Capturing The Invisible World of Technology With Graphic Design
Released on 12/08/2014
(applause)
I love graphics.
They tease my eyes, challenge my mind,
and extend my understanding.
And after practice and design for nearly eight years,
I'm still blown away by their power to communicate.
See what I've learned in that time
is that graphics are like a form of language,
and it takes time to find your voice.
For me, things really clicked at about the time
I created this poster
for the Mushashino Theater Festival in Tokyo.
You know, my goal for this design was simple:
to create a graphic that captured,
perhaps the magic our eyes might experience
when we see something amazing.
After six years, I still enjoy exploring
the color and form of this image.
It has become the symbol of my love for graphics.
What's truly fascinating is for thousands of years,
humans have used graphics in various forms
to communicate abstract ideas.
From the elegant cave paintings
at Cheveaux Cave depicting an array of ancient animals
to Buddhist mandalas depicting the universe
to arabesque patterns that show
the principles governing our world,
graphics always helped humans capture and communicate
abstract processes at work in our minds
and in the world around us.
Now, fast forward hundreds of years
and you'll see that we've been raised
in a Golden Age of Graphics,
and they surround us.
Sometimes in terrible ways,
but occasionally, in beautiful ways.
And in the digital age,
they are being proven again to be
a powerful communication tool.
Now, in 1945, something amazing happened.
ENIAC, the electronic numerical integrator and computer,
was turned on.
This is widely considered to be
the world's first digital computer.
And this huge calculator
started an armed race to build
the world's fastest tabulation devices.
Now, these machines were out of this world
for the people of that time.
And it's unsurprising that companies
had a hard time explaining what they did,
or really, why they were important.
A photograph simply couldn't capture
their inner workings, so they turned to graphics.
Designers such as Anton Stankowski,
who actually coined the phrase,
the visual presentation of invisible processes,
in the 1960's were commissioned
to create abstract representations
of what these machines could accomplish.
These graphics captivated the imagination
and started communicating this new
and invisible world happening within computers.
And they did it with style.
So 50 years later, human ingenuity
is pushing us even deeper into these invisible worlds.
Whereas, the 50's and 60's was an exploration of hardware
and 60's, 70', and 80's, was arguably
an exploration of silicon and software,
the exploration of our day is data,
and more importantly, the potential of data.
And yet again, graphics are proving to be
an invaluable tools helping us describe
and share the nature of the many complex processes
within these invisible worlds.
From my early days at Wired to my extensive work with IBM
to fooling around with the folks at Facebook,
and most recently, VISA, I've always been fascinated
by the worlds within our networks and devices.
And this fascination has sent me on a journey
of drawing the invisible.
Today, I'm often commissioned to create
abstract graphic representations
of things you can't see:
themes such as connectivity, personalization, scalability,
to name a few, are all common threads in my work,
all of which display vast invisible processes.
So how do you make a picture of something you can't see?
For me, I started
by asking questions and creating puzzles.
For example, these sketches, so some of my first
real work with abstract graphics.
A little company called IBM
commissioned me to create a series of visual compositions
of contemporary technical phenomena.
They wanted purely graphic,
non-representational designs presenting terms such as
insight, risk, computing, or simply, data.
I mean, this was an amazing, yet daunting assignment.
Where do you start when you're asked
to create an abstract representation of data?
See, at my core, I'm a visual storyteller,
so making pretty pictures isn't good enough for me.
It's important that I really understand the subject.
And I create something that is smart
as well as beautiful.
And this is why I start by asking questions.
I would question everything about the subject.
There were no stupid questions.
I mean, what makes data data?
How do you structure data?
What's the nature of raw data?
I would sit in my studio having
these low-level existential conversations
that I as an art major in college
was completely unqualified to have.
But something constructive would emerge.
That would be the seed for an image
that could artfully, but intelligently,
represent these subjects.
For example, data is just simply information
that's been collected.
We all understand that.
That's simple.
You know another thing is that
a single piece of data is useful,
but generally, knowledge happens
by planting multiple, and oftentimes
unrelated pieces of data.
That makes perfect sense.
But, lastly, data is always changing, so it's alive.
And like anything else that's alive,
it's subject to external pressures and hierarchies.
Now, when I go through this exercise,
this is where things start getting visual for me,
and I start making puzzles.
And let's play this out a little further.
A piece of data is called a data point.
Well, in my world, this is what
a data point looks like to me.
You know but when you add enough data points,
patterns begin to emerge.
And, eventually, a picture fills-in.
And then, when you add a sense of depth,
you breathe life into the hierarchies
and the pressures governing those patterns.
And then what eventually emerges
is my abstract representation of data.
You see, by asking questions
it's how I distill these subjects
into the key attributes that define them.
And it's these key attributes that guide my hand.
And really, what emerges are graphics that are
evocative of the many complex and invisible processes
at work in technology today.
(10 second pause)
So, you know, whether I'm constructing an image
representing the tsunami of DNA data
we're currently collecting now,
or how data and analytics is improving our personal health,
you know, my motivation is to capture
and celebrate the abstract nature of our existence
into beautiful cognitive puzzles.
And I've come to understand that my graphics draw
upon many of the principles governing the natural world.
Things like multiplicity, pattern,
chaos, form, and function.
But perhaps the strongest aspect of my work,
I think, is when I combine
geometry with iconography.
And a great example of this is a series of six
interlocking posters I created
for IBM's Think Exhibit in New York.
But another thing I've learned over the years
and I find absolutely fascinating
is the ability for these graphics
to transcend language and culture.
The work I was doing at IBM was central
to a communication platform
that spanned over 130 countries.
From China to Chile, IBM was using
these designs to talk about and communicate
some of the more illusive and complicated stories
they wanted to tell.
So now, I'm really excited to share
a piece of work I haven't shown yet.
So, since working 60 hours a week
just seemed too easy, I started
a new studio, a new hybrid
storytelling and design studio called StoryTK.
And we recently concluded a collaboration
that combined many of the graphic disciplines I love:
abstract graphics, infographics, and motion graphics.
And the client was Visa,
and they asked us to tell the story of VisaNet,
the global payments network system
that processes over seven trillion dollars
in transactions every year.
I mean this was my biggest challenge yet.
Something so big and so technical
demanded that I get out of the studio
and into the field.
And my first stop was Visa's data center in Virginia.
After getting a biometric scan
and passing through an airlock tunnel,
I was able to see the guts of one of the world's
most sophisticated and secure global networks.
And I got to talk directly with Visa's top engineers
and was able to ask the questions
that would help me distill this incredibly complex system
into a simple list of attributes.
Things like ubiquity, security, and equality
immediately raised to the surface.
And this prompted me to ask one simple question
that would put me on a path to a solution.
Is each and every transaction viewed equally
in the eyes of the network?
So whether you're spending 200,000 dirham in Dubai
for a new Mercedes
or two dollars in Denver for a pack of gum,
does VisaNet treat each of those transactions equally?
And the answer was yes.
You see, they were so used to talking about transactions
in the thousands or millions
that a convoluted, a very simple but beautiful fact,
that electronic payments, like snowflakes,
are actually completely unique moments in time.
And I was fascinated by this,
and I was obsessed to find a way
to capture this graphically.
In working with Visa's data scientists
we distilled that every transaction
has a key set of variables
that give it its unique signature.
Things like merchant type, amount, time.
From there, I developed a graphical system
based on abstract forms to visualize these variables.
And once the design logic was coded,
the system would generate
unique digital signatures we began calling snowflakes.
So whether you were buying a wedding ring
for your bride to be,
or paying for your child's college tuition,
or making a donation to your favorite charity,
this system combined the power of information
and abstract graphics to capture and visualize
the data moving through one of the world's
most secure and sophisticated global networks.
And, yet again, graphics was a key part
in helping us capture and explain
a complex and mostly invisible process.
And as people continue to build
evermore complex and invisible technological wonders,
abstract graphics will be even more necessary
to communicate how they work.
Yet no matter how much I celebrate abstract graphics
as a powerful communication and storytelling device,
their ability to delight
is powerful and undeniably beautiful.
Thank you. (applause)
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