You can also use the Amazon link to order the posters from inside the US as well, and if this goes well, we may just use Amazon for all our fulfillment—it’s a lot of work!

We hope you’ll like them. Most of the proceeds for the posters will be going to Kiva and DonorsChoose (we hope to have an update on that shortly). And if you run into problems that Amazon cannot fix, let us know. This is an experiment, and we’re still trying to figure out the best way to handle all the issues involved.

— Eva and Ben

Dencity (read about the making of in Hot Spots and Cold Mountains)

All Streets (read about the making of in All Streets exhibits in Frankfurt)

It turned out that The Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) had invited her to speak at their symposium. But she did write home and explained:

WESTAF holds an annual gathering of researchers whose work relates to arts and culture policy — everything from arts administrators, economists, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, and designers — each in their own way trying to figure out what value the arts have to contribute to big picture goals like vibrant cities, well educated kids, and renewed economic prosperity for regions where industry has moved elsewhere. The focus this year was the overwhelming amount of data these fields now have access to, and how that data might be translated into better policies for arts and culture initiatives.

Representatives from design firms like Fathom and Stamen shared ideas about what’s possible, and how storytelling and narrative are key starting points for making research and data more accessible to a larger audience.

I showed Stats of the Union, in particular, because it started life as a public data set. Because we did two distinct versions using the same data, its a great way to show how framing changes things when all else is held equal. First as a more basic redesign of the content. And then second with an eye towards telling a compelling story to a larger audience.

Katy claimed she had conference most of her stay in LA, but she did manage to send home a photo diary:

The symposium took place on the top floor of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Prior to this trip, the pavilion was only known to me as the place where my mom, as a high school student, saw Angela Lansbury in a production of Mame. It was a beautifully maintained late 60s arts complex that had a great view of the plaza below.

This was the closest I got to the Hollywood sign. The tiny, white horizontal thing in the middle of that back mountaintop is it.

After talks, I spent a lot of time decompressing in the gardens surrounding Walt Disney Concert Hall (designed by Frank Gehry).

This was the inner table at the symposium. Anyone who sat here had to speak.

“Prolific” may now be as tied to Joyce Carol Oates as “abominable” is to the Himalayan snowman. But more interesting than the productivity is of course the imagination that enables it: how Oates renders a fictional Jeffrey Dahmer or Marilyn Monroe with such perfect empathetic pitch that everything about them seems lifelike. Still, we thought it would be interesting to look at this “prolific” and show an overview of Joyce Carol Oates’s extraordinary creative output.

We gathered the covers of all her novels, novellas, short-story collections, young adult fiction, children’s books, memoirs, essay collections, plays, and novels under two different pseudonyms. In our process of figuring out how best to look at them, Chris built several viewers that showed cover art and genres on a timeline that spans 1963 to 2012.

We found that a static image, showing all the data at once, told the most interesting story (and also worked best as a “poster of aspiration and stress” for wannabe novelists…). What we most wanted to see was simply: “What does it look like to have written 120 books?”

Click to enlarge:

The first draft set a high bar.

In most cases you’d want to fill the lost spaces with cuts of other things you might need, like keychains. But Friday does funny things to people.

The first universal truth of laser cutting: the remains will be almost as fun to play with as the thing you just had cut.

Forget about making it bigger, making it red, or adding a bird. In this studio, we put an F on it.

An F in 55pt Sentinel Bold, to be exact.

Perfect for tucking into that back pocket.

As prototypes go, it’s not half bad! After some intense internal testing, these are the takeaways for the next round: beef up the connections between each segment of the stencil, bump the thickness from .5mm to something with a little more heft, look for a material that is slightly less transparent, and collaborate with our friends at danger!awesome to get it produced locally.

The layout depicts all 5,480 pages of reports in a single display. The 1892 report, just 18 pages long, is seen on the left, while the newly released 2011 report weighs in at 146 pages on the right. (With the exception of the front and back covers, we show “spreads” or pairs of pages together, just the way that you’d read them in the originals.)

Clicking on one of the terms on the lower left highlights all relevant mentions of that term across all of the pages. Selecting a highlighted page shows the text that surrounds each word, and clicking on the page displays the actual spread.

In addition to the terminology changes, we were also excited about seeing design trends, since annual reports are a kind of bellwether of graphic design. When viewing a cover, you can also move left or right to see each year one after another.

The collection reveals a fascinating history of not only GE as a company, but also the country as a whole. The reports directly address national and world events—economic depressions, world wars, the space race, energy crises—and the challenges they brought to the company, its investors, and its consumers. Reports from 1915 and 1944 mention GE’s production of war goods at the request of the government. The annual report of 1945 describes how GE provided parts for the atomic bomb, which has “…brought to mankind a potential source of power heretofore unavailable and almost inconceivable.”  The 1973 report, reflecting on that year’s oil crisis, notes how “the energy challenge has several special facets of meaning for General Electric.”

When and how watchwords emerge is another piece of the story. “Technology” was commonly used beginning in the 1960s. The first mention of “Innovation” in 1949 pertains to the clock radio—“Nearly 1,000,000 sets of this popular postwar innovation have been produced”—but the term appears often, especially in chairman’s reports, from the 1980s on.

Even in its earlier years, GE was an international company, and the reports depict the rapid growth of its international businesses in later years. In the 1970s, the more modest “International” starts to lose ground to the all-encompassing “Global,” terminology that reaches notable frequency in the reports of the 2000s, as “globalization” became the word of the day.

Changing sensibilities also meant that words were used in different ways, and in some cases we decided to preserve these alternate uses. In the 1890s and through the first decades of the twentieth century, the term “economy” is used to describe the efficiency of processes, people, and machines rather than national and global fortunes. The 1894 report notes steps being taken to mitigate losses suffered in the panic of 1893: “Special attention has been given to the supervision of credits, economy of administration, and the improvement of factories…” Not until 1946 does a report stress that reducing coal and oil consumption in the production of electricity is of “tremendous importance to the national economy.”

On the visual front, black-and-white text and simple graphs give way to full-color photographs by mid-century. The 1945 report, which covers the company’s transition from wartime to peacetime production, is markedly longer than the wartime reports and is the first to include photographs.

In a number of instances, the sentence containing the keyword isn’t even the most interesting thing on the page.  “Health” leads us to page 17 of the 1952 report, where a delightful kitten paws at the “first 27-inch aluminized picture tube.”  (the same size as the flat panel monitors used in the development of this piece.) “Lighting” shows us the amazing “‘Partio Cart,’ a complete outdoor cooking center on wheels” along with party-goers in classic 1960 fashions.

“Wind” takes us to 1981, where a scientist works at a massive computer with a hood (p. 9) that makes one grateful for the portability of modern laptops. “Global,” as in “brutally Darwinian global marketplaces,” will lead you to page 4 of the 1991 report, but the real gem is CEO Jack Welch’s explanation of why he has been on a crusade to remove bureaucracy and layers from GE:

“Layers…insulate.  They slow things down.  They garble.  Leaders in highly layered organizations are like people who wear several sweaters outside on a freezing winter day.  They remain warm and comfortable but are blissfully ignorant of the realities of their environment.  They couldn’t be further from what’s going on.”

Over the course of his leadership at GE, Welch turned the previously matter-of-fact chairman’s letters into spirited declarations of GE’s goals for the future.

Searching for the term “Appliances” provides a particularly amusing look at fashions and gender roles throughout the years. The term takes us to page 20 of the 1967 report, where we are introduced to appliances in the new yellow “Harvest” color, “supplementing the fashionable Avocado and Coppertone colors which are marketed in addition to white.”

In 1961, a Betty Draper-ish housewife pours her husband a cup of coffee and displays the “many other electrical servants the Company brings to the aid of homemakers.”  (In 1976, on p. 11, a husband in bellbottom jeans is finally pouring himself his own damn cup of coffee.) “Appliances” also suggests GE’s global reach, even mid-century: in the 1959 report, p. 7 has photographs of Nixon and Khrushchev visiting the kitchen built by GE in Moscow.  The caption notes that the kitchen was designed “not as a dream kitchen but to show what the average American expects to find in a new home.”

Later reports illustrate GE’s efforts to become a more diverse and global company. A search for “Technology” yields a statement about the company’s support of educational programs designed to attract women and minorities to engineering (1976, p. 26).  People of color begin to emerge in photographs of employees at work and of consumers using GE products. In the 1950s and 1960s, women in the reports appear most often in the kitchen, making dinner and washing dishes; by the 1970s they are pictured running machines and heading divisions—and one, Gertrude Michelson, has joined the board of directors. Her retirement is noted in 2001 after twenty-six years of service; compare that board of directors (pp. 38-39) to the board her first year (1976, p. 25).  The 2000s in particular reflect a concern with making products that benefit consumers around the world. Searching for “Cancer” brings up p. 29 in the 2011 report, which describes GE’s $1 billion commitment to improve cancer screening in under-served areas such as Saudi Arabia.

The piece allows users to discover these details while speaking to a larger story: how the history of GE has reflected the history of the United States. It shows how their inventions and innovations, from a better light bulb to a jet engine to an energy-saving refrigerator, both impact and are influenced by the changing lives and demands of American—and, increasingly, global—consumers.

(In a future post, we hope to add more details about how the piece was built. We had less than two weeks to go from working prototype—with thousands of unretouched scans—to production—with all 5,480 pages and over 5,000 text excerpts! Features were limited as a result, and the process of scanning, cleaning, and annotating all of the data took center stage. More later…)

Since talks can be one thing when you hear them and quite another when you try recap them later — sans speaker charisma, raised stage and elegant delivery — I often find it interesting to return to my notes a while after the talk. See if the genie is still in the bottle. What stays with you over a bit of time, is often more valuable than your immediate impression. (Stealing the slides also helped.)

Mark’s point on interactivity in data visualization states that a display needs to be interactive if a changed view lets the audience focus on the analyses rather than the data.

It’s a principle often ignored. Even when a designer exports the data into visual expressions, the viewer still often has to spend energy locating comparable data sets.

While in the example below, by making data from the Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI) report available in a single-screen interface for the iPad app Stats of the Union, the viewer can change perspectives while preserving the context.

Mark also gave the “why this, why now” of data visualization.

Visualization has long been simply a practical method for communicating information. The effort to tease meaning out of data sets and show it visually — be it uncharted coasts, human behavior, or balls of light traversing the night sky, is not new.

But this is why companies and the public pay more attention to the field:

Mark detailed the process of how analysts, developers, and designers establish relationships between numbers, images, and text in order to fit them into an interactive app that preserves meaning and is simple to use.

A week after hearing his perspective, one thought in particular had stayed with me:

Insights are expensive.

Once the work is done, an insight may appear simple. But the effort that someone went through to acquire them was far from.

An expensive insight, once truly understood, can often be extremely concentrated. It’s the sub-clause that sums up a writer’s understanding of how Russian literature affected the Western voice — precisely what the story needs — versus the cheap effort of filling two paragraphs with notes on a late morning. An expensive insight may add just a small part: a slice of a three million year old bone extracted from the Ethiopian desert, cleaned, analyzed, and fitted into context — Lucy — by a patient archeologist.

Once simplicity is reached, a design looks obvious, even banal. Of course it’s done this way! It’s almost annoying. But with the aim on clarity, one should never show off the effort. Showing off effort tends to inspire design that may look intriguing but is about as instructive as its real life equivalent:

Hairballs.

Besides promising to entertain us with his looks on February 29, Chris built an interactive Wooly Willy-app so that other people could help design a great mustache.

Frank Zappa, Burt Reynolds or Frida Kahlo. Plenty of styles to choose from. All of them giving Wooly Chris a new inner life.

In the same way as the full beard allows the secretly 40-something hipster to sport the lifestyle of a 22-year old without anybody asking questions, the mustache gives its bearer a quick key to his personality. You can guess from afar that the guy in a Dali is eccentric; the walrus is probably sweeter than he looks, and the man in the Fu Manchu is not the good guy.

All this digital growing and shaving raised a deeper question: why do men grow mustaches outside of charity?

“Research show that facial hair makes a man look more mature,” says Nancy Etcoff, Assistant Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School and author of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, when we asked her.
“But it also changes the way we perceive facial features and configurations. It can hide the shape of the mouth, or change the perception of the distance between nose and mouth. Beards can exaggerate size of jaws, mutton chops can make a face seem slimmer. And all can hide complexion problems.”

So hiding and enhancing?

“Yes. Men’s facial hair is like women’s cosmetic.”

This section of the site should give you an idea of what we like to think about (especially if you dig back through older posts), and you can get a sense of some of our client work from the rest of the site. We like to keep a mix between client work and in-house projects that we do out of curiosity or for the hell of it—a bit more of a mix of research lab and commercial. We’re a small shop so finding exactly the right people is especially important.

For all the positions, you’ll be creating work like you see on fathom.info, but with even more of an emphasis mobile projects (Android, iOS, JavaScript) and installation projects. If you’re a developer, design skills are a plus. Or if you’re a designer, same goes for coding.

• Developer Looking for someone with a strong background in Java, and some C/C++ as well. On Monday this person would be sorting out more advanced aspects of a client project. On Tuesday they would hone the Processing Development Environment, mercilessly crushing bugs. On Wednesday they would refactor critical visualization tools used by brilliant scientists. On Thursday they could put out a fire in another client project without breaking a sweat, and on the fifth day, they would choose what we’re having for Beer Friday. This messiah also might not mind being referred to in the third person.
• Web Developer In 1996, I used Java for my Computer Graphics 2 homework at Carnegie Mellon. I’ll never forget the look on the face of my professor Paul Heckbert (Graphics Gems IV, Pixar, and now Gigapan — a man who wrote an actual ray tracer in C code that fit on the back of a business card), when he asked me during office hours why this was a good idea. Your professor did the same thing when you told him (or her) that you’d be implementing your final project with JavaScript and Canvas. We need amazing things to happen with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and you’re the person to do it.
• Junior Designer You’ve finished your undergrad design program and feel the need to make beautiful things. Your commute is spent fixing the typography in dreadful subway ads (only in your head, please). You are capable of pixel-level detail work to get mobile apps or a web site just right. And if we’re lucky, you’re so good with color that you’ve been mistaken for an impressionist painter.
• Senior Designer So all that stuff above that the Junior Designer candidate thinks they can do? You can actually do it. And more important, you have the patience and humility to teach it to others around you. You’re also an asset on group projects, best friends with developers, and adored by clients.

At the moment, we’re only looking for people located in (or willing to relocate to) the Boston area.

Please send résumé or CV, links to relevant work, and cover letter to inquire (at) fathom (dot) info. Please do not write us individually, as that may void your contest entry.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been building two interactive installation pieces for the lobby of GE’s headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. The pieces are part of the GE Works campaign, which describes and organizes the company’s work with four verbs: Powering, Curing, Building, and Moving. Our job was to show how data can illustrate these first two activities.

To share the installations online, we created a pair of videos (seen above and below) that capture how the interactive pieces work and what they depict.

For the “Powering” piece, we worked with data about the location and power output from 713 GE gas turbines during fifteen days.

For “Curing,” we tracked 125,530 CT and MR scans conducted using GE equipment during a 24-hour period. Aesthetically, the pieces had to work from a distance in the physical space of a lobby, which called for some different design decisions than an online tool would require. Still, we wanted it to be clear that the pieces are informed by real data, generated by machines at work in the real world. Real data has structure, and this structure informs the design.

The difference between generative art and a visualization based on real data is that with the latter, the viewer can visually decode the piece. Order, shape, size, direction, and color all have meaning. The dots originating from the globe in the “Curing” piece, for instance, represent the locations where the scans took place.

In the “Powering” data set, we discovered that turbines located in the same area work together for efficiency and sustainability. Globally, there’s no intentional, overarching structure to how the turbines fire up. Yet patterns emerge when turbines sharing time zones turn on and off at the same time. You can see these correlations in the final piece: the illuminated lines rolling towards the center at the same time indicate turbines turning on in unison. This wouldn’t happen with artificially generated data.

We chose each design element to best highlight what the data represented. The designs either evoke thoughts of the actual events and actions that the data signifies (turbines turning on, electricity being generated) or show a story of time and scale that is otherwise difficult to grasp (what do 135,000 scans really look like? What do they look like when spread across five continents?).

The designs also allow for different perspectives in a single interface. The globe in “Curing” shows the geo-location of the scans; simultaneously the timelines indicate the number of scans occurring each minute. The wheel in “Powering” shows the correlation of turbines turning on at the same time that it shows each turbine’s location and power output. This ensures that no data point is presented without context that lets an audience put it in perspective.

Even if these visualizations are small stories, just short glimpses into a larger story of activity across the world, they still reward the audience for taking an interest and a closer look. They make accessible actual numbers and output that would otherwise be buried in a spreadsheet.

The pieces are now being displayed on a large touch screen wall in the GE lobby. They were also on display during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.

We turned to our friends for the soundtracks: for Powering, Gloobic produced From there to, and Oslo electric by Eric Gunther is the backdrop for Curing.

Chris and Ben made some color palettes… and then we just looked at the pictures instead of out the window.

These are birds from Emily Gobeille’s and Theo Watson’s interactive Puppet Parade. Theo and Emily used to work in our office all the time, but now they live in New York. We miss them.

Hey Theo and Emily, what’s the story about these colors?

The color is very important with this project. The environment had to be inviting and neutral, because the colors and textures of the creatures change based on the foods they eat.
What’s the name of this bird?

Pointy. Pointy is very happy but also very hungry.

What does Pointy like to eat?

The creatures eat the food made by the children and if they want to erase their color they eat the clouds.

And what do they like to do?

They like to be controlled by frantic arms and they are always hungry for a meal (being a giant puppet burns a lot of calories).

Why are they so colorful?

In this world ‘you are what you eat’.

This is a photo that James Grady shot last fall. When James doesn’t go to RISD, he is a designer for us. This is what he wrote about the colors in his photo:

In the late fall, the crisp air and bright blue sky make for the most amazing sunsets. I love the way the solar flares bounce off the camera lens and create a beautiful prism of color that ranges from hot pink too cool blue, while all the other colors fade to graphic silhouettes.

 

When we asked Katy which colors she likes today, she sent a vintage label for Orange Crush soda from across the room:

I bought a batch on eBay with about a hundred old soda labels from all over the world. They were really beautiful, and had great names, like Howdy and Cheer Up!. The backgrounds were screen prints or lithographs made for glass bottles, which allowed for spot colors and an intensity you just don’t see on modern labels. Incidentally, Fathom is housed in the Puffers building here in Boston, which takes its name from a local beverage entrepreneur who patented carbonation and bottling technology in the late 1800s.

Beatriz Ramos, artist and founder of New York/Caracas production company Dancing Diablo, channeled her roots in this painting for a stopmotion animation piece.

I come from the Caribbean, where the sea is turquoise, the mountains roll in lustrous greens and the sky is an intense blue. The sunlight is so bright that any colors you use for your house or your art work, have to be high in chroma in order not to look faded. You get used to rich, vivid colors.

New York photographer Anna Schori makes everyone look chilly like they were in Sweden or something.

Portrait of Ed Vallance, musician.

I like cold metallic blues and greens. The more underwater the picture feels, the more I can strip skin tones from warmth, and the more satisfying I find the result. During the winter months in Sweden, where I grew up, you get more dusk and dawn then actual daylight. The light that the snow reflects back then is a beautiful cold blue.

Sosolimited sent us a flyer they made for one of their shows at Middlesex.

This was a giant poster that we picked up from a CVS going-out-of-business sale. The original picture said something about “you go girl”. We think the colors are supposed to inspire youthful confidence, but the kind of confidence that is improved if you buy make-up.

But not everyone likes color. Skylar Tibbits from MIT Department of Architecture, finally put his foot down:

The spectrum from black to white is filled with nearly limitless variations and there is little to no need for any other colors in ones life. Even if there was a need for color (which there clearly is not), the average human life has roughly 2,208,816,000 seconds, which is just not enough time to comprehend the complexities of black-to-white, let alone the infinite spectrum and depressing qualities of the remaining colors.

If black is the absence of all color and white is the presence of the complete spectrum, then one might ask ‘what more do you need in your life than all or nothing?’  Who wants to be stuck on the fence?

Living proof of the purity of black lies in an architects outfit – I ask, ‘have you ever seen an architect dressed in color?’

Which made us feel a bit like this guy:

But we kept being happy about colors. Here are some other palettes we like:

Gucci’s fall collection

Lady Gaga for Thierry Mugler

Male Bird of Paradise

Frida Kahlo by Frida Kahlo

Cube installation by Robert Filliou

Photo by Guy Bourdin

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland