Scientific Visualization Example

Another discipline of visual thinking that I think is really cool is scientific visualizations. I’m on the Apple RSS feed and that had a cool article about scientific visualizations being done at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The article is essentially a Mac promotion piece, but it has some interesting observations about visualization. The AMNH executive producer states that they view themselves as “translators for the public.” I like that concept, using visual explanations to translate complex data into understandable messages.

The article also has a link to the AMNHs website to the arctic sea ice visualization video. Pretty powerful method of communicating. Reminds me of some of the examples in Tom Wujac’s VizThink presentation New Technologies in Visual Thinking (way down near the bottom of the page you can see the video of this presentation).