Notebook
Here's where we post periodic updates on what we've been up to at Fathom. Reflections on the interesting stories that emerge from our client work, side projects, after-hours rabbitholes, and other miscellaneous threads of inquiry.
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve been awarded a grant from the Knight Foundation! After working with Knight to navigate the civic tech landscape, we thought they would be a great resource to help us explore a more personal project. The Knight Prototype Fund helps media makers, technologists, and tinkerers take ideas from concept to demo, so it seemed the perfect starting point to bring our latest project on urban agriculture to life.
It should come as no surprise that we spend a lot of time geeking out over data. Unless we're busy watching movies, you'll find us exploring existing datasets, and working towards a clear and compelling visual representation of the stories we find inside. Reimagining the child health record as a part of last year's Records for Life contest offered an exciting opportunity to apply those same design concepts to the input mechanisms themselves — both digital and analog — in order to increase the volume and accuracy of global health data.
This blog post is motivated by the work I'm carrying out at the Sabeti Lab, which consists of the development of new tools for the visualization of health and genomic information. One of the aims of these tools is to help doctors and researchers find new correlations in their data.
It ain’t over ’til it’s over. Latest personal project at Fathom, Rocky Morphology, analyzes the narrative structure of Rocky I-VI.
Hot off the presses! Our latest project with the Knight Foundation went live today. Trends in Civic Tech is an interactive tool for exploring the rapidly growing field of "civic tech" — organizations and companies operating at the intersection of technology, open government, and citizen engagement.
In addition to taking on new projects, interns, workshops, and leadership in the last few months, we were excited to enter Records for Life, a design challenge sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The challenge focused on reimagining the child health record — a humble document that is responsible for a tremendous amount of information exchange during the first five years of a child's life.
It’s been exactly a year since Professor Kristen Coogan's Information Design class from Boston University came by for a visit, so we were glad to have them back for another tour in 2013. While it was a bummer that two members of the “dad” side of our office were out sick today, their empty chairs fortunately allowed us to accommodate seating for our 16 guests. Once everyone got settled on the third floor, Katy and Terrence began an overview of some of the work we’ve been cooking up in the past year.
Fathom has been doing a lot of work for Nike in the past nine months, in particular with the Nike+ FuelBand and the NikeFuel* data.
In September we were honored that Connected China was named a finalist in the 2013 Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards.
We all loved it when James brought his family to visit the office this summer — especially when his oldest daughter Joy took a particular shine to the Big Chair: