Case Study: devising a way to understand the relationship between forum topics
Strategy
With 180 sessions over the course of several days, made up of hundreds of participants, connections between sessions and themes are too complicated to be immediately apparent. The Forum sought a way to depict the interrelationships between concepts and ideas covered during the course of the week.
Seed Visualization developed a custom visualization for use in the program at the Annual Meeting. The image shows keywords found in session descriptions, sized by frequency of their overall use. Arcs colored according to one six themes connect keywords most frequently found together in the descriptions, with the thickness of each arc determined by how often the pairing appears throughout the program. The final image is intended to highlight keywords and connections in a visually engaging way, while also revealing the complexity beneath.
Creative
The amount of information our society generates is difficult to quantify, but one estimation holds that we now create more data each year than was produced in all prior human history. Generating actionable knowledge from this information is a critical design challenge with substantial economic, political and intellectual consequence.
Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Seed Visualization helps companies and governments find solutions to clearly communicate complex data sets and information to various stakeholders. The unit’s research arm, the Phyllotaxis Lab, works to advance the field of data visualization through basic research and experimental design work. Phyllotaxis is a form commonly found in nature that is derived from the Fibonacci sequence. It is the inspiration for Seed Media Group’s logo, designed in 2005 by Stefan Sagmeister and recently included in the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA.
