LO: Information Visualization

Immediately, I was intrigued by Moritz Stefaner’s work, specifically his Project Ukko: a visualization of seasonal wind prediction data. Project Ukko presents a thematic map of wind data using lines of varying opacity (prediction accuracy), thickness (wind speed), tilt and color (trend of wind speed). Stefaner outsources his computational data from clients, which is processed by another group called RESILIENCE, so unfortunately I cannot find much about the algorithm behind his work, but I can tell that Stefaner put a lot of effort into the process of his visualization. He asks questions like “What are the main views?”, “What needs to be available immediately, what on demand?”, and “How important is each part?”. I admire that he keeps the design process, that I myself have to go through in my major, central to his work. Furthermore, the final piece is both beautiful and highly functional. For someone not entrenched in the data, it is still an easy visualization to process; but it can easily become a deeply detailed source. It is minimalistic in that it includes only the necessary parts, yet it still feels so rich.  

Moritz Stefaner, Project Ukko