After a very demanding week with two different intensives (Text Mining for Social Research and Creating Visual Narratives), I feel motivated by the possibilities for my Futures Project (and my work in the future, beyond university). Especially after Creating Visual Narratives, I felt deeply inspired as to how extensive and rich the visual language can be.
This confirmed my choice, as presented in my previous blog post, to link data, communication, and design through data visualisation.
Even today, after attending the EFI Makerspace induction, I feel that 3D printing could be an exciting way to convey data visualisation. For example, a 3D model of a data visualisation could be inclusive to people with visual disabilities through involving the sense of touch. Really, data visualisations could take a variety of forms and materiality, from knitting[1] to intervening photographs[2] (which is what I believe I will be exploring for my Creating Visual Narratives project), from sculptures[3] to live GPS tracking.[4]
Within the design thinking framework, I feel like I am in the ‘Ideate’ process, where the possibilities are endless, and one tries to cover the most comprehensive range of ideas. My next step would be to start to narrow it down. Maybe knowing what the data visualisation would be about would be helpful in this next step.
I am looking forward to the supervision meeting and the ideas I will be able to get from my classmates and discuss their own project ideas to keep moving forward in envisioning the future.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/world/europe/germany-train-delay-scarf.html
[2] https://happy-data.co/
[3] https://zkm.de/en/data-sculptures
[4] https://qz.com/296941/interactive-graphic-every-active-satellite-orbiting-earth
Alexa Pukall
Since you bring up 3D printing as an opportunity for accessibility, I’d be curious to know if there were similar options in the other data visualisation techniques you mention here.
Anja Hendrikse Liu
I also attended the Makerspace induction, and found the possibilities for combining different tools available there to be really exciting (e.g., 3D scanning an object, printing a scaled version of it using the 3D printer, then making a mold of it, etc…) I wonder if you might consider a multi-step process of physical data visualization, combining multiple tools depending on what content/themes you decide to explore.
s2528722
This is exciting; 3d printing within a data visualisation project is immediately appealing for the way it makes something as abstract as data really tangible and present. Do you know whether you’re drawn to large-scale, systemic data narratives, or do your interest fall closer to the personal and granular stories? There’s a big movement currently to questioning what is/should be counted as data, so if you’re considering an experimental visualisation form you might consider how that might a)bring new stories out of very traditional kinds of data or b) take something most people wouldn’t consider data and pull a data-driven story from it anyway