New Media For Scientific Visualization

Andrea Fasolo Rao
New MediA for

scientific data
visualization
New Media for scientific

data visualization
Andrea Fasolo Rao
279245
Supervisor:
Marco Ferrari
A.A 2014/2015
Sessione di Laurea
Marzo 2016
Universit Iuav di Venezia
Dipartimento di Progettazione e pianificazione in
ambienti complessi
Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Design del Prodotto e
della Comunicazione Visiva
Curriculum Comunicazioni visive e multimediali
Abstract
Italiano
Questa tesi affronta il tema dellinterpretazione

e della visualizzazione dei dati scientifici, su come si
sviluppata negli ultimi decenni, il suo legame con
la tecnologia informatica e la posizione nei riguardi
dei principi del design dellinformazione pi tradizionale, oltre allenorme influenza che il fenomeno Open
Data sta avendo sul mondo della visualizzazione in
generale. Verranno analizzati inoltre vari progetti
basati sulla visualizzazione dati, ma che la affrontano
da punti di vista diversi: quello puramente scientifico, quello del design e quello artistico. Questultimo
tipo di progetti potrebbe essere fondamentale per
levoluzione della visualizzazione scientifica e di dati
in generale: mettendo al primo posto valori estetici
piuttosto che informativi esplora nuove modalit di
approccio ai dati precedentemente non prese in considerazione Inoltre, lutilizzo di strumenti considerati
innovativi (video, new media, interattivit, suono)
pu dare nuova vita alla divulgazione scientifica e
alla visualizzazione di dati. La complessit e la vastit
dei fenomeni e dei dati coinvolti, applicando algoritmi
di traduzione in immagini e suoni, pu contribuire a
costruire esperienze di valore sia divulgativo che estetico. Sfruttando questo valore estetico si pu avvicinare il pubblico a tematiche apparentemente complesse ma affascinanti, che normalmente passano per
forme di divulgazione pi tradizionali che, negli anni
a venire, rischiano di perdere appeal agli occhi di un
pubblico sempre pi esigente, in termini di entertainment e spettacolarit.
New Media for Scientific Data Visualization
This thesis deals with the interpretation and

visualization of scientific data, on how it has developed in recent decades, its connection with computer
technology and its position regarding the principles
of the more traditional information design, and also
the huge influence of the Open Data phenomenon is
having on the visualization world in general. Various data visualization projects will be analyzed, that
approaches it from different angles: the purely scientifically one, the design one and the art one. This
last kind of project could be fundamental for the scientific, and data too, visualization evolution: with its
primary focus on aesthetic values rather than informative it explores new ways to approach data; in addiction the use of innovative instruments (video, new
media, interactivity, sound) can breathe new life in
science popularization and to data visualization. The
complexity and breadth of the involved phenomena
and data, together with appropriate translating algorithms to sounds and images, can create informative, popularizing and aesthetic experiences. Leveraging this aesthetic value, it can be possible to bring
the public closer to apparently complex but fascinating themes, since the more traditional popularization
and communication means will lose of appeal to an
always more demanding and difficult to astound public, that is becoming used to always more spectacular
and entertaining means of communication.
Abstract
English
Contents
1. Introduction
10
Why to investigate Scientific Visualization
12
2. Scientific Visualization
14
What is Scientific Visualization
16
Historic Scientific Visualization
18
Scientific Visualization, computers and computer graphics
24
3. Open Data
32
Beginning of the Open Data era
34
Early Open Data examples
36
The birth of public open data
37
The future: Linked Data
40
4. Art, Science and Design
44
Separation of Science and Aesthetics
46
Evaluating attractiveness
48
The role of art
50
5. Case Studies
52
Case studies selection
54
Ryoji Ikeda, Supersymmetry
56
Nathalie Miebach, Weather scores
60
Alex H. Parker, Worlds
64
Aaron Koblin, Nik Hafermaas, Dan Goods, eCLOUD
66
Soo-in Yang, David Benjamin, Living Light
68
Lorenzo Pagliei, Les Invisibles
70
JeongHo Park, LHC CERN Data Audio Generator
72
Jan Willem Tulp, Goldilocks
74
Kurzgesagt, In a Nutshell
76
Nasa Scientific Visualization Studio
78
Nasa Hyperwall Visualizations
82
6. A Design-centered evolution
88
Design as the unifying force
90
Usage of new media
91
Coverage of contemporary and popular science topics
93
Usage of datasets and real-time data sources
94
Keeping the data understandable
95
Application of design reasoning and verifiable methodology
96
7. Project: Sounds from the Sun
98
Sound and Psychoacoustics
100
Application to data
102
The Solar wind and its consequences
103
Solar wind observation
104
Sound rendition of solar wind data
106
Technical aspects
108
Testing process
110
Resources
114
Conclusions
118
Thanks
121
Colophon
122
1.
Introduction
Why to investigate
scientific
visualization
12
One of the most rapidly growing field of design

in the last decade has surely been data visualization.
This happened, and is still happening, for a variety of
reasons, including the always-increasing availability
of any sort of dataset, the rise of visual journalism,
but also the incredible computational power that we
can have inside the few kilograms of a nowadays
laptop computer, when compared to a 20, or even 10,
years ago workstation.
Thanks to these few conditions, we have the
possibility, power and will to create progressively
more useful and appealing visualizations that can fit
in different aspects of our lives.
Parallel to design-driven and artistic data visualizations, in the last three decades another field of
representation was born and growing exponentially,
both in usage and importance: Scientific visualization, or SciViz.
This particular kind of computer graphics is
traditionally aimed at rendering three-dimensional
phenomena of various kind, with an emphasis on the
realistic representation of features like volumes or
surfaces, depending on the aim of the piece. This kind
of artifacts, however, are usually developed in highly
specific scientific or academic environments, focusing
on very different parameters from the artworks we
are more used to see, aiming at a very small group of
experts from a specific field and often created without the design knowledge involved in the generally
more accessible works of data visualization.
However, things are rapidly changing: in the
last years the open data revolution caused a great
number of research centers and agencies to make
their datasets available to the public. For the first
time in history each one of us have the possibility to
work on the very same numbers analyzed by the top
scientists and researchers of NASA or CERN, just to
mention two of many. This created a lot of interest in
various design and art communities, and made pos-
sible some extremely interesting works of data rendition, ranging from static visualization to real-time
immersive interactive installations, covering the vast
arc that goes from design to art.
This could turn out to be a great possibility for
Scientific visualization: it has the chance to learn
from the great mass of projects involving open data. It
could incorporate, for example, a more conscious and
consistent design process, to improve usability and
readability for the specialists, but also to look at the
more experimental and aesthetics-oriented works of
art, that could be made into powerful popularization
instruments for the general public.
Introduction
13
2.
Scientific
Visualization
What is Scientific
Visualization
1: T.M. Rhyne, North Carolina State University,

Information and Scientific Visualization:
Separate but Equal or Happy Together at Last,
2011
2: The Ohio State University, A Critical History

of Computer Graphics and Animation
https://design.osvu.edu/carlson/history/
lesson18.html
3: T. Delmarcelle, L. Hesselink, Visualizing secondorder tensor fields with hyperstreamlines, Computer

Graphics and Applications, IEEE, 1993
16
If Scientific visualization is approached, the first

thing that should be made clear is if and how it is different from what we usually call data visualization:
is it a subfield, a completely different thing or something in between?
Traditionally, Scientific visualization has always
been considered a group of techniques to transform
some kind of science-based data into visual information through a reproducible process, with the fundamental difference from data visualization that the
data is intrinsically spatial and physically based. In
other words, in Scientific visualization the spatial coordinates are part of the data, usually being between
the independent variables; while in information and
data visualization designers often deal with abstract
data, so they can freely decide how to manage the
two or three spatial dimensions.1 The same consideration is for time: in Scientific visualization its often
given and intrinsic to the data points, while in data
visualization its another parameter that the designer
can choose to manipulate.
This difference can be further clarified when
the most common visualization techniques used in
SciViz are taken into account, considering data of
different nature:2 bi-dimensional dataset usually
represents scalar or vector fields; in the case of scalar
data (for ex., temperatures) color mapping, wireframe
plots, scatter plots or contour lines can be used, while
vector fields (like winds or magnetic fields) take advantage of streamlines or line integral convolution;
For tri-dimensional data the subdivision between scalar and vector fields still adapts: in case of
scalar values, volume rendering or isosurfaces can be
used, while vector data uses streamlines, line integral
convolution, particle tracing and topological methods. To visualize tensor fields instead, which are more
complex, a technique denominated hyperstreamlines were developed.3
Example of line integral convolution applied

visualizing heat movements in a hot water pot
Example of mesh visualization of a 3D function
Example of hyperstreamlines applied to tensor

field visualization
Scientific Visualization
17
Historic Scientific
Visualization
4: J.C. Maxwell, Letter to James Thomson,

The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk
Maxwell, volume 3, p. 230-231
18
For how SciViz is defined and for its mechanics, it is tightly bounded to computers: it requires to
elaborate and translate to images always increasing
amounts of data, or to run complex simulations that
may take up to years of calculations on huge supercomputers. Therefore, it may be difficult to imagine
Scientific visualization before the digital revolution
that happened in the 80. In fact, usually we consider SciViz to be born in the early 80, and becoming prominent at the end of the same decade, after a
1987 report released by SIGGRAPH for the National
Science Foundation, Visualization in Scientific Computing. That report was crucial for the history of Scientific visualization, bringing to the newborn field a
lot of attentions, that concretized themselves in new
funding, workshops, conferences and publications in
the following years.
Before the NSF paper there are anyway some
remarkable examples of visualizations, developed
beginning from the 60, and there are even more impressing examples of pre-digital Scientific visualization: in fact, the century from 1850 to 1950 gave a
great push to the developing of various data representation techniques. The most important example, but
also quite singular, is considered to be the Maxwells
thermodynamic surface, a clay sculpture created in
1874 by the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell.
He is considered the father of electromagnetism, but
he was active also in other physics and mathematics
fields.
His surface was, in fact, a three-dimensional abstract plot of the thermodynamic states of a fictitious
substance, similar to water, putting in relation its volume, entropy and energy on the x, y and z axes, with
isothermal and isopiestics lines traced on the surface.
With Maxwells own words, it allowed the principal
features of known substances [to] be represented on
a convenient scale4 : usually, in thermodynamics,
when it is required to analyze the state of any fluid
and to extract a parameter like pressure or temperature, engineers and scientist have to rely on a number
of different bi-dimensional diagrams, each one plotting just two parameters at a time, like pressure and
volume, or temperature and entropy, and so on. Those
diagrams can be considered, in fact, just various bi-dimensional projections of a Maxwells thermodynamic surface. While the practicality of this artifact is
low, due to the obvious difficult to extrapolate or read
single values from it, it offers an extreme degree of
synthesis, allowing a novel and encompassing view
on various phenomena of fluid thermodynamics, offering so a major insight value over the traditional bidimensional graphs.
Going back two decades, another remarkable
example must be taken into consideration, this time
in the field of public health. During 1854 there was
a cholera outbreak in London, in the Soho district: it
was a particularly unfortunate area of the city, since
Maxwell thermodynamic surface

Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, England.
Example of Pression / Entropy

thermodynamic diagram for water
Example of Entropy / Enthalpy

thermodynamic diagram
20
the sewer system had still to reach it. This wasnt,

anyway, a big concern to the population: at the time it
was a wide spread idea that infectious diseases spread
through some kind of miasma, or bad air, therefore
most people had no idea of the importance of proper
sanitary services. What really changed the situation,
saving many other people from the infection and
bringing a new understanding about hygiene, was
the work of John Snow, a physician: he started tracing on a map all the cases of cholera he was hearing
about from the population, and thus noticing that
most cases were localized in a precise area. Further
investigations brought him to conclude that most of
the infected had been drinking water from a particular street pump. His research led to the closing of
that pump, that later was discovered to be polluted
by a nearby cesspit, and created in the population the
awareness that some diseases are carried by infected
water, thus anticipating Louis Pasteurs germ theory
Snows original cholera spreading map
21
Florence Nightingales Diagram of the causes of

mortality in the army in the East
5: Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of
Londons Most Terrifying Epidemic and How it
Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World,
Riverhead Books, 2006
22
by 7 years.5 Its an incredible milestone for scientific

visualization: it was one of the first time, and a proof,
that visualizing a phenomena on a map in a useful
way can cast a new light on events that may seem
unconnected between them.
Another notable example that are considered
precursors of SciViz is the Diagram of the causes of
mortality in the army in the East by Florance Nightingale, from 1873. She was as a British nurse manager
during the Crimean War, founder of the first secular nursing school in London and also a proficient
writer, with various publications to spread medical
knowledge. She also worked on and popularized the
graphical presentation of statistical data, leading to a
breakthrough in scientific visualization. During her
career she used to produce various diagrams, with a
designed that she created and called coxcombs, or
nowadays polar area diagrams, that she often used
to present statistical data and observations to people who may had difficult to understand traditional
statistical reports, for example for her reports to the
members of the Parliament on the state of the medical care in the Crimean War.
One of these diagrams visualized the seasonal
mortality by cause of her patients, noting that a big
number of deaths was linked to the bad state of British army camps in India, particularly: bad drainage,
contaminated water, overcrowding and poor ventilation. So, she started a campaign to popularize the idea
that it was necessary to improve the sanitary conditions in the country to increase the life quality and
expectance for both the Indian population and the
British army.
With support from the Royal Sanitary Commission, she convinced the minister responsible to
require every house owner to connect its building to
the main drainage system, greatly enhancing sanitary conditions.
As in Snows example, also this case shows how
a proper and well-design way to represent abstract
data can help to establish connections that are otherwise difficult to be noted, and to spread knowledge on
problems that are difficult to understand for whoever
may be a stranger to a particular field of knowledge.
23
Scientific
Visualization,
computers and
computer graphics
Composition of frames from

A two gyro gravity gradient
attitude control system
6: Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of

Londons Most Terrifying Epidemic and How it
Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World,
Riverhead Books, 2006
24
One of the most remarkable example of early

computer-generated scientific visualizations, and also
the first computer graphics film, is A two gyro gravity gradient attitude control system. Dated 1963, it
comes from the Bell Laboratories, at the time owned
by AT&T. It was created by Edward E. Zajac, an engineer working on various long-range, trans-oceanic
and planetary communications projects.
At the beginning of the sixties Zajac was working on Bells communication satellites program, involving a new kind of satellite equipped with two
gyroscopes, that would have solved some stability
and control problems that emerged with the previous
satellite designs. While the mathematics required to
prove its theory are thoughtfully explained in its paper A Two-Gyro, Gravity-Gradient Satellite Attitude
Control System, (J.A. Lewis, E.E. Zajac, The Bell system technical journal, 1964), he felt that the data, the
graphs and the static images in that dissertation were
not really enough to explain the complex rotations
that its theorized satellite would have. So, together
with his colleague Frank Sinden, they started to work
on an innovative visualization technique: a perspective video simulation, programmed in FORTRAN and
finalized using a custom-made software called ORBIT,
designed for this very purpose.
The realization process is to be considered interesting, for todays standards: the original computations were fed via punch cards to a IBM 7090 supercomputer, and then printed directly to microfilm with
a General Dynamics Electronics Stromberg-Carlson
4020 microfilm recorder.
While the animation looks clear but extremely
elementary, each minute of the resulting 16 FPS-video rendering took up to eight minutes of computation
on what was one of the most performing supercomputer at the time.6
In those early days of computing resources were
incredibly strict, thus the aesthetics of most visual-
izations were tied just to black and white, since color

would have consumed significantly more memory.
The first example of the use of color came nevertheless in 1969, by Dr. Louis Frank, who was working
with the Space Plasma Physics Research group of the
University of Iowa on the data collected by the LEPEDEA instrument of a satellite.7 He plotted time on the
x axis, while the energy spectra in on the y axis and
the different color hues represents the amount of particle hits per second, effectively summarizing three
dimensions of data in two-dimensional plot.
Going back again to animation, in 1977 the
Computer Graphics Research Group (CGRG) of Ohio
State University, with Bob Reynolds and Wayne Carl-
IBM 7090 supercomputer
7: http://www-pi.physics.uiowa.edu/~frank/
Dr. Franks time / energy graph
25
The Mice Galaxies
Still frame from Interacting Galaxies
26
son, created a milestone visualization of interacting

galaxies that was also featured on the Carl Sagan Cosmos TV show.8 The importance of this work lies in
the fact that it was a display of a very complex numerical simulation, that actually was repeated many
times with different parameters to show how different types of interaction can create very differently
shaped galaxies, explaining for example the tidal
tails formations we observe in the Antennae Galaxies and in the Mice.9 The simulation was programmed
in FORTRAN by Dr. Alan Toomre, and even if quiet
simple for the number of particles simulated in the
system, proved how this kind of simulation were already a valuable research tool in this particular field:
in fact, when dealing with this kind of dynamics, simulations are the only way to visualize the evolution
of galaxies, since observation can show us only stills
of galaxies in various stage of their life, considering
the time involved in these processes. For example,
his simulations led Toomre to suggest that elliptical
galaxies are remnants of the major mergers of spiral
galaxies,10 which became a widely accepted idea from
the scientific community.
Visualization and animation proved its value
also with another historic example, this time in the
field of programming. One of the classic problems
posed to computer science students is the implementation of sorting algorithms, which are various ways
to put in order a big series of randomly distributed
8: http://excelsior.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~carlson/
history/ACCAD-overview/overview-old.html
9: http://excelsior.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~carlson/
history/ACCAD-overview/overview-old.html
10: http://excelsior.biosci.ohio-state.
edu/~carlson/history/ACCAD-overview/
overview-old.html
Still frames from Sorting out Sorting
27
Still frames from Sorting out Sorting
11: R. Baecker, Sorting out Sorting: A Case

Study of Software Visualization for Teaching
Computer Science, Software Visualization:
Programming as a Multimedia Experience, MIT
Press, 1998.
12: Bruce McCormick, Thomas DeFanti, Maxine

Brown, Visualization in Scientific Computing, p. vii
28
numbers. Mathematics and researchers created in

the years a lot of different sorting algorithms, reaching an incredible level of efficiency, but also involving very complex mathematics processes that make
very different to imagine how an algorithm actually
works and to estimate its efficiency. With this idea in
mind, Ronald Baecker from the University of Toronto
created in 1980, and presented at Siggraph in 1981,
Sorting out Sorting, the first computer-generated
process-visualization animation that showed the application of different algorithms in real-time, making
their inner workings evident, with clear comparisons
on time and efficiency.11 The video was a great success, and its still used today to illustrate that kind of
processes.
The fact that really pushed forward the at-thetime young Scientific Visualization field was the publication of a report compiled for the National Science
Foundation from a SIGGRAPH panel in 1987, called
Visualization in Scientific Computing: first of all it
acknowledged and defined officially Scientific Visualization, poetically describing it as a tool for applying computer to science, [that] offers a way to see
the unseen,12 and then proceeded to explain the
role of visualization in science, which processes are
involved, how it should expand and even mentioned
the already underrated importance of data, especially
from high-volume sources. The paper identifies Visualization as a multidisciplinary field, that at that time
involved computer graphics, image processing, computer vision, computer-aided design, signal processing and user interface studies, but also recognizes
the need to expand that, including engineering and
scientists dedicated to develop new visualization sys-
Still frame from the last section of

Sorting out Sorting
tems, artists, for their education in visual communication and inventive about visual representations,
cognitive scientist and psychologists to design better
interfaces and try new concepts and steer research in
new directions.13
Throughout the paper its underlined many
times how visualization in general is fundamental
to human beings, and that a lot of different kinds of
information are better communicate in a visual way:
for example, when dealing with big amounts of data
that the brain cannot process in numerical form, or
for structures like DNA, molecular models or other
kinds of simulation. An interesting fact is that the
authors note the need for interaction in Scientific visualization: at the time most elaborations run on supercomputers via batch processing, so the user could
only start the process and wait for the result, without knowing what the calculator was doing. They
theorized Interactive visual computing, where scientist
could communicate with data by manipulating its visual representation during processing. The more sophisticated process of navigation allows scientists to steer, or
dynamically modify, computations while they are occurring. These processes are invaluable tools for scientific
discovery.14 This change should be implemented developing and giving high-quality visualization tools
directly to the researchers, via a proposed federallyfunded initiative. The first step should be to abandon
the supercomputing model, in favor of workstations,
minicomputers and image computers [] that should
be placed on the desks of each and every researcher
with specialized graphics processors, that could be
much more efficient, with each of these machines
costing between 5,000 $ and 100,000 $. Along with

Brown, Visualization in Scientific Computing, p. 11

Brown, Visualization in Scientific Computing, p. 5
29
this new hardware, research centers should provide

dedicated software to develop visualizations, easy
enough to use to not require the user to know programming or have particular graphical knowledge.
The SIGGRAPH report apparently got its point,
causing the interest of the research world, attracting
funding agencies and triggering conferences, workshops and various publications on the topic. Most
importantly, various software developers proposed
a variety of specific and generic visualization software environments, for example IBM Data Explorer,
Wavefront Advanced Visualizer and SGI IRIS Explorer. Most of them did not use code or textual instruction, but rather developed a dataflow paradigm that
did not require programming or graphics knowledge:
the user had to connect modules between them, each
one performing a specific operation. It was however
possible to create custom modules with traditional
programming languages like C or FORTRAN.
Screenshot from the Wavefront

Advanced Visualizer
30
Screenshot from apE from the Ohio

Supercomputer Graphics Project at Ohio State
Screenshot from the IBM Data Explorer software
31
3.
Open data
beginning of
The Open Data era
Robert King Merton
34
A phenomenon that is slowly influencing and

changing various aspect of our lives, even if most of
us are still not really aware of it, is Open Data: with its
idealistic push and novel way of seeing information
we can consider it to be the most recent revolution in
the history of knowledge.
For centuries data, particularly governmental,
was considered something to keep away and even
dangerous for the public security, until 2008, when
the Obama administration realized that opening up
their data to the public could bring to more participation and trust in the government.
But if we consider the attitude towards the
openness of scientific data and results, it has always
been more positive than in the political world, with
various researchers theorizing that every scientific
result should be as more widespread and accessible as
possible. Even with this disposition, until the 1990 decade there wasnt really any active projects to publish
or share scientific data.
The specific term Open data was first mentioned in May 1995, in a proposal for the Congress of
the World Meteorological Organization, concerning
the disclosure of geophysical and environmental data.
From the same paper we can read: Atmosphere data
transcends borders, they promote open exchange of
information between countries, a prerequisite for the
analysis of this global phenomena. While this seems
almost obvious nowadays, at the time even the sharing of naturally global atmospheric and weather
data was not really taken into consideration.
But the concepts behind Open data are way older than that, always considering the scientific world:
from a theoretical point of view, in 1942 Robert King
Merton, considered one of the fathers of sociology,
wrote: Communism, in the nontechnical and extended sense of common ownership of goods, is a second
integral element of the scientific ethos. The substantive
findings of science are a product of social collaboration
and are assigned to the community. They constitute a

common heritage in which the equity of the individual
producer is severely limited. [] Property rights in science
are whittled down to a bare minimum by the rationale
of the scientific ethic. The scientists claim to his intellectual property is limited to that of recognition and esteem which, if the institution functions with a modicum
of efficiency, is roughly commensurate with the significance of the increments brought to the common fund of
knowledge. [] The institutional conception of science as
part of the public domain is linked with the imperative
for the communication of findings. Secrecy is the antithesis of this norm; full and open communication its enactment. [] The communism of the scientific ethos is incompatible with the definition of technology as private
property in a capitalistic economy.15
While it does not clearly mention Open Data
in the way we consider it nowadays, he is endorsing it way ahead of its time, and even touching the
theme of intellectual property, a topic that will be
very dear to the Open source movement in the last
decades of the century, that was also a great promoter
of the Open Data ideals. Another important theoretical endorser of Open Data was the American political economist and Nobel prize Elinor Ostrom, that in
2009 stated that information commons are similar to
public goods, because their use by one do not impede
the use by other. Instead, information commons can
be considered of a new kind: their use does not deplete the common stock, but rather it enriches it.16
Elinor Ostrom
15: Robert King Merton, The Normative
Structure of Science, The Sociology of Science:
Theoretical and Empirical Investigations
16: Charlotte Hess, Elinor Ostrom, IDEAS,

ARTIFACTS, AND FACILITIES: INFORMATION
AS A COMMON-POOL RESOURCE, 2003
Open Data
35
Early open data

examples
Human Genome Project logo
One of the first notable example of the applications of some Open Data principles is from the 1950
decade: the International Council of Scientific Unions
created the World Data Center system, in preparation
for the International Geophysical Year of 1957/58.
Several World Data Centers were established, to minimize the risk of data loss and maximize data accessibility. However, since there was no Internet, that was
more like a distributed storage system, rather than an
active data sharing platform.
The first really Open Data-oriented project was
the Human Genome Project, which is still the biggest
collaborative biological project. Its planning started in
1984, the development begun in 1990 and was completed in 2003. It was carried out by twenty universities in United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France,
Germany and China, under coordination and funding from the US government, with the ultimate goal
of mapping the whole human genome, sequencing
multiple variations for each gene.17
17: Kathering Harmon, Genome sequencing for

the Rest of Us, Scientific American
International Geophysical Year 1957/58

celebrating stamp
36
Going back to consider Governative Open Data,

the most important event on this side was the Sebastopol meeting: a reunion of thirty activists and thinkers near San Francisco, aiming to define the concepts
of Open public Data, hoping to make it adopt to the
US presidential candidates. Between them there
were various important figures: Tim OReilly, most
known for popularizing the concepts of open source
and of Web 2.0; Lawrence Lessing, a professor of
Law at Stanford Univeristy and founder of the Creative Commons licenses; Aaron Swartz, hacktivist
and inventor of RSS, sadly known for his suicide in
2013 after being found guilty of wire fraud for trying
to download and share a great number of academic
journal articles.
The Sebastopol meeting defined that public data
should be considered a common property, just like scientific ideas, and it should be of interest to everyone
for it to be shared and used. This concept did not come
out of nothing, but it is strongly based on the concepts
of open source software: openness, participation and
collaboration. Coming from that environment most of
the participants were aware of how good this model
is working for free software development: programmers collaborate and are invited to publicly share
their code, both to let others learn from them, and to
create a collective exvvpertise. There are not really
hierarchical rules, and the work between developers
is based on a peer-to-peer collaboration model that
promotes competence and reputation. Synthetizing,
Tim OReilly said that we must apply the principles of
open source and its working methods to public affairs.
The meeting achieved even more than what
they were expecting: in 2009 the newly elected president of the US Barack Obama signed three presidential memoranda about open government and Open
Data, taking the open source culture at the heart of
public actions, stating that Openness will strengthen
our democracy. Precisely, he defined that the Govern-
The birth of
public open data
Aaron Swartz at a Creative Commons event, 2008
Open Data
37
18: Barack Obama, Transparency and Open

Government - Memorandum for the Heads of
Executive Departments and Agencies, https://
www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/
TransparencyandOpenGovernment
Open data scores per country, evalued from the

Global Open Data Index - http://index.okfn.org/
38
ment should be transparent, to promote accountability

and because information is a national asset; participatory, to enhance public engagement, soliciting public
input, thus enhancing the government effectiveness
and improving its decision-making; collaborative, using innovating tools to create collaboration between
Government, public and private sectors.18 This had a
huge impact also for scientific data, because it triggered the opening of NASA and other governmental
agencies datasets to the public.
The situation of Open Data in governments is
positively evolving and many states worldwide are
moving towards policies similar to the one used in the
US, even if the cultural changes required for it may
be difficult to accept in some context. The benefits are
anyway vastly superior that any possible concern,
both in politics, allowing better transparency and
citizenship participation, and economics terms, having created a whole new branch of possible activities
based on data.
What is incredibly relevant about Open Data
for the Scientific Visualization field is that making
scientific datasets available for the public created a
great interest in designers and artist: being able to access that amount of data made possible to create entirely new data-driven concepts and projects both in
art and design, that are creating fascinating ways to
make use of those numbers, often crossing with fields
like new media, interactive and installation art.
Anyway, Open Data is not spreading as fast as it
could, and it is facing some issues: the most important
being the lack of interoperability and the heterogeneous demand. The first problem can be summarized
with the lack of a universal Open Data standard: it
is stated that data needs to be machine-readable, but
not how, and so dozens of different standards and
formats are used around the world. This does not just
regard the file formats themselves, but also column
subdivision and labeling, precision in number representation, and many more similar details that a developer must face when approaching different datasets.
Open Data theorists themselves, after their
great initial success and the general social acceptance
of their ideals, also are slightly changing their points
of view: for example, Lawrence Lessing dissociated
himself from the ideas of radical transparency of the
movement. Even Beth Noveck, that took part in the
creation of the Open Data policies of the Obama administration, is not sure anymore that Open Data is
being enough to improve the governance of public
affairs. Other participants of the Sebastopol meeting
even ended up supporting WikiLeaks.
These minor difficulties do not mean that Open
Data should be abandoned: they just mean that that
was a first step, and we must proceed towards always
better models of data sharing. Tim Berners-Lee is proposing, for example, Linked Data.
Beth Noveck
Open Data
39
The future:
Linked Data
19: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.
html
20: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/
semic/news/understanding-linked-dataexample
Tim Berners-Lee
40
Tim Berners-Lee is an incredibly important figure, that influenced the very way we communicate
and perceive information nowadays: in March 1989,
while working at CERN he defined and prosed a new
information management system that became, in the
November of the same year, the World Wide Web
that we all know, successfully implementing the first
HTTP communication.19 Currently he is director of
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and founder
of the World Wide Web Foundation.
Starting from 2009, he worked with the British
government to support their Open Data project, that
concretized itself in the data.gov.uk portal.
Tim Berners-Lee research nowadays is focusing
toward the future of Open Data: he is proposing the
Linked Data standard, as a mean to solve the problems that traditional Open Data are facing.
Linked data must respond to four simple rules:
1- Use Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as
names for things, e.g. http://dbpedia.org/resource/Brussels can be used for referring to the city of Brussels.
2- Use HTTP URIs, so that people can look up those
names.
3- When someone looks up a URI, provide useful
information, using the standards (i.e. RDF, SPARQL).
4- Include links to other URIs, so more things can
be discovered, e.g. from http://dbpedia.org/resource/
Brussels a link is available to http://dbpedia.org/resource/Belgium.20
To make clear and rate how much Linked
Open Data is considered good and useful, a rating system has been developed:
1 Star: The Data is available on the Web with an
Open license.
2 Stars: Data is in a machine-readable format, like
an Excel file instead of a scanned image.
3 Stars: Data is in a non-propertary format, like
.csv instead of Excel.
4 Stars: Data uses a W3C open standard to iden-
tify things, making the data easily linkable.

5 Stars: Data is linked to others dataset to provide
context.21
This system is addressing mainly governmental
agencies and any other entity that can produce and
spread Open and Linked Data, to make clear which
is considered to be the best and most useful way to
share their data, focusing on shareability and possibility to link different contents.
The most notable example of Linked Data nowadays is DBpedia22: it is a project born in 2007 from
the Universities of Berlin and Leipzig and in collaboration with OpenLink Software, aiming at extracting
all the structured content from Wikipedia, to make
it available on the web and semantically searchable.
This last aspect is a major difference over more
traditional forms of Open Data: semantic research
allows to query for associative and contextual information, both explicitly and implicitly, allowing to
provide a single, precise piece of information, but also
answer to open questions through techniques like
pattern matching and digital reasoning. With this
kind of technology, the value of information grows
exponentially when adding new connections, al-
21: https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/
LinkedData.html
22: https://www.ted.com/talks/
tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web/
transcript?language=en#t-485180
DBpedia mapping in 2014
Open Data
41
23: https://www.ted.com/talks/
tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web/
transcript?language=en#t-485180
24: http://www.geonames.org/
25: http://umbel.org/resources/news/umbel-v1-20-released/
42
lowing each dataset to be interconnected, effectively

building a much more effective network of knowledge than what is possible today.
To give an example, as of February 2016, the
English DBpedia describes 5.9 million resources, with
4.3 million abstract, 425 thousand geo coordinates
and 1.45 million depictions. 4 million resources are
part of a consistent ontology and consists of 2.06 million persons, 682 thousand places, 376 thousand creative works, 278 thousand species and 5 thousand
diseases. There are 128 languages in which DBpedia
is localized, for a total amount of 38.3 million entries.
All of this data is automatically selected, extracted,
categorized and linked together by automatically
scraping Wikipedia.23
Another remarkable example of Linked Data is
represented by GeoNames, a geographical database
containing 10 million geographical names, corresponding to more than 7.5 million unique features24;
and UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange
Layer), a knowledge graph of 35 thousands concepts
that can be used in information science to relate information from different sources. UMBEL in particular makes heavily rely on the semantic research and
interoperability for concept search, concept definitions and ontology consistency checking.25
Open Data
43
4.
art, science
and design
separation of
science and
aesthetics
46
Observing both the historic examples and the

more contemporary case studies taken into account
from scientific visualization, it can be noted that they
focus mostly on solving functional requirements, often overlooking on concepts like aesthetics or user
experience. Also, they are often created by and aimed
to experts in a particular scientific sector, requiring
some level of familiarity and knowledge with the
topic of the visualization.
On the opposite side, the increasing public availability of datasets, APIs, and other forms of Open Data
is creating a kind of parallel universe of artistic projects involving visualization, centered mostly on the
aesthetic value, reversing the more traditional utilitarian approach, and attracting much attention from
a new and wider kind of public, that maybe never really approached science and are just generally interested in art and culture: in this way, suddenly, they
are experiencing a work of art but also dealing with
subatomic particles, pulsars and weather data. Come
for the art, stay for the science, it might be said.
A cause of the low consideration of aesthetics in SciViz resides in the perceived impossibility to
evaluate and rate objectively the attractiveness of
any visualization, privileging different parameters,
specificially utility and soundness. These three principles are considered the elementary requirements of
design, and were identified for the first time in 25 BC,
by the Roman architect Vitruvius in his book De Architectura. Relating these principles to information
visualization:
Utility is associated with functionality, effectiveness and efficiency, and can be considered the optimization of a visualization, presenting in the clearest
way as much information as possible within the given constraints. It is often the main focus of academic
research, since it can be evaluated by comparison of
different methods and concepts.
Soundness is a quality related to the algorithm
used to generate a visualization, mainly to its reliability and robustness; but also takes a wider sense,
including how efficient the code is, if it can take different kind of data, or tolerate errors. In an academic
environment it is expected that the algorithm behind
a visualization is clearly explained, and must fulfill
some elementary stability and reliability requirements. It can be evaluated both with mathematical
and empirical methods.
Attractiveness refers to the aesthetic quality of
a visualization, relating primarily to the appeal or
beauty, but can be extended to consider other aspects
like originality, novelty, and can also encompass the
whole user experience matter. The problem with this
principle is that, at least traditionally, there is no recognized way to objectively evaluate or it, therefore
academic research in scientific visualization does not
have any expectation in that regard26.
This kind of reasoning has a fundamental flaw
anyway: while it is obvious that beauty cannot be
measured, it is also true that various studies proved
that, when dealing for example with computer interfaces, the aesthetic quality can support utility, improving the users performances and satisfaction27.
26: Andrew Vande Moere, Helen Purchase, On

the role of design in information visualization
27: D. Norman, Emotion & Design: Attractive

Things Work Better. interactions 2002
Art, Science and Desig
47
Evaluating
attractiveness
28: M. Kurosu and K. Kashimura, Apparent
Usability vs. Inherent Usability: Experimental
Analysis on the Determinants of the Apparent
Usability. Conference on Human factors in
Computing Systems (CHI95)
29: N. Tractinsky, D. Ikar, What is Beautiful is

Usable, Interacting with Computers
30: S. Bateman, R. Mandryk, C Gutwin, Useful

Junk? The Effects of Visual Embellishment on
Comprehension and Memorability of Charts.
Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems (CHI10)
31: A. Lau and A. Vande Moere, Towards a

Model of Information Aesthetic Visualization.
International Conference on Information
Visualisation (IV07)
32: David Chek Ling Ngo, Lian Seng Teo, John G.

Byrne, Modelling interface aesthetics
33: Oliver Conolly, Bashar Haydar, Aesthetic

Principles
48
It has been proved that the perceived usability

of an interface is related to the subjective aesthetic
judgment by the user28; another study revealed that
users tend to spend more time using a software with
a more appealing interface and are also more forgiving in case of errors or bugs29.Another study empirically demonstrated that visual embellishments
considered non-utilitarian, like metaphors, positively
influence long term recall in infographic charts30.
Transferring the same reasoning to visualization, a highly valuable aesthetic applied to data may
compel the user to engage with it, giving a higher value to the information presented and enabling a better
communication.
When it comes to evaluate attractiveness for visualization, some theoretical efforts to identify some
kind of criteria have been made, most notably from
Lau and Vande Moere. They identified three possible
characteristics that determine the engagement of
audiences on a visualization: design quality, generally including visual style and user experience; data
focus as the core of the visualization is to communicate meaning instead of simple facts or trends; user
interaction, that involves the aspects related to fluidity, engagement and social collaboration31.
Another effort is from David Chek Ling Ngo,
that proposed 14 different metrics to quantify the
aesthetic layout of an interface: balance, equilibrium,
symmetry, sequence, cohesion, unity, proportion,
simplicity, density, regularity, economy, homogeneity,
rhythm, order and complexity; backed by mathematical models and empirical analysis32.
This extremely rational approach of course is
not shared by everyone: others researchers believe
that aesthetics can be evaluated without any measurable characteristics, and is ultimately founded in the
human experience. So people can find an artwork or
a visualization aesthetically pleasing without knowing why, in a non-discursive way33.
While each and every project has its own equilibrium of art, design and science, nowadays it can
nevertheless be clearly distinguished if they are addressed toward aesthetic value or scientific clarity,
creating a sort of buffer zone that sits right in-between them and is currently extremely small populated, if not at all. Design could move in this zone,
somehow bringing those two directions together and
blurring the line to create a kind of visualizations that
fuses them, maintaining readability of the data and
also bringing in aesthetic value. This could improve
the experience both of experts, creating better tools
and practices to handle and work with data, while
also creating new artworks to popularize science
among the public, that readability and instructional
value.
Art, Science and Desig
49
The role of Art
50
About the role of art and artist, there is a very

interesting case study from Daniel F. Keefe, David B.
Karelitz, Eileen L. Vote, and David H. Laidlaw at the
Brown University Visualization Research Lab, where
they investigated both the potential role of artists in
designing new visualization techniques and in the
impact that virtual and augmented reality technologies can have on the future of visualization. They got
together programming, art and design students, and
a team of scientists to explain the various tasks and
topics they had to cover. They started from simple
2D fluid flow visualization, to scale up with increasingly difficult task as 3D and visualization in a Virtual Reality environment. It quickly became clear
that artists can be very useful in the initial design
and conceptualization stages, as they often provided
new insights to the team. Working together with scientists they achieved a very effective feedback loop
with them, also influencing the way data was collected to better suit the artists proposals. Cooperating with designers and programmers was also very
proficient for they artists, since they often lacked the
technical knowledge to convey their concepts. A useful tool that brought all the participants together was
the critique and discussion moments, both on a visual
and on a scientific standpoint.
Proceeding in the work, some difficulties
emerged when approaching VR: the main obstacle
with it is the lack of prototyping tools that allow nonexperts to work with it. But since VR is such a unique
media, it is almost impossible to evaluate and critique
a design proposal without trying it in the appropriate environment, and nowadays this requires days
of specialized programming work, thus breaking the
possibility of quickly testing, alter or discard concepts,
a methodology widely used and of proven effectiveness in the nowadays design practice. To work around
this difficulty, the team realized a quick augmented
reality sketching system for the artists, that involved
a fictional paintbrush that traces virtual 3D strokes,

that effectively sped up the work and allowed for a
better evaluation and refinement process.
Working with VR and data has proven to be a
delicate work of balance, because while it allows to
represent much more information in an amazing immersive environment, it must be clear from the beginning how a design idea will work with the actual
data to display: it can happen to prototype a concept
based on a personal perception of the data to find
out that it seems effective, to alter discover that that
concept does not go well with the actual data once its
implemented, and considering how VR is difficult to
implement right now it may turn out to be a considerable waste of time.
In conclusion, this experiment shows a few important points on the relationship of art, science and
design: artists proved that their creativity can be
very useful in the conceptual and initial designing
process to create new techniques, better if in a multidisciplinary team. When it come to virtual reality
and similar novel and specific medias it also must be
noted that the developing of rapid prototyping environments should be a priority in the next future, to
allow for the experimentation of novel visualization
techniques34.
Virtual Reality bloodflow visualization, created

with the visualization prototyping system
developed at Brown Universitys Visualization
Research Lab
34: Keefe D, Karelitz D, Vote E, et al. Artistic

Collaboration in Designing VR Visualizations.
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 2005
Art, Science and Design
51
5.
CASE STUDIES
case studies
selection
Please note that some tags will be counted more

than once for tha last two cases, which embed
more small projects.
There is currently a notable number of databased projects that crosses ways with art, design and
science, using both more traditional forms of expression (graphics, video, sculpture) and new and
non-conventional medias (sound, interaction, installations). There is a selection of works in different field,
including some institutional projects created directly by research center and agencies, and some works
that does not directly involve data, but acts as means
of science popularization, with a very good response
from audience. Each project has tags to distinguish its
field and features:
1 - R. Ikeda, Supersimmetry - Art, Installation, Particle physics, Music,
Projections
2 - Miebacht, Weather Scores - Weather data, Sculpture, Music, Art
3 - A. Parker, Worlds - Video, Planetary Science, Design
4 - eCloud - Weather data, Installation, Art
5 - Living Light - Weather data, Installation, Design
6 - L. Pagliei, Les Invisibles - Music, Particle physics, Art
7 - J. Park, LHC CERN Data Audio Generator - Music, Particle physics,
Application, Design, Science
8 - J. W. Tulp, GoldiLocks - Planetary Science, Web, Design
9 - In a nutshell - Web, Video, Animation, Design
10 - NASA Scientific Visualization Studio - Weather data, Planetary science, Science, Map
11 - NASA Hyperwall Visualizations - Planetary science, Science, Weather Data
54
Tags recurrency
Science
Weather Data
Planetary Science
Animation
Design
Art
Music
Map
Installation
Particle Physics
Video
Projections
Sculpture
Application
Case studies
mapping
Design
09
08
05
04
01
06
Art
02
07
03
10
11
Science
Case Studies
55
Ryoji ikeda
Supersymmetry
Audio visual installation, 40 projectors,
40 computers w/ monitor, speakers,
2014
35: http://www.ryojiikeda.com/biography/
Ryoji Ikeda during a performance
56
Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese sound and visual artist, whose musical interest is mainly in the most
raw states of sounds, like fundamental tones and
various kinds of noise, that he often uses to play with
the limits of human earing, with extremely low or
high-pitched sounds. His visual aesthetics is based on
similar principles, often visualizing the sound he produces with massive, abstract and geometric black and
white projection. He often used data, mathematics
and physical concepts as sources for the composition
of his works, and is considered a pioneer of minimal
electronic music35.
His project Supersymmetry was developed
during his residence at CERN in Geneva in 2014 and
2015, where he had the chance to cooperate with the
researchers working on the supersymmetry theory:
at the time they were running experiments at the
LHC particle accelerator to find some yet-undiscovered fundamental particles, like the Higgs Boson,
that would prove the reliance of the Standard Model.
Even if this work does not include data directly from
the LHC experiments, it is trying to describe in an artistic and experiential way what these physics theories are and imply, so it is more of a conceptual project
than an actual data visualization system.
The installation itself is constituted of two sections, named experiment and experience: the first
one revolves around observation of natural phenomena, which is exemplified with a number of small
Supersymmetry (experience), whole view
Supersymmetry (experiment), particular
36: http://special.ycam.jp/supersymmetry/en/
work/index.html
Supersymmetry (experience), one of the monitors
pellets of different materials, moving on three lightened surfaces that are constantly changing their inclination. The pallets move following the angle of the
surfaces, colliding with each other. A laser scanning
system detects the position of each particle and sends
it to the second section, experience, where sound
and images are produced according to movements
and collisions detected between the pellets. This creates a kind of detachments in the users perception:
while they try to follow and understand at least one
of the events, hundreds of other events are happening each second around them, in a way simulating
the enormous amount of data and complexity that
particle physics researchers have to face with each
experiment36.
Supersymmetry (experience)
Supersymmetry (experiment)
Nathalie miebach
Weather Scores
Scuplture, music
37: http://nathaliemiebach.com/statement.html
Nathalie Miebach
60
Nathalies work focuses on the intersection of

art and science, taking data from astronomy, ecology and meteorology and transforming it into woven
sculptures: in this way she uses the natural grid that
basket weaving creates as a coordinate system to displace three-dimensional data. In Nathalies opinion,
her work pushes the boundaries of traditional ways
to interpret and visualize data, playing with the expectations of audience about what is considered to be
science and art37.
Additionally, since 2009 she collaborated with
musicians and composers, to transform a series of
sculptures she based on weather data into musical
scores for them to play: this both gives a diverse emotional level to her primarily visual work, and might
also reveal patterns in the data that may otherwise
remain unnoticed.
Her work can be considered quite rare in data
art, mixing together media that are not really much
used in the field, thus creating a unique way to see
and experience the datasets she uses. Her work also
maintains a very analogic feeling, relying on an art
that requires a lot of manual work and skill as basket
weaving and preferring traditional scores and human musicians for her music, rather than relying on
electronics music or computer-guided composition as
most sound/data artists uses to.
The Weather scores exposition
Musical score for Duet of Blizzards
Case Studies
61
External Weather, Internal Storms 2009
62
O Fortuna Sandy Spins, 2013
Case Studies
63
Alex H. Parker
Worlds
Animation, Music
38: http://www.alexharrisonparker.com/
39: http://www.alexharrisonparker.com/
datavisualization/
Dr. Alex H. Parker
64
Alex Harrison Parker is a planetary astronomer

at Southwest Research Institute, currently collaborating with NASAs New Horizons mission38. He is active
also as a science popularizer, creating illustrations,
video and musical pieces based both on scientific data
and on topics from his research.
For example, Worlds: The Kepler Planet Candidates is an animation video he created were he visualizes all the Kepler planet candidates around a single
star, each one of them with their real diameter, orbit,
and speed. It was awarded with the CinGlobe Data
Visualization Award in 201339.
The value of this work resides in the very
straightforward and clear way it presents such a rich
topic: it can be considered a very good work of design
rather than art, but nevertheless very interesting,
giving in little more than 3 minutes a good perspective on the incredible amount and variety of exoplanets that the Kepler space telescope is discovering.
Other projects from him include Painted Stone,
a visualization of 100,000 asteroids and orbits, observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, with the color
representing their material composition; Kepler 11: A
Six-Planet Sonata, a sonification of the transits of the
six planets in front of their star in the Kepler 11 planetary system, that demonstrate through sound the
orbital resonances that system; Beyond Neptune, an
animation about trans-Neptunian objects, visualizing
when they were discovered, their size and orbit.
Worlds
mid: Beyond Neptune

bottom: Worlds
Painted Stone
Aaron Koblin,
Nik Hafermaas,
Dan Goods
eCLOUD
Dynamic sculpture, 2010
40: http://www.ecloudproject.com/tech.html
41: http://www.ecloudproject.com
66
eCLOUD is a dynamic sculpture made from

suspended polycarbonate tiles that can change from
transparent to opaque, to simulate the volume and
behavior of an idealized cloud. It was created in collaboration with NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory
and the Art Center Collage of Design. The system
takes real-time weather data from NOAA and simulates how a cloud would behave in the conditions of
the picked location40.
The project includes a dynamic display system
that shows a preview of the simulated cloud behavior,
the current location, and details about the weather
data received.
eCLOUD was created for and is installed at the
San Jos International Airport as a centerpiece artwork, as part of the Art & Technology program41.
This is a valuable example of the possible intersections of data, art and new media: it uses an innovative technology to display real-time data through
a very effective visual metaphor, that people passing
by can easily understand, together with a notable and
positive aesthetic value.
eCloud installed in the San Jose Airport
mid: eCloud installed in the San Jose Airport

bottom: demonstration of the liquid crystal tiles technology
eCloud dynamic display
Case Studies
67
Soo-in Yang
David Benjamin
Living Light
Public art installation, 2009
42: http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/
living-light-2.html
68
Living Light is a functional art installation located in Seoul, created to inform the citizens about
the air quality in the city. The canopy has a city map
etched on its glass surface, and is divided in 27 different blocks representing the different areas of the city
where the air monitoring stations are situated. When
an improvement in the air quality of a district is detected, the corresponding block of the system lights
up; otherwise the system is automatically updated
every 15 minutes, lighting up all the blocks in order,
from the one with the best air quality to the worst
one. The structure also responds to text messages,
blinking and then sending the data about the specific
location that the user requests. Living Light is fully
integrated with the already existing air-quality monitoring system active in Seoul, receiving data from its
sensors network42.
This is a notable example of public art: its beautiful design became an attraction for the city itself,
and it is also very useful for the population, informing and raising awareness about the condition of air
and pollution in the city.
Living Light installed at Peace Park, Seoul
Lorenzo Pagliei
Les Invisibles
Sound Installation, 2001 / 2015
43: http://www.lorenzopagliei.com/site/bio.html
44: Personal interview with Lorenzo Pagliei,
February 2016
Lorenzo Pagliei
70
Lorenzo Pagliei is an Italian composer, electronic

musician, pianist and orchestral conductor, currently
living and working in Paris at IRCAM as composer
and researcher. His work focuses on sounds not realizable with acoustical instruments and innovative
ways to interact and control sound43.
In 2001 he took part in a collaboration effort
made from the Centre des Arts of Paris, aiming at
making scientists and artists work together on a piece
of art involving concepts from physics and nanotechnology: Lorenzo worked with the Centre national de
la recherche scientifique CNRS, that was currently
working on nuclear magnetic resonance. Its a new
technique to investigate the properties of molecules
and nanoparticles, that works by analyzing the particles oscillations when hit by an electromagnetic
pulse. This kind of data is almost directly translatable
into sound, since particles and molecules threated this
way behave like regular objects that get hit, vibrating
and thus generating sound. Analyzing this oscillating
response from molecules allow to deduce its composition and various other properties.
Each particle generates a different sound or
rhythm, that were used as the composing material
for a 1-hour music piece created for the exposition.
Les Invisibles was performed again in October 2015,
in the Crypt of the Ville dOrsay, this time as a realtime performance controlled live by the composer44.
Sonogram of a section of Les Invisibiles

mid: Setup for the live performance
botton right: Developing of the sound synthesis system
bottom left: Visualizations of the results of some experiments
JeongHo Park
LHC CERN Data
Audio Generator
Data analysis Software
45: http://jeonghopark.de/z
46: https://github.com/jeonghopark/lhcCernMac
72
Jeongho Park is a developer and audiovisual

artist that created various data-oriented and interactive projects, applications and installations45.
This project is a software application that generates a tridimensional visual models and a sonification from event data of the LHC particles accelerator
at CERN in Geneve. Some events are bundled with
the application, and new ones can be download from
CERN website, since the application is natively compatible with their databases.
Each line of the visualization is the path of a
particle, and when an event is played also a sound
from each one of them is generated, with a different
frequency according to its mass and properties.
Tools like this prove the didactic and research
value that an aesthetic approach can have, giving a
useful and explorable 3D view of an event, while the
sound gives information in an intuitive way, making
easy to spot the general layout of an event, or quickly
pinpointing abnormal or strange particles, that will
stand out for their different tone.
Screenshot from the application
Interface of the application
Case Studies
73
Jan Willem Tulp

Goldilocks
Data Visualization, website, 2015
47: http://tulpinteractive.com/goldilocks/
74
The Goldilocks name comes from the homonym effect, that states that some phenomena must
fall within certain margins rather than reaching
extremes: this principle is applied to astrobiology to
determine when a planet could theoretically support
life, since it depends on a series of parameters that
must fall within certain boundaries47.
This interactive visualization displays all the
known exoplanets (1942 confirmed, at October 9th,
2015) and their host stars. Size and orbital parameters
of the planets are based on the observed data, as well
as star size, color and position.
Alongside the main visualization, displaying
all planets around their stars in their respective positions, there are five other visualizations, more dataoriented, focused on: distance of each planet from
their star, underlying the ones in their systems habitable zone; Earth Similarity Index; atmosphere and
composition compared to Earth; temperature and
mass; temperature of their stars and amount of energy they receive from them.
Various visualizations from

http://goldilocks.info/
kurzgesagt
In a Nutshell
YouTube channel
48: http://kurzgesagt.org/profile/
49: https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt
76
In a nutshell is a YouTube channel started in

2013 by a Munich design studio, working with animation and information design48. Their videos deal
with various topics, like physics, sociology, computer
science, biology, astronomy and politics, and always
explain a particular subject related to some contemporary matter, to mention the most recent topics: the
war on drugs, what are red dwarf stars, what is a
quantum computer, how Facebook steals video views,
and the refugee crisis. Its always some kind of demanding argument, that may somehow scare away
people looking for entertainment: but the channel
has nevertheless almost two million subscribers and
is getting close to a hundred million visualizations,
thanks to the their engaging style of drawing and animations, and for the easy but informative way they
deal with these topics49.
Very little of their content is related with data
itself, even if they use data visualization from time
to time, but the value of this case is in the way they
are doing science popularization and information,
in a way demonstrating that it is possible to talk to
regular people about difficult, niche and specialized
arguments with the right design language.
Various still frames from In a nutshell videos
Case Studies
77
78
Nasa Scientific
Visualization
Studio
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio works to

popularize various contemporary science topics covered at NASA, like Earths climate or planetary observations. They also cover various techniques, from
simple picture elaborations or combinations to animations and various data visualizations.
50: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.
cgi?aid=12094
Projects between the most popular include:

Human Fingerprint on Global Air Quality:
thanks to to high-resolution global satellite maps,
NASA tracked air pollution trends in the last decade
around the world. They compiled a map summarizing that data, and a video to explaining how and why
air quality is changing aroud the globe.
This project demostrates how valuable emission
control laws are being in the United States and in Europe, observing how general air quality improved in
these regions in the last years, while emerging and
less regulated countries like China or India are seeing
a decrease in air quality. Air pollution is linked to other factors too: for example since the beginning of the
civil war Syria is decreasing in population due to emigration and most economical activities are shutting
down, thus, ironically, leading to a better air quality.
Data is collected with the Ozone Monitoring
System aboard the NASA Aura satellite50.
Human Fingerprint on Global Air Quality map
Case Studies
79
Frames of Five-Year Global Temperature

Anomalies from 1880 to 2015
cgi?aid=4419
80
Five-Year Global Temperature Anomalies from

1880 to 2015: This project from NASA Scientific Visualization Studio shows the temperature anomalies on
Earths surface from 1880 to 2015: this means that the
colors does not represent the actual temperature, but
the difference from the normal temperature.
Data is taken from the GISTEMP (GISS Surface
Temperature Analysis, NASA Goddard Institute for
Space Studies) analysis system, combining data from
NOAA GHCN v3 (meteorological stations), ERSST v4
(ocean areas), and SCAR (Antarctic stations)51.
Dial-a-Moon: This project is mainly a picture visualizer, that takes a date and time as input and outputs an image of the Moon in that moment, plus some
textual informations about phase, apparent diameter,
distance and precise positioning. The very high resolution and detail of the pictures comes from the fact
that they are taken from the Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter, a NASA probe orbiting the Moon, that pairs
its LROC camera to a laser altimeter, LOLA, allowing
for a precise mapping of our satellites surface. It is also
possible to download a high resolution map for each
picture, with the name of each location written on it.
Together with the visualization are presented
some video explaining related topics, for example
how the Moon rotates around Earth and what its libration is52.
Space Weather: This animation shows the hypothetical voyage of a photon of light from the center
of the Sun to the Earths atmosphere. The video displays also various phenomena that are encountered
in such a trip: it shows nuclear fusion and ignition
processes inside the Suns core; loops, flares, prominences and coronal material ejections on the surface;
and then follow the solar particles until they reach
Earths magnetic field, causing aurora53.
Still frames from the Space Weather video
cgi?aid=4404
53: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/
SpaceWeather.html
Case Studies
81
Nasa Hyperwall
Visualizations
Dionysius Craters rim
The HyperWall is a visualization system with

8x16 = 128 LCD modular screens, backed up by 128
computational nodes and connected to the Pleiades
supercomputer (a 11312 multi-CPU nodes calculator).
NASA internally develops various kind of media and simulation for this system, leveraging both on
the huge screen size available and the massive computing power behind it.
The visualizations include:
Dionysius Crater: Its a series of pictures taken
from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of a crater
in the Sea of Tranquility, interesting for non-uniform
and striated materials of which the crater seems to be
composed.
NASAs Hyperwall
Plutos surface composition: A series of picture

of the nano planet Pluto, taken with various instruments aboard the New Horizons probe. Together
with regular pictures, other instruments toke images
in other wavelengths to investigate Plutos surface
composition. Also, High-resolution b/w images and
low-resolution color images where combined to obtain some of the most iconic pictures released.
Observations on Plutos surface
Case Studies
83
GEOS-5 Nature Run Collection: This series of

massive visualizations displays data from various
simulations about weather and changes in Earths
atmosphere, run with the NASA Goddard Earth Observing System Model (GEOS-5). Topics covered include the evolution of surface temperatures, clouds
formation and movements, presence of water vapor,
dispersion of aerosol from dust, biomass burning, fossil fuel emission and volcanoes, and winds.
The full simulation took 2 years to complete,
running on 3750 processors on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation,
producing 400 terabytes of data.
On the other page, top to bottom: Earths surface

temperature (colors) and outgoing radiation (white);
surface (white) and upper level (colors) winds;
Dust (red), sea salt (blue), organic/black carbon
(green), and sulfates (white).
On this page, top: total precipitable water (white)
and rainfall (colors, red is highest);
middle: aerosol and human-initiated burning
simulation.
Case Studies
85
top: sea-surface temperatures visualization

mid left: sea-surface temperature anomalies
visualization
mid-right: accumulated thermal stree visualization
86
NOAA Coral Reef Watch 2015: A series ofanimated Data Visualizations showing the real time
conditions of reef environments, helping to identify
where the corals are losing their symbiotic algae,
so losing their color and bleaching: a condition that
heavily endangers the survival of entire colonies.
Data is taken from a variety of satellites, including
the polar orbiters Suomi-NPP/VIIRS and MetOp-B/
AVHRR, and the geostationary satellites MSG-3, MTSAT-2, GOES-East, and GOES-West. Data itself consist
mainly of temperatures, from which various other
indexes are calculated, according to average or instantaneous values.
Solar Wind Strips the Martian Atmosphere:

While today Mars is covered by a dry desert and has a
very thin atmosphere, scientists agree it used be quite
different, with a thick atmosphere and probably bodies of liquid water like seas, lakes and rivers, similarly
to modern Earth. The change happened because the
atmosphere dispersed into space, and the most probable cause is solar wind: in this video the simulations
made to verify this theory are confronted with the
MAVEN probes observations of ions leaving Mars
atmosphere to disperse in space.
top: Solar wind hitting Mars

mid left: Mars atmosphere stripped away
mid-right: Ions speeds observed by MAVEN
Case Studies
87
6.
a design-centered
evolution
Design as the
unifying force
90
Analyzing projects from both scientific visualization and data-driven art, looking at their history and at some case studies, it emerges that, while
these disciplines underwent a great evolution and
has reached very remarkable levels of advancement,
there is still room for notable improvement, especially
if we consider the role that design methodology could
have in the future of these disciplines.
Nowadays, in fact, SciViz and data art projects
are running in two different and almost parallel directions, with almost none contact points; but they
could both benefit a lot from some kind of interaction between them. Design could be the force driving
them to cooperate, being almost equidistant from
both of them, but still close enough to be able to interact with both. Recognizing the potential of design
for these fields and involving more designers into the
developing processes of scientific visualizations and
data art would bring a more reliable design methodology, that would improve, for scientific visualization,
important aesthetic qualities like the overall experience and the design of interfaces, easing the work for
researchers and allowing the creation of better popularizing and generally public-distributed material; at
the same time data-oriented art projects could rely on
a more solid work methodology and on a good technologic know-how.
There are various examples of designers and researchers endorsing the potential of art: to mention
one, in the report made for a project experimenting
visualization techniques for Virtual Reality, Daniel
Keefe and his colleagues stated concluded that artists
[have] key roles in working closely with scientists to
design novel visual techniques for exploring data and
testing hypotheses, and strongly suggest a interdisciplinary approach to visualization, Teaching art to
computer scientists, computer science to artists.
With the technological evolution of the last

decades and the popularization of developing and
easy-to-use creative tools, its always more common
to see projects that involve interaction, immersive
video projections, sound and similar state-of-the-art
features. In this way the general audience is becoming more and more acquainted to this forms of media,
and always more difficult to impress.
This implies that any forward-looking project
must take into serious consideration the usage of
the most interesting and appealing of these technologies: it must not be modernism just for the sake of
it of course, but it must be taken into account during
the design process that it may be more useful and
far more compelling for the audience to rzepresent
a certain phenomenon, for example, with sound, or
giving the possibility to explore a particular dataset
through virtual or augmented reality.
Its obvious that a weak design idea wont magically acquire value thanks to the use of any technology, but the right combination of a well-thought
concept and the appropriate technical mean will
much more easily appeal and attract the public, and
the more time they will spending interacting or observing the project the more it will possible for the to
become interested in the underlying information and
Usage of New Media
Example of projection mapping, a new media that

can be seen more and more in public events
A Design-centered evolution
91
Interactive virtual reality simulation of a brain

tumor removal surgical operation.
54: Teodor P Grantcharov, Is Virtual Reality

Simulation an Effective Training Method
in Surgery? - http://www.medscape.com/
viewarticle/575183
55: https://virtualrealityreporter.com/virtualreality-surgical-medical-application
56: Robert M. Candey, Anton M. Schertenleib

, Wanda L. Diaz Merced, Xsonify sonification
tool for space physics
57: Wanda Diaz Merced, Sonification for the

exploration of 1D Astrophysics data - South
African Astronomical Observatory Colloquium,
17 April 2014
92
topic.
It must also be considered the value of new media for researchers and professionals, for example: in
the medical field the use of virtual reality has already
proven its outstanding value both for surgical training and as assistance during surgeries54, and some
theorize that technologies such as Microsoft Handpose, an extremely precise hand-tracking system,
will be paired with already-existing robotic precision surgical arm to use during operations, allowing
much more accurate actions and preventing human
mistakes55.
The use of sound is also proving its usefulness
in the field of astrophysics research: NASA is using
data sonification through a software called Xsonify
to translate observations made in various fields into
sound. For example, they translated x-ray observations, radio signals from Jupiter and micrometeorites
impacts on the Voyager II probe56. The project was
born to help visually impaired researchers, but it has
been found to be useful also for normally seeing individuals: for example, for x-ray observations data
was usually visualized, but that method proved to be
scarcely effective due to the high level of noise and
the difficulty to visually identify events and patterns.
Moving to a sound-based system proved to be a better solution to pinpoint different kinds of events, that
presents themselves as different timbres, or patterns,
audible as rhythms57.
Considering projects directed at the general

public also the choice of the topics to cover can be relevant: while most of the population has only a general and superficial science knowledge, often as old
as their high school years, most of them have heard
from media of various relevant events in contemporary science. For example, they might know about
Higgs Boson observation at CERN, the New Horizon
probe reaching Pluto, the Zika virus, the discovering of gravitational waves, or got interested in fields
touched by movies like Interstellar: this can be made
use of to engage people in a project and going deeper
on the same topic.
It may also be interesting because most of contemporary science topics are full of open and unanswered questions, and being presented with an indevelopment topic can be far more engaging, pushing
the audience to wonder and make hypothesis, rather
than dealing with a fully known and already disclosed argument. These kind of discoveries are also
changing our point of view on reality itself and may
make way to life-changing technologies or scenarios:
this also is a possible engagement factor, and at the
same time a knowledge to spread in order to limit
misinformation and anti-scientific propaganda.
Coverage of
contemporary
and popular
science topics
Still frame from a video from Kurzgesagt In a

Nutshell explaining quantum computing
93
Usage of datasets
and real-time data
sources
Progress in data-collection techniques in the

last years has been incredibly fast and prolific, creating the necessity of always more refined and powerful data analysis and visualization algorithms. So,
doing research and experimenting new techniques
with big datasets and real-time data sources, even if
only for aesthetic purposes, can lead to the creation of
novel systems that may be useful also in the scientific
research field.
Also using real-time data sources can increase
the users engagement in case of popularization-aimed
or exposition projects, creating always-changing scenarios that can also bring useful information to the
public, like in the Living light project by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, eCloud by Aaron Koblin et
al. and other public data display projects, that serves
both as beautiful public art or urban furniture and
as providers of useful and meaningful informations.
NASA Deep Space Network Now visualizes

in real-time all communications with far away
spacecrafts and probes
94
This is of course the most important requirement for a project aimed at pure research and investigation purposes, which would be useless if the
data is not somehow clearly readable and understandable. Data can be accessed even if an indirect
way: an easy expedient that a lot of works use is to
present a general overview of the whole involved
data in the main screen, while allowing the user to
select one or more data points to access the details
about it.
This point may be important also for projects
directed to the general public, allowing for a more
precise understanding of the presented phenomena
and maybe also giving the piece an instructional
value. If the data is difficult to understand, maybe
because of its unit of measure, or for the very wide
order of magnitude, a number of devices can be used
to overcome the problem, for example translating
the raw numbers with some metaphor related to
some more understandable measures, or related to
everyday objects. Instead of using magnitude for the
brightness of a star the value can be related to the
brightness of a far-away light bulb, or power consumption/absorption can be related to the amount
used by home appliances.
Keeping the data

understandable
95
Application of
design reasoning
and verifiable
methodology
3D visualization design for the bat flight problem

inspired by the Mir painting The Gold of the
Azure, one of the results of Keefes project
96
A fundamental step in any data visualization

project is to map data to visual attributes and structures. This procedure, to be effective, requires a high
degree of design reasoning, especially if it involves
the creation of new techniques: in this case it is required to invent an original visual metaphor that fits
well with the abstract structure of the data. Considering the three space dimensions, time, all the possible
transformations in positioning, size, color and so on,
there are almost infinite possible combinations of
data elements with visual parameters and attributes,
so data-to-form decisions need to be explicit. Even
if design reasoning is always present, it may be unconscious, and if this happens the designer must pay
attention to reconstruct and document the path that
brought him/her to those particular decisions, and
try to objectively evaluate or even test them. Even if
there is no right or wrong in this field, there are
various ways to support a design choice: from established empirical results, like the Gestalt laws, to
various studies on human perception, or by feedback
from other designers or the users themselves. Building up this kind of objective documentation on visual
mapping decisions, including the use of new technologies, will increase the amount of good examples and
best practices that future projects will be able to build
upon, in a very open-source manner.
While this aspect may be already of use for
some or a minor addition to some others designer
workflow, it may a different matter for the art universe: since its a personal form of expression from the
artist to the world, its not obvious that the author has
the intention to explain the thought process behind
his/her artwork, or it can even be interested in giving the idea that the inner processes behind an artwork are just purely irrational, or dreamt up, to leave
the work open for different possible interpretations.
However, if a piece is dedicated to a purpose as science popularization or raising awareness about some
phenomenon like global warming, it should be considered in a slightly different way. Artists working
in this particular sub-field should be aware that the
value of their work can be also in the research and in
the thinking they made and in the rationale in their
decisions; and that their work has the possibility to
ease scientific research if they invent a valuable data
rendition technique.
There are some cases of good documentation
of the design processes in the last years: for example,
Daniel F. Keefe et al. explains in a IEEE Computer
Graphics and Applications article the process and
the results of a project that involved both professors
and students to develop new visualization techniques
in a virtual reality environment. This kind of documentation can be extremely valuable: VR as a working technology is still in its first years, so there is no
consistent literature or examples about possible uses
in design and visualization; in fact, also Keefe and his
colleagues highlighted the complete lack of design
tools to rapidly sketch and prototype58. Also Byron
and Wattenberg explained in detail in a paper the
design rationale behind their Streamgraph, an new
kind of stacked graph, from the algorithmic level to
every visual choice they made59, creating a collection
of generalizable knowledge that can benefit other designers and developers who want a similar approach.
Together with the current approach of interaction design, were aesthetics to be an integral part
of functionality, with pleasure a criterion for design
equal to efficiency or usability60, these and other examples show and explain the potential of integrating
design thinking in the research process, how aesthetics is valuable to any visualization, and how it can be
somehow estimated and evaluated.
Byrons Streamgraph example
58: Keefe D, Karelitz D, Vote E, et al. Artistic

Collaboration in Designing VR Visualizations.
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 2005;
25(2): 1823.
59: Byron L and Wattenberg M. Stacked Graphs
- Geometry & Aesthetics. IEEE Transactions on
Visualization and Computer Graphics 2008;
14(6): 12451252.
60: Gaver B, Dunne T, and Pacenti E. Design:

Cultural Probes. interactions 1999;
A design-centered evolution
97
7.
Project: Sounds
from the sun
Sound and
psychoacoustics
100
Vision is widely considered to be the most important and defining sense of human beings: it is indeed true that the ability to see colors, for example,
gave a great evolutionary advantage to our ancestors;
and it is also one of the rarest and most powerful features between mammals, reserved almost only to humans and some great apes.
At the same time, the hearing system of mankind is considered to be less evolved and refined than
the one of other species of mammals: most of them
have a wider range of audible frequencies, are more
sensible and can better localize the source of sounds
around them. The hearing system of humans was,
and still is, nevertheless fundamental for the survival
of our specie, being the most effective way to detect
and localize possible dangers: a sudden noise startles
us, and triggers in the brain and in the body a chain
reaction that gets us ready either for fighting or for
fleeing.
The effectiveness of this system is due to a series
of different reasons:
-Hearing is much quicker than seeing. Vision
is a slow chemical process: molecules in the retina
change their characteristics when struck by light,
this change is transformed into electrical signals that
the brain has to deeply elaborate to transform them
in the images we see. This process is considered to
take between 1/30 and 1/20 of a second, resolving in
the general knowledge that we can see no more that
20/30 different pictures per second. We can express
this as a value with a unit of measure: 30 Hz. Meanwhile hearing is based on a quick mechanical process, with the hearing bones vibrating and exciting
a nerve connected to the brain. In result this process
is much quicker, allowing mankind to process sound
with a resolution 1.000 times greater, around a maximum value of 20.000 Hz. In other words, the shorter
event that the eyes can perceive has to last at least 50
milliseconds, while the shortest hearable event can
last around 0.05 milliseconds.

- Vision is focused in front of us, while we can
hear all around us. Humans, mammals and other animals can only see in front of them, and checking all
around us require to move our whole body, and this
process of course takes some time. We also have to
focus on what were seeing to recognize if something
may be of our interest. On the other hand, hearing is
always working in every direction around us, and it
usually takes way less than a second to identify the
location, possible source and our possible interest of
a sound.
- We can close our eyes, but never our ears. We
can effectively shut down our seeing in any moment by just closing our eyes, becoming visually isolated from the surroundings, but there is no effective
way to shut down our hearing. Even while sleeping, it
is easier to be awakened by a noise than by a change
of light. This is linked to other interesting features of
our hearing system: for example, it is very easy to become acquainted to, ignore, and do not hear anymore
the majority of background noises. A constant sound
is taken for granted from our hearing system, and
so ignored to focus on more interesting sounds, while
we instantly notice any new sound that appears
around us, or even any relevant change in the sound
scape surrounding us.
Project: Sounds from the Sun
101
applications
to data
102
The peculiarities explained, together with others of minor relevance, can have some interesting
consequences. For example, the extreme precision of
the hearing system enables us to easily detect both
established patterns and irregularities in them: for
example, we instinctively detect and recognize temporal patterns as rhythms, often following them with
some kind of body movement. In the same manner
we can notice if something breaks out of an established pattern, breaking a rhythm.
The mechanisms applies in the frequency domain: we instantly distinguish an harmonic sound
(where all sounds have a frequency multiple of the
same number) from any kind of non-organized sound,
that we call noise. If any kind of harmonic context is
established, like an orchestra playing a classical piece,
any kind of sound incoherent with that background
pops up, for example a badly tuned instrument.
This kind of ability has, in fact, already proven its value for data investigation: NASA is using it
with its Xsonify software, to translate observations
made in various fields into sound. For example, they
translated x-ray observations, radio signals from Jupiter and micrometeorites impacts on the Voyager II
probe. The project was born to help visually impaired
researchers, but it has been found to be useful also
for normally seeing individuals: for example, for xray observations data was usually visualized, but
that method proved to be scarcely effective due to
the high level of noise and the difficulty to visually
identify events and patterns. In this specific case, the
ability of our hearing system to ignore background
noise made easier for researcher to isolate interesting events, while temporal patterns in the data that
corresponds to repeating or cycling phenomena are
easier to find, also quickly spotting irregularities that
are much more difficult to identify with traditional
visualization.
The Sun is Earths source of energy, in the form

of light and heat, but its activity does not limit to that:
it also emits every other form of electromagnetic radiation, from radio to gamma waves, together with a
massive stream of plasma and charged particles, like
protons, electrons and alpha particles. Its magnetic
field extends well beyond the eight planets of the Solar System: this is constantly changing due to Suns
rotation and activity, and has a notable influence on
each planet.
The variations in these phenomena leads to peak
values that can influence our life on Earth: the most
harmless and spectacular being aurora borealis and
australis, caused by the interaction of high amounts
of charged particles from the Sun with Earths magnetic field. The most powerful emissions, classified
as Solar flares, Coronal mass ejections and Geomagnetic storms, in order of magnitude, can have far less
desirable effects on our technological lives: they can
disturb and create malfunctions in the communication and geolocation satellites in geostationary orbit;
on Earth they can disturb and interrupt wireless networks, like cellphone network, influence the behavior of compasses and other location and orienting devices, and even induce huge electrical currents in the
Earths crust. To mention the most catastrophic event
linked to solar activity, a geomagnetic storm occurred
on March 13 in 1989 caused first the lost of control of
various satellites in polar orbit around Earth, interrupted the communication with GOES weather satellites, caused anomalous operations to NASAs TDRS-1
communication satellite, and after only 90 seconds
broke the majority of power breakers in Quebec power grid, causing a massive 9-hours blackout on a large
area of Canada61.
the Solar
Wind and its
consequences
Above: a mid-level solar flare emitted on Jan.
12 2015, pictured by NASAs Solar Dynamics
Observatory
61: Morin, Michel; Sirois, Gilles; Derome,

Bernard (13 March 1989). Le Qubec dans le
noir (in French). Radio-Canada: http://archives.
radio-canada.ca/environnement/catastrophes_
naturelles/clips/14150/
103
Solar Wind
Observation
62: Morin, Michel; Sirois, Gilles; Derome,

Bernard (13 March 1989). Le Qubec dans le
noir (in French). Radio-Canada: http://archives.
radio-canada.ca/environnement/catastrophes_
naturelles/clips/14150/
Seeing the consequences that Sun can have on

Earth, the close observation of its activity has grown
in interest in the last decades: since 1995 NASA and
ESA launched 4 different satellite probes to monitor solar wind: Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
(SOHO), Global Geospace Science (GGS) Wind, Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and Deep Space
Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). Observatories in
outer space are much more effective than Earthbased ones: our planets surface is almost completely
shielded from solar wind by its magnetic field, thus
making impossible any kind of direct observation,
and only some indirect evaluations can be made for
example observing some atmospheric phenomena.
All of these probes are orbiting between Earth and
Sun at a distance around 1500000 kilometers from
our planet: their signals take around 5 seconds to
reach us, while solar wind has a largely lowest speed
and takes around one hour to cover the same distance62. This gives us at least a minimum time to get
ready for exceptional solar activities, to minimize the
consequences on our technological infrastructures,
since as of today we have no model or way to forecast solar activity: in fact, this is another challenging
ACE satellite during preparation and testing phases
104
objective for astrophysicists, that hope, with the data

collected by these probes, to design a model of solar
dynamics good enough to forecast solar wind and its
peak activity.
The forecast of dangerous events in solar wind
is currently based on the ACE Real Time Solar Wind
program, which issues warnings and alerts for anyone with systems sensitive to high levels of magnetic
activity. Four of the instruments on board of ACE
produce a low-resolution continuous stream of data
that can be received from different stations on Earth,
the stations forwards the data to the Space Weather
Prediction Center in Colorado, which delivers it to
other centers around the world and is also published
on the World Wide Web. This whole process takes 5
to 10 minutes, from the measurements took by ACE
instruments to the to the publication on the SWPC
website, available on http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
products/ace-real-time-solar-wind.
The solar arrays on NOAAs Deep Space Climate

Observatory spacecraft, or DSCOVR, are unfurled
in the Building 1 high bay at the Astrotech payload
processing facility in Titusville, Florida, near
Kennedy Space Center.
105
Sound rendition of
Solar wind data
Considering on one side the particularities of

our hearing system, the differences with visual perception and, on the other, the continuous and realtime nature of the data taken into account, it can be
interesting to consider a different approach to the
rendition of solar wind data, that leverages on different mechanisms of perception rather the purely
visual one; and since this kind of data needs to be
constantly monitored, but at the same time is almost
constant or with small variations of little interest, it
can pair well with the innate abilities of our hearing
system to ignore constant background sounds, while
promptly reacting to changes in it, without requiring
the specific attention and focus of the listeners, that
can, in this way, prioritize other more demanding
tasks.
So, in my project I took into account the different phenomena and their parameters monitored by
the ACE Real Time Solar Wind program: energy of
charged particles stream, components of the solar
magnetic field and density, speed, temperature and
density of the plasma stream.
Each phenomenon is translated with a specific
sonification system that reflects its characteristics:
The particle stream is rendered by a discrete
stream of microsounds, where the energy is mapped
to the frequency of the sounds;
Data about Magnetic Field & Solar Wind Electron

Proton Alpha Monitor from the SWEPAM
instrument, as presented on http://www.swpc.
noaa.gov/products/ace-real-time-solar-wind
106
the plasma flux is rendered by a noisy, continuous sound, where the temperature is mapped to the
timbre of the sound, the density to width of the noise
and the speed to the central frequency;
the magnetic field is rendered by an harmonic
sound similar to a chord, where the total magnitude
is the fundamental pitch and each component of the
magnetic field corresponds to the volume and beating
cycle of each harmonic.
These choices are not casual, and are made for
different reasons: first of all, metaphorical, their perceptions mimic the nature of the phenomenon they
replicate, and the sound parameters are mapped taking into consideration which one of them may better
represent their physical correspondence.
Another aspect taken into consideration is if the
sounds can be identified even if played together: in
this case the sharp attacks of the particles is always
clearly distinguishable from the other continuous
sounds; while these other two are distinguishable
from two different aspects; they take different registers of the audible spectrum, and also the harmonic
nature of the magnetic field rendition stands out from
the noisy sound generated by the solar wind plasma.
107
Techical aspects
The data is published in form of plain text on

the http://services.swpc.noaa.gov/text/ web directory, in three different text files according to the instrument that generates the data, and is updated every minute for solar wind plasma and magnetic field,
and every five for the electron and protons flux. Data
is retrieved from those files within thirty seconds
from a Processing script, that translates the plain text
in scientific notation into the regular positional notation, labels and then sends them via OSC to a Max/
MSP patch. This passage is required because Max/
MSP cannot directly use values in scientific notation
written as strings in plain text, while Processing can
translate them in a very efficient way.
In Max the values are routed to the proper
sound generator, that adapts the data to the appropriate ranges of values, and then transforms them into
parameters for the sound synthesis engines.
Source data in raw format, as presented on the

SWPC web directory
108
Data on SWPC
website
Wait 30 seconds
Download on local
computer
Software
Flow Chart
Conversion to
positional notation
Processing
Labeling
OSC send
Values to sound
parameters mapping
Max/MSP
Sound synthesis
Spatialization
Output
109
Testing
Process
110
The described system has been tested for some

days, both from myself to refine the initial calibration, and from ten non-trained users with only a general knowledge of the involved phenomena, to verify
the capability of the system to effectively translate
into distinguishable and perceivably different sounds
the original data.
The system that proved most quickly its effectiveness was the particle synthesis applied to the
proton and electron stream: the only adjustment required was to double all to frequencies generated, to
create a clearer difference between the low-frequency sounds associated to the low-energy particles and
the highest pitched sounds related to the high-energy
particles. For most of the time the stream is constituted mainly of some thousands of low-energy particles
per second, with some dozens of high-energy particles. Occasionally this balance changes, and the solar
wind composition shifts, with the most energetic particles increasing their density by ten or more times.
After applying the frequency range adjustment,
I requested to the users to say whenever they could
notice this shift while I was checking the real-time
data: the change was correctly noticed in almost every occasion, both if the subject was paying attention
and if they were involved in casual chatting.
The subtractive synthesis engine working on
the solar wind plasma data required some more testing and refining: the speed and density parameters,
mapped respectively to the center frequency of the
filter and to its bandwidth proved to be quite effective
and describing, with the changes being almost immediately noticed by the test subjects, even the less relevant ones. The last parameter, the temperature of the
plasma mapped to the timbre of the noise, proved to
be more difficult to render effectively, mostly because
of the wide range of possible values, from 1000 K to
1000000 K. Small changes, around 50% or less of
the previous value, can be difficult to detect without
some focus; anyway this parameter has often very

noticeable and sudden changes, with the value doubling or increasing even more, often in less than a
minute: these shifts became clearly noticeable with a
careful calibrating of the related parameters, allowing to pin down most of the relevant changes in the
phenomenon.
The harmonic synthesizer connected to the
magnetic field parameters proved to be the most difficult to map, and various different approaches were
tried before getting to a satisfying one. In the definitive system the total magnitude of the magnetic field
is considered to be the most relevant, and thus is connected to the fundamental frequency of the sound
generated, which is the most clearly distinguishable
parameter. The three components, x, y and z, of the
magnetic field are mapped to the amplitude of harmonic sounds multiple of the fundamental: in this
way the overall character of the sound changes with
the balance of the magnetic field, exposing the dominant component. In this way sudden changes both
in the magnitude and in the rotation of the magnetic
field became clearly audible.
Sonograms of the three sound synthesis systems,

top to bottom: particles, solar wind plasma, and
magnetic field
111
References
Conclusions
Thanks
Colophon
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117
Conclusions
The objective of this thesis is to present some

possibilities for the improvement of a field, scientific
visualization, that has seen a steady increase in its
importance since its beginning.
First of all, it has been necessary to make clear,
both for me and for the possible readers, how scientific visualization can be defined, explaining why and
how it is different from the most generic information
visualization projects that we are more and more used
to see almost every day, ranging from user-generated
statistics to popular visualizations spreading through
Internet about any possible field of knowledge or interest. The fact that it requires a deep understanding
of the underlying scientific phenomena pushed it in
a niche, effectively separating it from the more generic fields of visual arts and design that nowadays
are pushing experimentation in information design,
especially thanks to the technological innovations of
the last decades. These innovations, for example virtual reality, nowadays are almost confined in the field
of entertainment, while they have a great underlying potential for visualization and design for a great
number of different topics.
In fact, the interest for contemporary science
topics is well alive, and the projects created by artists and designers in the last years, thanks also to
the Open Data revolution, demonstrate this, together
with the some of the possibilities that new forms of
media could have to investigate even the most complex concepts related to science, medicine, physics,
and so on.
There are nowadays some very prolific examples of cooperation between scientists, artists, programmers and designers, that created some new and
novel ways to approach visualization, and more generally rendition, of various data and phenomena, but
they are still considered extraordinary and experimental examples, while my research suggests that
that kind of approach should become more and more
common in the next years, involving artists and designers not only in the finishing phases of visualization projects but also in the concept and development
parts: this could bring great positive effects both for
researchers, that could have better instruments, involving new technologies and approaches to investigate their fields; and also for the general public, that
could have access, for example, to pieces of public art
with an informative value, supported by strong scientific principles.
The project I developed demonstrates how a
new and different approach, that revolves around the
conscious use of sound, can be an effective and useful
way to to represent real-time data, even in a mission
critical environment.
To conclude, it has been a difficult but satisfying
work, that required a broad research and the conceptual effort to put together many different fields, that I
hope will at least contribute to open the discussion on
how to reconsider the respective roles of science, art
and design, how they could interact for us and how
they could positively effect our lives in the future.
119
120
First of all I have to thank my family, that made

this 2 years experience in Venice even possible, supporting me in all the ways possible for them.
A huge thank you goes to the colleagues I met
here in Venice, the ones that became some of my
best friends and really my other family, making this
amazing city not only the place where I studied, but
also my home and the place I loved the most to live in.
Your caring support made this experience a wonderful one, that made me grow way more that you all can
imagine.
A special thank goes to my relator, Marco Ferrari, that really guided me in the right way to face
this thesis project, starting from my initial vague and
unclear concepts about the themes I wanted to investigate. I realize that my previous formation and my
way of working may not entirely fit in this field of
design, but I guarantee that I absorbed the most that
I could from each project I realized and each course I
took here, and for that my thank goes to Marco and
all the other professors.
Thanks
121
Colophon
IUAV University of Venice
Design and Planning in Complex Environments Department
Master Degree in Product and Visual Communication Design
AA 2014 / 2015
Supervisor:
Marco Ferrari
Typefaces:
Aleo, Alessio Lasio
Bebas Neue, Ryoichi Tsunekawa
Software:
Adobe InDesign CC
Adobe Illustrator CC
Adobe Photoshop CC
Processing 3.0
Nodebox 3.0
Cycling 74 Max 7
122

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Andrea Fasolo Rao

New MediA for

New Media for scientific

Questa tesi affronta il tema dellinterpretazione

New Media for Scientific Data Visualization

This thesis deals with the interpretation and

Why to investigate Scientific Visualization

What is Scientific Visualization

Historic Scientific Visualization

Scientific Visualization, computers and computer graphics

Beginning of the Open Data era

Early Open Data examples

The birth of public open data

The future: Linked Data

4. Art, Science and Design

Separation of Science and Aesthetics

The role of art

New Media for Scientific Data Visualization

Case studies selection

Ryoji Ikeda, Supersymmetry

Nathalie Miebach, Weather scores

Alex H. Parker, Worlds

Aaron Koblin, Nik Hafermaas, Dan Goods, eCLOUD

Soo-in Yang, David Benjamin, Living Light

Lorenzo Pagliei, Les Invisibles

JeongHo Park, LHC CERN Data Audio Generator

Jan Willem Tulp, Goldilocks

Nasa Scientific Visualization Studio

Nasa Hyperwall Visualizations

Design as the unifying force

Usage of new media

Coverage of contemporary and popular science topics

Usage of datasets and real-time data sources

Keeping the data understandable

Application of design reasoning and verifiable methodology

7. Project: Sounds from the Sun

Sound and Psychoacoustics

The Solar wind and its consequences

Solar wind observation

Sound rendition of solar wind data

One of the most rapidly growing field of design

New Media for Scientific Data Visualization

1: T.M. Rhyne, North Carolina State University,

2: The Ohio State University, A Critical History

3: T. Delmarcelle, L. Hesselink, Visualizing secondorder tensor fields with hyperstreamlines, Computer

If Scientific visualization is approached, the first

New Media for Scientific Data Visualization

Example of line integral convolution applied

Example of mesh visualization of a 3D function

Example of hyperstreamlines applied to tensor

4: J.C. Maxwell, Letter to James Thomson,

New Media for Scientific Data Visualization

Maxwell thermodynamic surface

Example of Pression / Entropy

Example of Entropy / Enthalpy

New Media for Scientific Data Visualization

the sewer system had still to reach it. This wasnt,

Snows original cholera spreading map

Florence Nightingales Diagram of the causes of

by 7 years.5 Its an incredible milestone for scientific

New Media for Scientific Data Visualization

Composition of frames from

6: Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of