Overview
This project was submitted as my final project for the BIMD 250 - Introduction To Interaction Design course during the Winter quarter of 2019. For this work, we were tasked with using an API or JSON object to create a visualization from data in a significant way. This work is a 3D visualization of every known asteroid impact recorded by NASA. The data itself was collected and converted into a JSON file containing 1000 objects that each represent one asteroid's impact data.
Data science and visualization is becoming more prevalent and desired in the business and technology worlds. Large amounts of data are currently available but not always collected, and making visual connections between small pockets of collected data helps us gain more perspective. I believe the next new wave of art will continue to develop as we collect more data from our lives both on and off line.
Process
When approaching this assignment I was unsure of what type of data I wanted to work with. I knew that using data unfamiliar to me would make for a more challenging but also rewarding experience so that's what I did. When searching for data sets I found that the information provided about space was really interesting to look through. In the end I decided I wanted to learn more from the asteroid impact data that NASA has recorded and put together in a json data set.
While working on this project I found that the chapters on "Scale" and "Time" applied to the program the most because of the type of data that was being focused on. The most influential and maybe hardest to work around at some times were scale and modularity because of the range of a certain variables value. The mass of the asteroids had such a large range, from as little as 1kg to 2,000,000kg, that getting the right scale was very difficult.
However, as part of the project I decided that too much scaling would distract from the impact that the visualization has. One of the important and most prominent pieces of this is that fact that some of the asteroids are so large in size they take up the entire canvas. I felt this was essential to providing a visual layer that gives the viewer the experience of imagining how that might look when impacting the earth.
As a result of working with data that was previously unfamiliar to me I feel like I learned a lot about how I visualize data. Before starting the class I did not have experience with data visualization and had never known much about art that comes from it. It was very rewarding to simply be able to take a large set of data and watch the digital representation be drawn on screen. I do look forward to working on this further in my own time after this quarter and I hope to get much better and representing data.
Reflection
After completing this final project, I felt like I had explored something I find very interesting which I didn't know existed before. Using and creating design to render different visualizations is something I find deeply meaningful in my life, and I used that to inspire this work. Seeing what other people had used for their projects and the use of many different data sets was enlightening in a way. It was really fun to see how many different data sets are available for use and that even using the same as another person doesn't mean the same visualization will be generated. The concept of taking just raw data and processing it to make patterns, find answers, and create solutions seems like a really important one and most certainly something I feel I can apply myself towards. I will be revisiting this project and implementing some better scaling functions so that the visualization is more inline with what I had drawn on paper.
Project in Action
Animation
