In her thesis on a work called »Fear Tuners — Protheses for Instincts« Susanna Hertrich writes about a wearable device that helps people to sense global and abstract dangers, be it a stock market crash or the rise of the oil price. It stimulates the autonomous nervous system to cause a state of increased awareness. Whenever stressful data is being delivered to this gadget, one can feel physically uncomfortable about it, although we lack the corresponding instincts.

I like the visualization of some exemplary fears we all know but mostly misjudge, for example of the consequences of environmental pollution, a plane crash or cancer. Susanna’s »Reality Checking Device« uses this graphic as well. I find the depicted information very interesting, although it consists of very few data. The mostly very big mismatch between how we use to feel about risks and the actual danger made me think. How about you?

image credit: Susanna Hertrich

Watch the animated visualization here.

Synoptic is an experimental application for visualizing weather data in an unusual way, namely in 3-D. It can be explored interactively by choosing from the weather values, e.g. average temperature, wind speed, humidity and air pressure. There is a timeline for choosing the displayed period of time. This plus changing the viewing angle via mouse dragging is the basic navigation.

Roland Lößlein (weaintplastic.com), currently a student of the University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg, Germany, and a good friend of mine, created this application during a class about information graphics led by Prof. Michael Stoll. You can admire many other resulting projects in his “show, don’t tell. student’s work” Flickr set.

Roland won a Malofiej silver award in the category “innovative formats” at the 17th Infographics World Summit at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. Congratulations!

CDN: Roland, tell us something about the study course you’re in and the infodesign classes.

Roland: It is called Multimedia and it’s a combination of design and computer science. You learn coding and design basics at the same time. At the end, you can specialize in one direction, in my case it’s infomation design. Prof. Stoll’s class is being offered every semester for some time now, and it always has an general topic the participating students have to approach. Last semester, it was weather.

What was your train of thought that led you to create synoptic?

I decided very quickly to develop a realtime updated interactive online thing, even I didn’t have a clue what this “thing” finally will be.

continue reading the interview here…

Yesterday we returned from Spain where I attended the SND Infographics World Summit at the University of Navarra in Pamplona.

By “we” I mean me and 5 students from the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg in Germany. I myself graduated there a few weeks ago and was a student of Prof. Michael Stoll. One of those students I traveled with is Roland Lößlein, who won a silver award for his experimental weather visualization called synoptic.

Chiqui Esteban did a great job on listing all the winners with many examples of their work on his infographic news blog. I recommend reading about the highlights on the SND Update page. Also, have a look at some photos that have been taken during the event.