Science Visualization at the VIVID Festival

A guest post by Gaël McGill, Ph.D., Founder & CEO, Digizyme Inc., and Faculty & Director of Molecular Visualization, Harvard Medical School

Date: 22 May - 8 June 2015

Location: Sydney, Australia

VIVID Ideas is a series of presentations that are part of Sydney's annual VIVID festival - an amazing time when the city comes alive with music, performances, lectures and, most impressively, a nightly light show the likes of which I have never seen. Imagine the Sydney opera house lit up and used as a dynamic canvas onto which are projected myriads of abstract patterns. Against this energizing landscape, VIVID Ideas brings together business and creative leaders to discuss and celebrate the latest trends in innovation, creativity and community across the technology and design industries. I was fortunate to be invited to present "Science Reimagined," a special event hosted by VizBi+ and Dr. Sean O'Donoghue (group leader at Australia's CSIRO and Garvan Institute).

This event was an exciting opportunity for me to share with this vibrant community what I've been working on the past few years in the "Science Remagined" seminar. I focused on the philosophy behind the recently released E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth digital textbook that I co-authored, and that my company Digizyme created in partnership with Apple and the E.O. Wilson Foundation. During my talk I shared examples of the 500+ interactive and animated widgets that we created for the textbook. A unique aspect of this project was the freedom to use digital media and visualization wherever we felt it would heighten the student's experience of the science, and the response from the community so far has been electrifying. Millions of downloads after its launch, we continue to receive excited anecdotes from high-school teachers who have either already adopted the textbook or eagerly look forward to doing so!

In addition to the general audience-oriented seminar, I co-taught a day-long scientific visualization masterclass with professor Tamara Munzner and members of Sean O'Donoghue's team. This was a lot of fun. I had a chance to engage with a varied group of scientists, artists and educators interested in the design and practical aspects of crafting data visualizations. The masterclass covered topics that ranged from the underlying principles of data visualization design, the ABCs of interactive data display and programming, to the power and danger of storytelling in scientific visualization. In this last topic, I was able to share some of the more innovative ways in which we have tried to combine narrative approaches with nested interactive media - in other words, embedding information for viewers to explore interactively at their own pace, while still reaping the benefits of an engaging storyline. These ideas seem to resonate with the audience as the Twittersphere came alive during the masterclass with engaging and supportive comments.

There is much research and discussion about how audiences respond to visuals and how these are used to engage students in the classroom, but there is little mention of the impact that creating a visualization has on its creator. Preparing for and crafting a visualization not only requires you to gain intimate knowledge of varied datasets, but it also carries the benefits of ‘visual thinking' where familiar data and concepts are often rediscovered in a new light. Anecdotally, it is not unusual to collaborate with a veteran researcher who, in the process of being challenged to create a visualization, has an epiphany about data that should be all too familiar. Scientific visualization design is also very effective at revealing missing data and, in doing so, can influence experimental design. In other words it is not just a process one engages in when experiments are done, results are analyzed and a ‘story' is ready to be shared. It can lead to better working models and spark new ideas and hypotheses.

Enabling scientists or students to more easily craft such visual models is an exciting prospect - one that I believe requires more intuitive tools than currently available in the scientific community paired with high-quality training. Given the potential benefits of the scientific visualization process for both scientists and students alike, we should strive to ‘democratize' a process that is currently only in the purview of highly-trained scientist-artists.

With this goal in mind, I was excited to announce the imminent launch of a new scientific visualization portal called Clarafi that enables scientists, artists, teachers and students to more easily create accurate scientific imagery. The portal, which will launch next month at the American Medical Illustration conference in Cleveland, offers a variety of high quality online/video-based training as well as innovative tools that dramatically lower the learning curve for those interested in creating scientifically accurate visualizations. I was encouraged when the ‘1-click-DNA' function (that is, structurally accurate and ready-for-simulation 3D DNA!) of Molecular Maya's new DNA kit elicited a few audible ‘Ooos' and 'Ahhhs' from the crowd... we are eager to see if Clarafi's combination of tools and training can help bring these powerful new visualization capabilities into new hands, including tomorrow's budding scientists!