Add Chris Jordan to the list of peo­ple I want to meet.

Lately, I’ve been think­ing about data visu­al­iza­tion as a nar­ra­tive form. How can data be pre­sented so that it truly tells a story in addi­tion to reveal­ing unseen information?

This stu­dent art project at Dartmouth College ren­ders a polar bear on-screen. When elec­tric­ity use in the dorm is high, the tem­per­a­ture rises, the ice melts, and the polar bear falls into the arc­tic waters. By unplug­ging, stu­dents can help the cud­dly char­ac­ter “live” hap­pily on the ice in a cool climate.

It’s a data visu­al­iza­tion at its core, but by using a cute char­ac­ter—as opposed to a bar chart — the pre­sen­ta­tion trig­gers an emo­tional response and truly tells a story. Not only that, but the story is inter­ac­tive, and the viewer/participant’s behav­ior deter­mine the outcome.

From Michael Chang, the guy who brought true scal­able type to Processing, comes a demo reel of data vis inter­ac­tion inspi­ra­tion. In my own work, I’ve focused on just “get­ting it to work” and dis­play the data, but now I want to make sure the whole expe­ri­ence is as beau­ti­ful and fluid as in Chang’s work.

For my next project at Berkeley, I cre­ated a real time visu­al­iza­tion of esti­mated train arrival times within the BART sys­tem. So next time you need to head over to the East Bay, just check the visu­al­iza­tion and you can see how far away your train is from the station.

More detail on the project and process behind it are doc­u­mented here. Thanks to BART for mak­ing their arrivals data available!

Launch project >