A picture of health

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.

I enjoyed speaking at the Design of Understanding event at St Bride Library the week before last. It was good to hear some feedback from the design community about the work I'm doing in communicating scientific data with graphics. I was also really impressed by the wonderful visual notes produced by not one but two of the delegates at the event! The first from Boon Yew Chew: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaremfan/8414252564/in/set-72157632608232968/ I think it's a really good summary. I like the quick sketches to remind him of three of my graphics - the Pharma Town, GOfER and the climate change arrow / box graphics. Also very pleased to hear that he thinks graphics should be academic work in their own right, although it is mostly written papers that get published (albeit with occasional diagrams). It's always a challenge that design academics (and students) face. One point of clarification - I don't think that bar and pie charts are necessarily A Bad Thing...

pharma town video from Will Stahl-Timmins on Vimeo . It looks like we've done it! 100 votes reached on Friday evening (putting us even further ahead)... So without further ado, here is the promised video of the design process. Many thanks to everyone that voted. If you haven't done so yet, voting is open until 23:59 on Mon 12th Nov (ie today...) Voting site:  http://bit.ly/Q8YqKe

Exciting news: My Pharma Transport Town poster has been shortlisted for a major science visualisation award! (the NSF/AAAS science and engineering visualisation challenge). Of the 10 shortlisted entries in my category, the winner, runner(s)-up and "people's choice" will be published in the prestigious Science journal. I'd really appreciate a vote for the people's choice at: http://bit.ly/Q8YqKe To vote, you first need to register (name, email, password). Then log in, select "posters and graphics" from the drop-down at the top right of the page, then click "vote for this entry" by the poster. The idea of the poster is to show the complex systems by which pharmaceutical products end up in our environment, and can then be exposed to people and animals in unintended ways. We're also trying to show that there are many different ways in which these exposures could be reduced. I'd also be very grateful if you could share this link...

This was a really enjoyable (if exhausting) project to work on. The brief? To expand on a traditional "pharmaceutical transport" diagram - which shows what happens to drugs we use once we have consumed or disposed of them. We ended up creating the information graphic above, which is intended to reveal to the viewer their own place in a complex system - with many loops, feedbacks and choices to be made.. I was working with two colleagues at the University of Exeter / University of Plymouth - Dr Clare Redshaw, an environmental chemist, and Dr Mat White, a behavioural psychologist. We wanted to expand a "traditional" pharmaceutical transport diagram (from Petrović et al. 2003), and perhaps work towards an academic paper on the subject. These diagrams normally start with what happens when we dispose of the pharmaceutical products that we use every day. As you can see from our scrawled annotations, we wanted to include what happens "upstream" of this poin...