The Butterfly Effect Schools Exhibition

By Leonora Oppenheim | Published: April 27, 2012

So this is what’s happening in our Creative Data world next week. The Butterfly Effect project is reaching its colourful culmination at The Forum in Norwich, with an exhibition of 10 Norfolk Primary Schools’ creative work.

At the beginning of this year bespoke educations packs and activities, that we designed, were delivered to each of these ten schools situated in the Broadland area. The children started the project by looking at maps of their area and were asked questions such as “Where are the Broads?”, “What do people do there?” and “How have they changed over time?”

Pupils were then asked to imagine what their local landscape might look like in the future and what role climate change might play. The children responded with a variety of vibrant visions, including drawings, sculptures, quilts and animations. Their beautiful work shows how young people imagine their future landscapes.

The subject of water also played a big part in the project with a several activities dedicated to its importance, both locally and globally. Each school took on a weekly water challenge to do one thing per week to use water more efficiently. Challenges included brushing teeth with half a cup of water, collecting rainwater for watering the garden, and having a shower instead of a bath.

This exhibition is the conclusion of our 3 year pilot project for Creative Data about the future of The Norfolk and Suffolk Broads. Its purpose was to explore how designers and scientists can work together to communicate valuable local data and research to the public in new and exciting ways.

This project was based on the PhD thesis of Paul Munday about future land use in the Broadland area. The Butterfly Effect was created in collaboration with Anglian Water, The Broads Authority, CUE East at UEA & Norfolk County Council Children’s Services.

Below you can see some of the highlights from the The Butterfly Effect Schools Exhibition which runs from Monday 30th April to Thursday May 3rd at The Forum in Norwich. Please come and see us there.

Ludham Primary School’s Quilt

 

A mobile of Filby Broad by Nathan at Ormesby Junior School

 

A beautiful black and yellow butterfly, also from Ormesby Junior School.

 

A drawing of a swan on The Broads from Hopton Primary School.

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Plunge – London Light Installation Marks Future Sea Level Rise

By Leonora Oppenheim | Published: April 3, 2012

This is a long overdue post, so late in fact that the artwork in question has now ended, but it’s still absolutely worth commenting on. Over the last few months mysterious rings appeared encircling London’s columns. They were placed some way up the columns and at night they lit up, glowing neon blue.

These blue rings were the work of artist Michael Pinksy and made up an installation called Plunge. Now that the clocks have gone forward, the lighter evenings mean the work would be less visible and the installation was taken down on April 1st. However, during the dark winter nights they have been a striking addition to the city landscape.

The project was all about the possible impact of climate change on our environment. Pinsky describes his work as:

“a simple, elegant statement placed on three monuments in central London. A string of low energy blue LED lights wrapped around each monument marks a time, 1000 years in the future, when sea level rises have changed the city beyond recognition.

The monuments are ones that are passed every day by hundreds of thousands of people, whether tourists who stop to photograph them, or commuters who walk by every day without seeing them. Plunge offers an opportunity to see them in a new light, to think about their place in our history and their place in the city.

Together, the Plunge monuments create an arc across central London, following the line of a future Thames that has swallowed much of the capital in its wake.”

Below is the dramatic infographic ‘When Sea Levels Attack!’ by David McCandless which Pinsky references in his Plunge project.  He says, “A height of 28 metres above current sea level was chosen for Plunge as an extreme illustration of what could happen if we continue with a ‘business as usual’ emissions scenario (without changing anything we do today).”

There is so much information and storytelling going on behind the placement of these rings around London. I just hope that people were curious enough to find out what their meaning was after seeing them as they walked by.

Here is Michael Pinsky talking about Plunge over a timelapse of the installation on the Duke of York Column.

Below is a photo I took of the Plunge ring in Paternoster Square. Appropriately enough I snapped this pic a few weeks ago when leaving the London Stock Exchange where I had just attended the launch of the Clean and Cool Mission.

Clean and Cool is a trade mission for environmental tech startups that has just returned from a week in San Francisco promoting amazing new sustainable technologies to potential investors. The blue ring of Plunge also matched the blue circular logo of Clean and Cool. A more appropriate brand tie in I could not think of. I think Michael Pinsky will be pleased to hear about these entrepreneurs who are definitely not following ‘business as usual’.

 

 

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The Butterfly Effect Introductory Workshops

By Hannah Thompson | Published: November 14, 2011

ellingham1sf

In the last few weeks we have done four workshops at Happisburgh primary school, Ellingham primary school, Hopton primary school and Thurlton primary school which have all gone brilliantly. In January we’ll be doing workshops with Ludham Primary, Rockland St Mary primary, Kinsale Junior School, Coltishall primary, and Ormesby Junior School. Finally, in February we’ll deliver our final workshop to the project’s 10th school Greenacre primary in Great Yarmouth.

In these workshops we are introducing our bespoke education packs to individual classes, and sometimes the whole of the Key Stage 2 year groups, with a series of activities to get children thinking about what The Norfolk and Suffolk Broads are, how they came to be, and what they are used for.

There have been some great conversations in all directions, between us and the children, between teachers and children, between us and teachers, and of course, amongst the children themselves.

happisburgh-5sf

They were very enthusiastic about discovering where they were located on the map. For some of them The Broads were very familiar, being in their back yards so to speak, and for others The Broads were a whole new concept, even though they live and go to school in the Broadland area.

ellingham2sf

At Hopton we had ninety kids take part. Yes that’s right, 90! They are taking an interesting approach to the project, with teacher Beth Palmer  running a lunchtime club for pupils who are interested in learning more about The Broads. It’s wonderful to see all the different approaches by the various schools.

Anna Clayton has been a brilliant assistant, recording conversations with the kid and commanding the workshops like a pro. She is very good at listening and drawing conversation out of even the shyest young ones.

We have seen an excellent selection of drawings from pupils. This was clearly their favourite part of the workshop and they would have drawn boats, butterflies and windmills all day, if we’d let them.

We’re very much looking forward to coming back in a few months time to see how everyone has got on with The Butterfly Effect project and we’re excited to be able to take their work to Norwich for a public exhibition. Details to be announced soon.

Good luck to all the schools in the project. We hope you enjoy your time with The Butterfly Effect and enjoy finding new connections with your local landscape.

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The power of visualization

By Leonora Oppenheim | Published: October 21, 2011

Excellent words from Seth Godin this week on why “data is hard for human beings to digest.” He talks about, “the power of visualizing data and turning it into information.” We like his thinking, but we also know it needs to go further, so that people really can identify with and make use of that visualisation.

We’re turning information into conversation. Our installations in public spaces create opportunities for people to tell their own stories in relation to research and data that is local and relevant to them. As Seth says,

“We repeatedly underestimate how important a story is to help us make sense of the world.”

Read the whole of Seth’s blog here.

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Stefanie Posavec talks about her beautiful handcrafted infographics

By Leonora Oppenheim | Published: October 21, 2011

This is a lovely video from Protein OS interviewing Stefanie Posavec about her work creating infographics. We love her “hand made” approach to dealing with patterns in numbers.  Read the feature on Stefanie here and watch the interview below.

 

“Everything I have done so far has revolved around things that I love – books and language, and maths and numbers. As long as I’m looking at something that I am really interested in it makes the days and hours of sifting through and analysing a subject easier.”

We’re pretty excited about Stefanie’s recent artwork for the cover of the new OK GO album. Apparently explanations of the graphics are pending…

This quote from Stefanie about what she wants to do next sounds right up our street. Creative collaboration with scientists is where it’s at. Great minds think alike.

“I’d love to collaborate more with scientists and researchers. Perhaps an artist-in-residence at a research institute; working with people with lots of interesting data that don’t really know what to do with it. And turning that data into something beautiful to show the public all the wonders that they are missing.”

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The Butterfly Effect Project Inset Day

By Leonora Oppenheim | Published: September 23, 2011

We’ve been working very hard here at Creative Data over the last few months to get our first education project off the ground. We’re very excited to say that last week we launched The Butterfly Effect Schools Project at an INSET Day for 10 teachers from participating schools in Norfolk.

This schools project is the culmination of 2 years work following The Butterfly Effect exhibition at The Forum in Norwich in 2009. We had always planned to follow the design installation with a dissemination project which allowed the community to take ownership of the theme of The Future of The Norfolk and Suffolk Broads, but due to some inevitable funding struggles it took longer to launch that we imagined.

But now we’re ready to go! Thanks in no small part to the support from our project sponsors The Broads Authority Sustainable Development Fund and Anglian Water.

Last Monday Lucy Rose, originator of the Butterfly Effect children’s workshop at The Forum, and project director Leonora Oppenheim hosted the INSET day, in conjunction with Anglian Water. We introduced the history of the project and handed over our beautiful bespoke education packs. We were very pleased that Paul Munday could join us to present his PhD work on future land use in The Broads. His was the scientific research which we based the map installation on, so it’s important to keep that connection to the original project alive.

Anglian Water kindly hosted us in a wonderfully grand room at the Heigham Waterworks site in Norwich. The size of the room meant we were able to spread out our map sections of The Broads on the floor for our icebreaker.

We used the map as a tool to get teachers from each school to introduce themselves and where they are from. Each stood on their section of the map that they took away with them at the end of the day with their Box of Goodies. We’re looking forward to bringing all the sections back together after the kids have got their hands on them for the schools exhibition next year, which will show off all the schools’ creative output from this project.

Lucy Rose and project researcher Anna Clayton led the sessions, introducing the workshop activities and getting our teachers to try some of them out. This included working in pairs and groups to discuss the various conflicting factors that are important to the future of The Broads.

Lucy even got them on the floor doing an activity!

Marcia Davies and Ellie Pluck from Anglian Water presented to the group about water use, describing the main problems the company faces in cleaning water, and different simple ways of using water more efficiently.

We worked very hard on our education packs for the teachers and we were delighted with the final look and quality of them. Thanks must go to Elio Studio design assistant Hannah Thompson whose beautiful graphic work is spread through the education pack. She also documented the INSET day with these excellent photographs and a short film – coming soon! That’s Hannah below, holding our lovely education booklet.

The response from the teachers was universally positive and we are starting to give the introductory workshops in schools with children next week. Here are just some of the lovely feedback comments we received at the end of the INSET day:

  • Excited at the prospect of being part of an environmental project with a really meaningful outcome.
  • Sounds like a fantastic way to get children and families discussing these important local/national issues.
  • Very enthusiastic to start ‘project’ I think children will really enjoy the learning.
  • The butterfly effect is the perfect way to stimulate discussion about the future of the Broadland, and ensure it is cared for by the next generation.
  • The project reflects the way we like to work in school and incorporates a real life purpose.
  • Inspiring ideas which I’m sure we’ll have great fun with at school.

Watch this space to follow the project’s progress. We will keeping in touch with each school and posting blogs on their activities throughout the process.

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Infographics made easy with ‘Chartwell Type’

By Hannah Thompson | Published: September 19, 2011

We’re excited to see a recent development by Portland based TK Type, which has made creating infographics simpler for both print and the web. TK Type have developed a downloadable font named “Chartwell Type”, which allows the user to create pie charts, bar graphs and spark lines very easily through  OpenType to interpret and visualise the numbers and values inside web code, making it easy to edit and update.

 

Pie Charts:

 

Chartwell Bars:

 

Chartwell Lines:

 

Each element fetches $20 on the TK Type site, or $50 for all three. It comes with a supporting webfont and a javascript plugin ” to do the heavy lifting” they say, until there is better support.

The system is particularly suited to software programs such as Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop because they have their own text engines, compared to programs such as TextEdit, Omnigraffle and iWork which are not compatible because they work on a MAC based text engine. It also does not agree with Microsoft Office or Excel, so pretty much stick to the Adobe environment if you plan to give it a try.

A fantastic, simple (yet slightly expensive) tool for making infographics more accessible to everyone.

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Comparing Apples To Oranges

By Hannah Thompson | Published: August 1, 2011

After two years of ‘life documenting’ it’s clear Lauren Manning is meticulous about collecting data on her food consumption.

As part of a larger daily data project Lauren noted down every meal she ate for a year. She then used that data set to make over forty different visualisations using a “variety of methods, techniques, styles, degrees of complexity, degrees of additional context and many other elements.”

It’s great to see someone using such a variety of graphic visualisation methods within one project, highlighting the infinite number of creative ways we can choose to tell a data story.

Fast Company‘s post on the project describes this project as “the Nick Felton Effect: Designers can’t get enough of visualizing their own quotidian doings.”

Lauren says, “The feedback I received really showed that there is no one answer to which method and style should be used. Different methods can all have a place when used in an appropriate setting.”

“‘It’s like comparing apples to oranges.’ This phrase is the best way to describe the current state of data visualizations. For the designer, its easy to find good visualizations and bad ones, but how to apply the successful elements of particular designs to one’s own data set starts to get a little more complicated. Data sets vary tremendously, so one man’s brilliant solution can be another’s complete failure. Instead of seeing many excellent visualizations of all different data sets, what if you could see tons of visualizations of the same data set? What new comparisons, knowledge and structure might be developed from this? How can this become a tool for the new data visualizer?”

Fast Company ponder whether this intensive analysis of her daily nutrition has actually had any influence on her eating habits. “You’d assume seeing an entire farm’s worth of poultry on the page might,” they rightly say. But Lauren says the impact of seeing what she eats hasn’t been that great. “My affinity for chicken has become something I’m more conscious of because it was such an outlier in the data, but still I find myself ordering it just as often.”

You can see all 40 visualisations on Lauren Manning’s Flickr Feed.

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The Black Cloud Citizen Scientist League

By Hannah Thompson | Published: July 20, 2011

Thanks to a tip off from @hugh_knowles of Forum For The Future we’ve been looking at the intriguingly named Black Cloud Citizen Scientist League, which examines pollution through collecting a variety of data. We’ve learned from the Citizen Sensing blog that the project is headed by Berkeley Art Studio Professor Greg Niemeyer. He has designed a small box called ‘PuffTron’ that measures CO2, volatile organic compounds, light, noise, heat and damp.

Aimed at measuring pollution and visualising levels of data, the twenty five eyes of the character on the box light up in varying colours to display levels of the elements. As Citizen Sensing explain, “a server collects the data and delivers interesting visualizations to the web site.” Based on a myth of the ‘black cloud‘ Niemeyer and his colleagues believe this tool encourages conversation around pollution and how we are involved.

‘PuffTrons’ were distributed in local communities in the San Francisco area, where local businesses and school children collected some surprising results, including high levels of CO2 in classrooms even before school, which could unknowingly cause sleepiness and headaches.

Below is a short KCET video on the project which very enthusiastically describes the process of how the PuffTron works and its effect on people.

Worth a watch!

We think this project is relevant to the current issue of London Air Quality for the 2012 Olympics, and could be a great way to encourage people to make changes through tracking their own data. Certainly the list of schools close to main roads, recently published by Campaign for Clean Air in London, could find them very useful for measuring pollution levels in their buildings and playgrounds.

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Invisible Dust Project – Double Pendulum

By Hannah Thompson | Published: July 15, 2011

More news on creative air quality projects today. We mentioned the Invisible Dust series yesterday in our post on Helen Storey’s Catalytic Clothing. Here’s a bit more info on what it’s all about.

The project, funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Arts Council England, includes a number of public art installations aiming to highlight the effects of air pollution on our health and environment. Artists involved include Faisal Abdu’Allah, HeHe (they of the Nuage Vert) and Dryden Goodwin.

Bringing artists, scientists and sports professionals together this public arts project examines the involuntary process of breathing. It aims to explore how factors such as physical attributes, gender, class and geography affects our breathing and the way we move.

The first artwork on show as part of Invisible Dust is Faisal Abdu’Allah’s work ‘Double Pendulum’ at the View Tube on the Olympic site  29th June – 17th July 2011.

The film can now be seen on the Guardian site.

Double Pendulum takes a critical look at the effect of London’s poor air quality on athletes. If no action is taken to remedy this controversial issue the result may be Britain being fines up to £175m by the International Olympic Committee. But as Double Pendulum highlights it’s not just athletes affected by air pollution, but all of us, especially children.

In relation to this the Campaign for Clean Air in London have recently published a list of schools that are within 150 meters of a road carrying more than 10,000 vehicles per day. Drawing attention to the long term effects of exposure to air pollution, particularly in children, resulting in seriously debilitating conditions such as asthma.

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