Nadia Susanto – Looking Outwards – 08

Kim Rees is the Head of Information Visualization at Periscopic, a socially conscious data visualization firm based in Portland, Oregon. Kim has garnered many awards and has presented herself to be a prominent figure in the world of information visualization. Kim’s work has been featured in the MOMA, the Parsons Journal of Information Mapping, and was an award winner in the VAST 2010 Challenge.

I really admire her work because she is taking her skills of creating beautiful pieces of information visuals to talk about bigger societal issues that are needed in this day and age. Below is one of her famous works regarding gun violence. What many don’t understand is that there is an overwhelming magnitude of loss from US gun deaths. The orange line depicts the person that died, and the white line that continues from the orange depicts how long they could’ve lived for. By this heart-wrenching visual, its easy to see how many years of life were stolen at the hands of guns.

To see the whole visual from above come to life, click the link below:

https://guns.periscopic.com/?year=2013

While Kim Rees was unable to showcase her works with Periscopic at Eyeo, her talk on the future of data was inspiring. She was not afraid to seem controversial and had great insights into privacy, actualized data, and more. Kim values open data and believes that using more and more data can help solve social issues. Watch her talk below at Eyeo 2014.