Design.playground
In the past year or so, I’ve really been fascinated by creative technology. I’m obsessed. I love innovative and creative applications of technology. I specifically love the work of Refik Anadol and Talia Cotton. They are my favorite creative pioneers of our time.
Refik Anadol is an AI Data Artist from Istanbul, Türkiye. As an AI artist, Anadol develops systems that “dream” or generate visuals from curated data. One of his newest works is the recently opened museum DATALAND in Los Angeles, California, developed with fellow artist Efsun Erkılıç. Anadol and Erkılıç created the Large Nature Model (LNM), an AI large language model consisting of ethically sourced data from nature. The museum features immersive, room-size experiences that transport visitors to a world of dreaming machines based on the LNM. It’s crazy cool work that uses meaningful data and translates that data into a unique interpretive experience.
Talia Cotton is CEO and founder of COTTON, a New York innovative design agency that develops generative experiences and branding for clients. Cotton’s work for System Health is just one of the many projects that struck me. I had the pleasure of listening to her presentation for the Dallas Society of Visual Communications (DSVC) and share a little about the project. Cotton developed a generative visual system for System Health that emulated the idea that in medicine, countless variables affect health and disease. Each node of the visual system can interact with each other and is constantly evolving.
What both Anadol and Cotton do is not just create generative or interactive visuals, they develop systems to make meaningful experiences that matter to people.
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For this proof of concept, I wanted to look at the Dallas Arboretum. Although they switched to a third-party parking vendor to manage their parking lots that led to lots of wrongly issued tickets of visitors that has made lots of people, including me, a little upset, the Dallas Arboretum is a nonprofit that’s mission is to enrich the lives through the beauty of plants complemented by community, learning, innovation, and sustainability. As a nonprofit, the Arboretum is required to publish annual financial reports. I wanted to look at their operating expenses and revenue and see if there was a more interesting way of not just visualizing but also interacting with that data aside from simply reading it. I want to inspire others to explore the possibilities when art and technology collaborate. And I think they can transform how we experience data into increasingly impactful works.
Last year, I started to learn Touch Designer; It’s a visual programming program that is used to create generative visuals. While incredibly useful and fun, I quickly realized a real limitation of the program that it’s not as portable compared to code. I need a very capable computer to run a generative program created with Touch Designer whereas using Python, for example, I don’t have that same concern. I still use the tool every so often, but I find myself returning to code for its flexibility. I again find this to be true for this proof of concept.
For this proof of concept, I wish to use the financial data reported by the Dallas Arboretum and create an interactive chart of the data to visually understand the composition of revenue for the nonprofit. The chart should resemble a Texas Thistle, a purple native and spiny wildflower that attracts pollinators in the Blackland Prairie ecosystem Dallas resides in. This chart should exist in-browser,accessible via a website, and reacts to user’s mouse movement; if a user hovers their mouse on a particular detail, that petal will be highlighted in color and scale. I used p5.js to create this visualization.