comfortable with how I'm using the data in
one of my projects.
So again, you know, this applies from information design and data visualization as well, but
I always try to provide an explanation of how my visuals are made.
So the complexity of the explanation is dependent on the context of the work that I'm creating.
So this could range from just a sentence to something more in depth and complex.
So these are, why?
Is that crooked?
Or maybe it's just from this point of view.
Really confusing.
Okay.
Sorry, guys.
Crisis subverted.
So, yeah, so these are just, oh, God.
These are examples of legends for past projects that I've created for a prince, well, for
a prince and for an album, for example, and so I make sure that even for most projects
that if someone wants to look further into the data behind the image, they can do so
if they choose to.
So now that I've looked at the data and trying to make sure that I am, I guess, treating
that very well, how do I add the poetry and the emotion?
So you know, I guess poetry is what we're talking about a lot, this IO, so I thought
I'd slip that word in there.
So to add this to the projects that I create, I always make sure that I'm using meaningful
data and so the process of looking for insightful patterns to use to create form is a really
important part of how I create my design projects.
So I try to search for data that has a really beautiful intrinsic connection with the message
that I'm trying to communicate.
And you know, I try to find some beautiful insightful pattern that makes me fall in love
with a project and gets me excited about it.
So when I'm looking for this meaningful data to use, this is sort of this middle process
that you don't see at the end is where data visualization is happening as I look for insight
and then afterwards I select the most appropriate insight to use to create form and then that's
what becomes the data illustration.
Another thing I try to do in some cases is I'm really just using the data as a design
tool as a raw material to create form.
So for a lot of the more illustrative projects, I create the data functions as a foundation
of the project upon which a subjective message is built and then this message is the main
element.
And then finally, the way I try to keep the subjective emotional side happy is that I try
to inspire a meaningful connection with the data and I try to highlight something that
the viewer hasn't seen before in order to inspire wonder and awe and a human connection.
So I think this is why like these two projects, the one on the left shows the structure of
part one of On the Road by Jack Kerouac and the same principles applied on the right to
the origin of species by Charles Darwin and that one I did with Greg McInerney.
But so you know I like to work with literature and it's one of those great ways of relating
to others and it's something that rouses powerful emotion and love in someone.
We think about a book that you really love and so I like to work with subject matter
or data that kind of gets somebody's emotions high that makes them fall in love with it.
Or like for this project where I have this love of handmade notation and handmade calculations
and so I converted the pencil-made long multiplication calculations into like each digit into a colored
shape to create these like visual representations of the cascading digits and these calculations
here.
You know and the reason I did this is because of my love of this notation and I wanted to
share my love of this data with the world and communicate it to a wider audience.
So I try to find data that kind of inspires emotion in people.
So this is my weird infographic, how far can you push into subjectivity before everything
collapses?
And I think it is really all about context.
It's a really simple answer but you know I think I can definitely get away with more
if it's an album cover or a t-shirt or you know then I would be able to if it was something
more functional.
And so depending on how the graphic, the end graphic result is used is will help me decide
how far I can be a little bit more arbitrary in the decisions I use when representing
that data.
So but this one of the best ways I've found to sum up the whole process of how I'm trying
to balance these two sides is something that the data artist and data visualizer Santiago
Ortiz said when he mentioned it in an email when I was discussing the idea of the IOT
shirt and he was saying that data in data art is kind of an Easter egg of sorts.
So with all of these projects I'm trying to make an Easter egg type of experience with
the data.
So it's a secret that's not necessarily a secret that you need to find out or be told
about but you can be told about it or keep it as your own secret perhaps.
So it's just like an extra bit of the design project.
So you know the IOT shirt is just a t-shirt until you realize that the design is based
on data which is accessible to the user should they choose to interpret it.
So I don't know who filled out a survey, some of you did, okay oh wow that's good, good
about.
So with this survey there were 11 questions, they were yes or no questions and I picked
these four to use for the t-shirt and all the questions relate to kind of bad behavior
on the job or just being a baddie in the workplace like using Machiavelli and tactics, sackable
illegal behavior, lying on resumes or lying about things that you say you know but you
don't.
So the way that I created each part of this graphic was in this way and I just need to
say that there's an errata that like nobody cares about but me, every time I tell it to
people they're just like oh I threw the tag away but the tag okay the quadrants that each
represent a question it's incorrect on the tag that is the right one in case you want
to pour over your t-shirt for hours.
Question one starts at one o'clock and then it goes clockwise in case you know in case
you're really into it but I like I woke up early like with jet lag like we're fretting
about this and no one else, no one else cares but anyway so yeah so basically if you answered
yes to all those four questions it would create this X symbol for you that means you're bad
or you're just like a bad worker but if you answered no then it creates this perfect circle
which means you're good and you're pure so if you look at this t-shirt you know I think
most people out of about 300 people so there's quite a few circles on there so people are
generally good or they might have just been a little bit bad and really out of the survey
respondents there's only three properly like bad people who answered yes to all the questions
so if you're out there you know one of them is you so yeah so the IO t-shirt this year
it provides these two levels of engagement one as this t-shirt and then two as a record
of survey responses so you're able to get this general idea of the data from this but
you know if you just see the shirt and you don't know the context it works as a standalone
t-shirt design so this data is kind of this Easter egg this secret edition where if you
fancy you'll be able to use the tag that you threw away and look at the shirt and understand
more about the behaviors of your your fellow festival goers so yeah so I'm always striving
for these two layers of meaning now one more thing about the t-shirt there was this bonus
question and I didn't use it because I thought that people were lying but I just want to
let you know that out of the 295 people who responded 13 said yes so you know watch your
back is all I'm saying but um yeah so that's how I try to balance these two you know like
working in this in-between space and so now I'll just show you some new data illustration
projects that put those ideas into practice set these principles into motion so the first
project is a project that I did for a film online film project called 94 Elements and
it's this project initiated by this filmmaker Mike Patterson and what he's doing is he's
commissioning short films that tell human stories relating to the first 94 naturally
occurring elements found on our planet so he received funding from the Welcome Trust
in London to create a new website for his film project and so that's where I came on
board but unfortunately the project was put on hold and then restarted again so I don't
have a finished website to show you but I'll still show you my bit of the project so for
this website I was asked to create the set of element icons so you know each film each
element would be represented by an icon and these icons would move around the and reorganize
themselves around the website in a variety of different ways and then you could click
on to the icon and then go and see that film a key part of this brief for this elements
project was that this was not meant to be a very academic scientific way of representing
the elements it needed to be less science being more approachable to non-science people
so I knew I couldn't use anything really rigorous really scientific so you know nothing atomic
looking it needed to be a little bit friendlier than that so I knew we still knew that we
wanted to work with data but we wanted to work in a way that was yeah still less science
so that was my main brief so I sort of knew that the context of this project meant I was
never going to create something very rigorous with the data that I was using so you know
if you just look on periodictable.com you'll find loads of information for each of the
elements but I'm not a scientist so I kind of ditched all this aside and I just found
a very neat set of numbers I decided to use to create harmony like use of the basis for
visualizing all of the element icons.
So what I decided to use were the distribution of electrons on the electron shells that radiate
around the center what's the center of the yeah okay so you can tell I didn't go far
in this but I thought it was a really nice like for meaningful when it comes to meaningful
data I thought it was a really nice set of numbers to work with to create form because
if you just look at this periodic table of elements from Wikipedia there's this really
lovely natural harmony harmony is progression like relationship between the number of electron
shells and then the organization of the periodic table and I think that's really nice.
So I had my data and then we also needed to find a way of representing like the aesthetic
choice like how are we going to use this data what was the form going to look like so none
of this is mine I pulled it from the internet but this was this visual inspiration so we
knew when we think about elements you know they're kind of blocky building blocks of
whatever or their objects their chunky so we were like sort of thinking about a tactile
thing that was like a three dimensional polyhedron type of shape so I knew I had my data I needed
to use it to create this sort of shape this sort of look and feel for the finished icon.
So instead of using processing sketches I use proper sketches that's not true real paper
sketches and I use paper sketches to you know kind of figure out how to make this to manifest
my idea and that turns into a PDF program that then I send this PDF to the developers
so that way they have to so they use this to generate the elements from that so I don't
know whether that's easier or more like useful or annoying like no one's really told me
yet but so that's what the elements look like just by using the using the electron shell
numbers as a basis to create these forms here so if you look at them close up you can see
that there's this really subtle insight I mean you know the context this isn't meant
to be an academic visualization but you can kind of get the gist you see that they are
related to each other you see that there is this like really subtle shift between like
you know the first element down to this one so you can see that the shape changes and
I think that's enough for me and it's enough for this project then each one of these shapes
was colored and then the color was based on which group in the periodic table that the
element was in and so then the darker the color the lot like the higher the atomic number
and so again you know from a data visualization point of view like some of the colors are
very similar to each other but I see still for this situation you still understand that
there is a pattern these are related to each other in a specific way even if that is quite
a subtle bit of insight it's not the main point of this project so that's what some
of them look like close up but then because it is supposed to be about human stories we
wanted to add a handmade feel to this project so I created these textures to wrap around
these 3D elements and I was basing the textures on the different types of elements so there
is these groups and sometimes these groups are variable and not controversial but like
something you know different people put different things in different groups but still so I
am still using that as a basis for adding the textures to those shapes so for this I am
still using the information I am still using like using the data but what I have decided
to do here is I take that information I take that data and then I use it as a jumping off
point to create a subjective response to that information so for example halogens, halogens
are they are often called salts so I use salt to create that texture non-metals you know
paper is created from a lot of non-metals so I use paper to create that texture then
I kind of go off the deep end and for actinides those are I think they are quite dense elements
so I couldn't really figure out how to well you can't really see them because they are
all they are all like really nuclear and radioactive so I use like really heavy ink to represent
that to represent their density so you can see that it is kind of a slightly fuzzy data
logic where I have decided you know that kind of works maybe it is not rigorous but I am
using you know being a little bit more flexible with how I am visualizing the data in this
case so that is what they look like with that texture wrapped around them and then some close
up so these are not in 3D I have just made them just because the website is not built
yet and so that is the entire periodic table so the way that I balance the subjective and
the objective in here you know it is just through my design choices even though some
of my ways of representing the information were more subjective and arbitrary than others
I have just tried to ensure that the harmonious patterns found in the data are still visible
but in a very subtle way again taking on board the fact that like the context for this is
that these are icons for a film website you know it is not this is not the reason people
are going to go to the website but the films are so I think you know I can be more flexible
with how I represent the data in this case so for my next project it is more of the idea
of data gathering in the in between so this I am calling it it is a work in progress but
I am calling it molly bloom soliloquy year 1 because it is taking me a year to get to
the point where I am at now and I thought it would take me a lot less time but last
year at IO I had this slide that said well if I can't code then I may as well work in
a space doing things that computers can't do or at least they can't do yet so I decided
I had this is the idea that I had in mind when I made this slide and I have always really
been you know I have obviously worked with large bodies of literature like Kerouac and
Darwin's origin of species so I have you know I have worked with books and chapters and
paragraphs and sentences to a degree but what I have always really wanted to do was to look
at the grammatical structure of sentences so figuring out what words modify other words
and what the relationship relationships between different words are in a sentence and that
really appeals to me and I really wanted to do a project with this for ages but I have
never gotten around to it and so I thought well I should actually you know get off my
house but and what I decided to do is to tackle something really big that dealt with sentences
so I thought well maybe the thing to get me excited to work with sentences again would
be to work with the longest sentence in the English language and now if you look online
you'll see that there's three that always come up time and time again well there are
others but these are the three published ones and I'm not including self-published so there's
because I don't think that really counts in the same way so I thought okay Faulkner's
a little too short and then Jonathan Coe is just a little bit too long for me to manage
so what I'm looking at is this is the sentence in Ulysses by James Joyce so this used to
be one of the longest published sentences in the English language for quite a while
before Jonathan Coe's overtook it so the longest sentence in Ulysses is a monologue a stream
of consciousness sentence and it's at the end of the book so it's the 18th and final
episode of the book and so the narrator Molly Bloom is thinking this sentence as she's
lying in bed next to her husband so that's the whole sentence it's a really cool thing
at this big on the screen but so that's how long it is four thousand words and so I thought
it you know I really I don't think a computer can do this for like this is just a snippet
like from it where this is one I found I had problems with so problems with understanding
what it meant with all the things getting dearer every day for the four years more I
have of life up to 35 no I'm what am I at all I'll be 33 in September will I what like
it's really hard for me to understand so I'm not really sure if a computer would be able
to understand the relationships between different words in that sense and so that's why I've
been really interested in figuring out what bits of this sentence modify other bits and
how the whole thing sticks together so for many of my past projects like I've gathered
a lot of data by hand often because I like to do it and then other times out of necessity
because I didn't know how to automate it so because of that I'm really interested in
hand notations and hand calculations like I really like the idea of seeing workings
out done in pencil or pen on a piece of paper so and this is where I think this project
kind of falls in this in-between space the way that I've decided to visualize the grammatical
structure of the sentence would probably be considered incorrect and not very rigorous
from a data visualization perspective so if people say oh you want to parse that sentence
surely you can just use a standard parse tree to do it but for me that I don't really find
that interesting I know it's like the proper way to look at a sentence and to look at how
it's you know what modifies what within a sentence but that doesn't appeal to me rather
the way that I wanted to use to kind of structure my data and gather my data was this method
on the right the read Kellogg's sentence diagramming method and this method was based on a method
like created in 1847 by this man Clark and the reason I wanted to use this sentence diagramming
method which I think some of you may have used when you were in school is because I
have these really there's a sense of nostalgia for me when I think about parsing sentences
in this way because I'm just reminded of being young and being in an English class and having
a really long sentence to diagram and then having one sheet of notebook paper and then
you start to diagram the sentence and it's too big so then you have to add another sheet
of notebook paper and tape that on and keep going and so for some reason I've always found
that satisfying influential I think in later design projects and then also you know my
main reference book for this project is this English grammar book which is from the sixties
which is my aunts but my dad had it and he had one like this as well and he had this
at his Catholic school and so you know like once I almost lost this book and I freaked
out because for me it's a really important kind of talisman or like reminder of my family
when I'm in London so that's why I choose to visualize a sentence using this way that
might not necessarily be the right way.
So here this visualization approach is an emotional nostalgic choice instead of maybe
a rigorous data choice.
So I started to work on parsing the sentence just using my head and it was really difficult
and so that's why I take in a year because it's just mentally exhausting trying to figure
out to go through this 4000 word sentence.
So it took a trip I mean my husband and I are in Malawi in Africa quite a bit and so
it took going to somewhere with no electricity, no smartphone, no internet, no telly, nothing
and being able to actually focus on this.
So I ended up taking the sentence and dividing it into 300 smaller sentence bits because
I think it's really just a big long compound sentence and then I did a first pass through
the sentence parsing it in this diagramming style from when I was at school.
You know I did try to use this website that automates the process but these were the only
bits I was able to get from automating it because it would just confuse the system and
so much of Molly Bloom's soliloquy is implied, so much of the language is implied as well
that I just think I kept getting errors so then that made me feel confident that there
really wasn't a quicker way to do this I hope.
Then I did a second pass correcting everything as I went and then redrawing this whole diagram
by hand and so that's the whole sentence as it stands so this is just like stage one
in the process and let's see, is it going to, hold on, yeah there so that's what some
of it looks like close up, a little bit closer up I guess and then to provide some context
of what it's like when it's printed on paper I've got it in my studio for the next stage
and it's three AO sheets, I don't know what that is in, it's like bigger than this like
this and a half so and then just a close up of what these diagrams look like when I draw
them so yeah so this is where I am for this and it's made me think a lot about data accuracy
I think one of the reasons it took a year to get this far because it was really difficult
to do and what I realized is that on the first pass I was probably only 60% accurate if I'm
lucky I mean I hope, I hope my grammar is that good and then with the second pass through
the you know drawing and redrawing the relationships of these words I think I might have gotten
to 80% accuracy if I'm lucky so in this in-between space I've started to understand that I just
need to be accepting of imperfections in my data sets like if I don't just move on with
my life now it's just going to take another year of parsing sentences before I have anything
to work with so I'm starting to understand that if you're working in this in-between
space like you know you just have to accept for some projects you know near enough is
good enough so I'm hoping that things will get near in the next incarnation but I think
you know it's near to showing the shape of the sentence then you know not even trying
to do it at all so yeah my next step will be to use I'm just going to start looking
at color using color to define types of phrases and to figure out all the parts of speech
and then show it to a Joyce scholar to see if you know if it's as right as it could be
and then I'll probably take that and then you know render that graphically at some point
but yeah so that's year one of that project and so these two projects even though they're
quite different they sort of culminate into some a project that I've just very recently
finished that is very very illustrative and I've definitely worked with data in a completely
different way and this is at the Memory Palace exhibition that's going to open at the V&A
in London in on the 18th of June so the V&A is this really wonderful huge decorative arts
and design museum in London and the premise of the exhibition is really simple it's the
writer Harry Kunzer who's a writer who's based in New York he wrote a story and well
a story called Memory Palace and I'll just read the synopsis of the story his story
set in a future London hundreds of years after the world's information structure was wiped
out by an immense magnetic storm technology and knowledge have been lost in a dark age
prevails nature has taken over the ruins of the old city and power has been seized by
a group who enforce a life of extreme simplicity on all citizens so recording writing collecting
and art are outlawed the narrator of the story is in prison he uses the memory the ancient
memory palace memory technique to remember past knowledge and events that the current
system is banned and so the story kind of I guess touches upon that.
So for this they asked 20 designers and illustrators to each take a section of the story and respond
to it in the way that they work and then the final exhibition is kind of like a walk in
story where you walk through the exhibition and take everything in and kind of get a feel
of the story but the whole story isn't represented you can't read the whole story with the images
it's a you can read snippets of the story and then look at the images so they're just
exploring narratives different types of narrative I guess.
So those are just examples of some of the preliminary work by other designers for this
so you can just see that it's quite diverse a really diverse range of designers here
and these are my three prints that I submitted for my section of the story so for my prints
each image functions as a map of the world so this white circle and they each one shows
a different time period in the story from the past to the present day within the story
so there's this past world an electric storm destroying everything and a world where nature
is revered.
So for the first print I was trying to illustrate using data this quote from the story so I
was trying to use data to illustrate the idea of fixing the whole world in time and space.
So that's the first print there what I did is I created a map of the world showing the
locations of the capital cities with lines kind of doing an arbitrary triangulation of
the different capital cities where I'm choosing which triangles to draw instead of having
a computer do it.
So each there's lots of data on there lots of the measurements are determined so each
capital city the altitude is shown the distance between the capital cities is mentioned the
area of each triangle is mentioned on there so there's loads of numbers the whole world
is mapped in time and space and so some of my developer friends said that the arbitrariness
of like what I wanted to do meant it would probably be quicker to make it myself than
for them to build it so that's what I did here is I just drew how I wanted it to look
in Google Earth and then I used that as the basis to gather all of my measurements.
So for this you know thinking about the idea of working in this in between space and making
sure that I'm faithful and truthful with the data I've tried to make this data as accurate
as possible I mean I could have lied considering the context it's just going to be on a wall
in an exhibition but for me it really needs to be accurate it needs to be proper and so
you know I need to treat it as well as I can so this is just an example of me being good
with the data here.
Now on the second for the second print this is a section of my text I was trying to illustrate
so I was trying to show this network this system collapsing and withering because this
apocalyptic in between time in the story is called the withering time so this is what
the print looks like and for this this is not a data visualization but it's more where
my background in book design and book cover design comes into play so what I've done here
is manipulate something that's based in data and use it to create something that's totally
subjective and illustrative so to show this system collapsing and withering I just basically
started to pull the first map apart making it tangle up and knot up and shrink and then
having all of the numbers and all of the data crumble and fall to the bottom of the map so
the whole thing is crumbling into dust so again this is using data and then as a basis
to create illustrative work so you know this is definitely more subjective than some of
the others.
And then the final piece in the series of prints I was trying to illustrate this part
of my section of text where the more men account the world the less wild it could be so I'm
showing this kind of post apocalyptic world where nature is revered where all these Londoners
are living in the detritus of their past city so you can see that the prior mapping
of the world and time and space it has withered up and then all of the data and numbers is
just you know crumbled and dusting the floor and then from that all of these weeds are
growing so all of these these I've still used data to create them they're all based well
they're all meant to represent different weeds that you find in London so the type of weeds
that you find on the roadside or on canals weeds are indigenous to London so for this
originally what I wanted to do is to look at branching patterns and try to accurately
well using pencil depict branching patterns for different types of plants but I've got
some ecologist friends and when I ask them well can I find some accurate like branching
data for the types of plants that I want and they're like well nature isn't that precise
so it's kind of one of those it would be really difficult for me to find the numbers that
I needed to base like a very accurate rigorous rigorous set of pencil drawings on.
So this is one of those examples where you know I've realized I need to relax a little
and accept that this is not I mean thinking about the context it's you know I'm illustrating
a book it's going to be in an exhibition space you know I can let go a little bit because
even just thinking about branching patterns that's like a whole other project in itself
so I can let go so what I did instead of trying to know all the accurate get all the accurate
data was I looked at online herbariums and did lots of research looking for as many numbers
as I could find for how each one of these each one of these weeds was structured and
I used these as a reference point and then the numbers I found like numbers of flowers
numbers of petals for each one of the each one of the weed types and I use them as a
basis to create these pencil drawings so I in then I specifically chose weeds that I
saw in London that I liked that I thought you know they did look like visualizations
so I was going for the mathematical plans so that's what all of the sketches look like
the drawings look like when layered upon each other and that's just a close up of them so
I've never really done a handmade visualization before but this is my first foray into using
pencils for this so this is the evolution of these three prints through these different
worlds or different time periods and then that's what the three of them look like together
and then it's going to look like this in the exhibition so with this text underneath it
so now I know that there's lots of people out there who are proper artists but I still
get a real thrill of seeing people with gloves holding up my work even if it is just a print
so I had to take a picture so this is these are the curator and the picture hanger the
mount or the fancy guy that hangs them hanging them up and yeah so that's them on the wall
so they'll be lit properly and everything so yeah so that's all of the work that I've
got to show today and I think what I've started to realize when it comes to working in this
in between space between subjective communication and objective data is that I really think
that you know you need to know the rules to know how much you can bend the rules so I
think it's only you can only make these decisions if you really are grounded in a good sense
of kind of you need to know how to do the things the right way to break it like many
different spaces that you can you can work in and I just think that this place in between
is really just a space for experimentation so of course there's a chance that designers
working in this space will make mistakes but these mistakes and explorations into seeing
how far we can push into subjectivity just moves the representation of data forward and
I think that's you know even if it's not right all the time I think it's only a good thing
as we move closer to you know new places and that and that's it.
