Book Design & Data Vis
Ocean is an experimental data visualization book translating the documentary Ocean with David Attenborough. The book is imagined as a supplementary object to the documentary, capturing the sentiments of the film and layering in rich data relationships. The double accordian book opens up show abstract visualizations only contexualized by matching partner vellum pieces. The book is meant to encourage the intentionality of coming to terms with the state of our ocean and illuminate the crises mentioned in the documentary with numbers. The backs of the accordion books are images from the film seperated, as the entire book is, into the safer past and the dark and dangerous future.
PROCESS
I have always been fascinated with documentaries on multiple levels. I enjoy them as these glimpes into history or these retellings of stories that have subtle, or not so subtle, interpretive lenses. A well made documentary acts both as a historical record and holds the responsbility of projecting its contents onto our future. Ocean was brilliant on its first watch and even better on the second. I wanted to capture these qualities of this film, and documentaries in general, through a non-linear book experience. To me, data is the natural supplement to this film. I am not a data scientist, nor will ever claim to be, but I knew that finding combinations of data sets to put in conversation would be crucial to creating both an investigative reading experience and a multi-layered material one as well.
The materiality and production of this book was a priority for me. What was the package that this came in? What did the instructions look like? How does the user open the book and immediately explore it? I wanted to create a book that felt like a packaged experience, a kit to decipher the abstraction that was core to the piece itself.