<aside> 🧠Concept Diary by Nadia Piet for the State of The Art Technology course of the Data-Driven Design MA class 2020-2021.
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We live in a world with so much data available - a lot of it too big, opaque, and abstract for us to understand. Designers and artists are experimenting with various ways of encoding this data in new types of visualizations and other media such as audio and sculpture.
I'm interested to explore meaningful representations of data beyond the traditional 2D charts.
Studios known for work like this are Refik Anadol, Ouchhh, Waltz Binaire, ANF Studio, xfy lab, and others.
I want to research the process and best practices for these new types of immersive / experiential / interactive 3D data visualizations, in comparison to traditional static graph visualizations. I want to understand the creative and technical process, the design and data choices made, and explore best practices for this new stream of data-driven design work.
I'd like to evaluate how best practices for traditional data visualisation like those developed by Edward Tufte may (not) apply to emerging types of experiential, immersive, interactive data installations. I'm curious how practitioners think about the various facets of a data viz such as its aesthetic qualities, interpretability, etc. and how they affect the experience, perception, comprehension, and impact on the audience. So far I haven't been able to find much existing research on this.
To pose this as a question we can ask: How might generative 3D visualizations help us engage with big data in a meaningful, experiential way?
As part of the project I want to learn to make these visualizations myself to understand the process of decoding and encoding data more intimately and collaborate with practitioners in this space. I want to see how far I can get with 4-6 weeks of practice and reflect on my experiences working with data and embedding knowledge and stories in 3D visualizations.
By reaching out to a few studios, I learned that one of the most-used software in this space is TouchDesigner. While TD is a powerful software, people also warned me how hard it is to learn. I'm told it's very challenging and there isn't that much documentation available (compared to say Python or Processing. The outputs are stunning, but the labor is technical and sometimes tedious.
Thankfully, one of the studios I emailed, xfy lab, offered to collaborate and support me in my learning journey. I plan to learn TouchDesigner by doing loads of tutorials, and will go to xfy lab one day a week for help and inspiration.
Depending on progress, I could also switch to a library like three.js which uses Javascript to create 3D renders and could be used for data visualization.
As part of the project I also want to continue to speak with practitioners and do unstructured interviews to understand their process, thoughts, and tools.
In the first week, I did interviews with yfx lab and Encoded studio about their process.
I also started TouchDesigner tutorials from YouTube. Following a handful beginners introductions to familiarize myself with the software and interface, I did these two from YouTube:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/b946c4c7-0332-4fb2-823f-d8f22e8a1d5b/Screen_Recording_2021-03-03_at_11.56.27.mov
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/7fb768ad-8a0d-4d5b-9c2e-da15eb82cce7/Screen_Recording_2021-02-23_at_22.12.02.mov
yfx lab introduced me on their Slack and after sharing what I want to learn, the community there provided me with a super valuable set of resources to learn about 3D data visualization in TD.
One of the key things they all mentioned that is vital to what I want to learn is instancing. I started learning about that with the following series of tutorials.