Alice Fang – Looking Outwards – 08

Eyeo 2014 – Mike Bostock from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

Mike Bostock is a data-visualization specialist, and was an interactive graphics designer for The New You Times. He is also a developer of D3.js, which is a javascript library that is used for visualizing data. He graduated in 2000 with a BSE in computer science from Princeton University.

Many of the projects on his portfolio website are visualizations of data for The New York Times, with topics ranging from “Mapping every Path to the N.F.L Playoffs” to “Drought and Deluge in the Lower 48.” He combines his interest and passion for interactive visualization and animation with his knowledge of coding, to create very visually compelling images that aim to make learning and teaching abstract concepts more intuitive. I admire the simplicity in a lot of its work, and the consideration he has for human factors, like how people intake and react to the information, something which translates in his presentation as well.

His presentation on “Visualizing Algorithms” helped me understand different types of sorting algorithms through quick animation, in a way that just looking at code would have made difficult. He also addresses some tricky questions: how much visualization is too much, to the point where it overwhelms the viewer? I think his work is very applicable to design, where similar considerations have to be made about the best way to communicate ideas.