Bio and Class Ideas — My Short Story I am a visualization and interface designer, currently working on the Perseverance Rover at NASA JPL. My life has centered around fusing art and science into powerful visual forms. I started my career as a modern dance choreographer, and I used medical illustration as well as stage design to keep…

Discussion and Future Directions — This thesis explores the hypothesis that designers, as visual representation specialists, can catalyze novel moments of insight for researchers by visualizing, translating, distilling, and interpreting abstract data or models into concrete forms which allow researchers to see their data in a new way. through four design practice studies, in four…

Higher Resolution Design Process and Thinking — The Importance Current popular models of the design process, although useful, do not accurately capture the sophistication and complexity of design, particularly for expert users. Recursive visualization requires a careful sensitivity to the context and needs of the moment, it is therefore useful to articulate carefully how process should unfold. A Starting Place

All the things — Case Study 0: Seeds of Visualization Design Medical Concept Visualization Context Classical medical illustration, and much of modern medical visualization for that matter, has the intent of communicating the form of a complex human body structure. Throughout the lifetime of illustration titans such as Henry Gray or Frank Netter, the human body and its myriad components were extremely difficult to capture…

Visualization, Translation, Distillation, and Interpretation — In other chapters I will refer to these meta-skills, which I consider to be the highest level skills which a visualization designer possesses and deploys in their work. I consider all four skills to lie along a ‘continuum of agency’ for the designer: visualization being the least full of agency…

Perception, Cognition, and Intuition — Location The most elemental component of a geospatial story is location. Without knowing where something is, no visualization can be built. The accompanying image shows a data story using only the location of fire events. Naturally occurring fires tend to have an element of randomness to their geographic distribution, whereas these…

Data Exploration — Context The MISR instrument team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab is a group of scientists, engineers, and software specialists who collect, format, host, and distribute a key data product from the TERRA satellite. This data product contains the location and properties of 56,000 wildfire smoke plumes occuring around the globe…

Morphing Matter Learning From Dynamic Balance Systems — Conceptual Framing The Morphing Matter Lab develops transformative and adaptive materials in order to realize the fictional future in the present. Nature, and the dynamic, adaptive systems that make it up, provide one of our primary sources of inspiration. This article is part of a series, which aims to wonder how the…

A New Way for Designers to Be — Literature In my review, I discuss findings from four separate but overlapping fields: human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, design studies, and visualization studies. All of these fields have much, of much value, to say. But they fail to address how a designer should do the work of using visualization skills to spark…