A picture of health

Another visualisation project at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health that I've been meaning to write up for a while now. This one was inspired again by Dr Clare Redshaw (who was also a driving force behind the Pharma Town graphic). We actually began talking about this project before that one, but it ended up being pretty extensive, and was only published earlier this year. Now it's in print, I am at liberty to blog about the design process for the paper figures. The first thing that Dr Redshaw presented me with was a series of three tables. The first of which looked like this: A lot of people are very apologetic about presenting me with Excel tables. Which is odd, because I love them. It gives immediate access to the data you'll be working with. Way better for a designer like me than some data locked up in a horrible bar chart or twelve, anyway. This data is all relational rather than numeric, but it's quite complex in its own way.

Photo credit: Adam Peacock I've recently become more and more interested in physical objects that encode information - sometimes call "data sculptures". I had the chance to be involved in the creation of one recently. I was working as a "facilitator" for a two week collaborative project at University of Exeter called Grand Challenges involving undergraduate students from a range of courses. My group were looking at "leading to a well world, and specifically enquiring into the question "how much is enough?". I set them the task of helping to write an infographics brief for 2nd year graphic design students at Falmouth - so that both teams of students could get experience of working in a designer / client relationship. The idea was to produce "infographics" that could be used to explain data on energy use around the world at two events - a presentation and an exhibition. The Falmouth students had just 3 days to come up with ideas,

Just back from an interesting trip around Norway - where I spoke at the Norwegian Agency for Pollution and Climate and Oslo Science Library. The main purpose of my trip though was give a talk and to run an information graphics workshop at Gjøvik University College (Høgskolen i Gjøvik). 17 of the students had filled out a survey about themselves before I got there, with about 20 questions on their favourite colours, films etc. The challenge for the workshop was to work in groups of 3 or 4 to produce an information graphic based on the data - to say something about the whole set of students - in just one day! I was of course very impressed with the results. I'd have been happy if they'd just produced roughs on paper, but most groups actually managed to boot up Illustrator (and in some cases Excel), and get at least a partial design done. While they didn't have much time to visually refine the graphics, I was really impressed by the communicative power of their designs.

I haven't had time to do much freelance work recently, but I was interested in this project. I was commissioned by an IT team from a local art school (Falmouth University). They had just completed a year-long project on developing a system for standardising and organising course descriptors. It was a complex project with many twists and turns, people joining the team and different challenges along the way. For a final meeting, organised by their funders at JISC, they had to display a poster that explained their project, alongside 30 or so other projects. They were conscious that, as an arts organisation, they had to have something that looked the part, hence my involvement. After an initial meeting, and a few emails, I asked them to give me a spreadsheet of all the significant dates / milestones connected to the project, and to assign team member(s) to each one: I wanted to represent each team member as a coloured line, and each event as a circle with matching colours.

I'm very honoured that our graphic (entitled The Pharma Transport Town: Undestanding the Routes to Sustainable Pharmaceutical Use) has been published in the journal Science recently - as winner of the "People's Choice" award in the NSF/AAAS International Science and Engineering Visualisation Challenge 2012: http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/vis2012/ The entries can also be viewed here: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/winners_2012.jsp There are some other excellent entries this year too, in all categories.