Week 27

This week has been about coral reefs, water colors, acoustic encounters and continuing work on my new project.

Early this week, we had a workshop led by Beyond Words Studio. During this session, they walked us through their data journalism projects and we gained insights into their working methods. This was followed by a briefing session where we looked at IUCN Red List’s dataset on endangered species and did some rapid concept generation to further explore ideas for an Instagram carousel data story.

In response to the brief, our group chose to focus on coral bleaching and what the recent El Niño forecast will mean for coral reefs and the marine ecosystems they sustain. Once we had a broad editorial viewpoint, we began our visual experiments. In order to explore ideas of fading we worked with watercolor & salt.

The following day, we continued testing various watercolor treatments and exploring visual variables inspired by coral reef forms.

Once we had a design direction, we moved on to sketching schematics of the data story and fleshing out the narrative.

At this stage, we had a feedback session with our tutor and a guest observer Trudi who shared some valuable ideas to explore with our watercolor experiments. We continued developing our visual language this time with different inks, paper, salt and bleach and the results were promising.

We looked for ways to achieve the spectrum of vibrant to faded colors to depict the idea of corals fading.

We were joined by Aya Kudo, Duncan Swain, Harry Turner and Sam Shannon for the final presentations and received positive feedback on our process & editorial direction along with valuable suggestions on the design.

I had an incredible experience participating in a workshop led by folks at Soundcamp learning about long durational listening. We assembled streamboxes using a Raspberry Pi, an audio hat, microphones, wind shields, a modem and battery. I then went on a data walk and used these to stream live audio from the neighbourhood.

I continued working on my project on Werner’s nomenclature of colors. I focused on getting the physical computing bits working. I am testing how I could use a RFID reader and unique tags to act as an interface for selecting the color swatches.