Notebook
Here's where we post periodic updates on what we've been up to at Fathom. Reflections on the interesting stories that emerge from our client work, side projects, after-hours rabbitholes, and other miscellaneous threads of inquiry.
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We've had an ongoing interest in activity data from projects with the Nike FuelBand (Year in NikeFuel and NikeFuel Weather Activity) to more recently with Fathom Watch Faces for Android Wear. This work has inspired me to track every place I've been and how I've moved between locations with the Moves app. With about twenty months of data on my hands I began parsing, analyzing and creating sketches.
In honor of Women's Equality Day, we released a new No Ceilings visualization exploring how disparities in wealth engender gaps in primary school completion. Girls from low-income households are often at the greatest disadvantage in their access to basic education, most predominantly in Middle Eastern and African countries. For all of the inequalities that exist in the U.S. school systems, there are millions of girls around the world who don't have the opportunity to graduate elementary school, let alone attend it.
As anyone who has recently taken a road trip can attest, there are a lot of places in the United States with very distinctive names. Many of us at Fathom are fascinated by geography and the subtle oddities around us, so it seemed only natural we create Place Poetry. The playful mobile application enables people to arrange strangely named cities into poems, while simultaneously plotting the location and distance of their journey.
We're excited to announce the launch of the Fathom Watch Faces, a collection of interactive watch face designs for the Android Wear collection, which is part of Google's Android Experiments. The experiments are designed to bring developers together on a common platform to push the capabilities of Android tablets, phones, and watches. We focused on using the internal components of the watches, such as their accelerometers and pedometers, to create delightful user feedback at every glance, and to really explore the information people can gain from a wearable device attached to their wrist.
I found Fathom through a data visualization course at college that was taught by a statistics professor, so my first exposure to information design was through the lens of statistical analysis. I spent most of my time in that class making sure the data was not misrepresented, and working through particularly challenging pieces of code. The more complicated the analysis or the code, the better I felt about the project, and I wanted that complexity to show in my end product. If the code worked and did something cool, then I was happy.
Last Thursday, we joined the studios of Design I/O and Sosolimited for a second annual gathering. All three teams met in Salem at the historic House of the Seven Gables, and spent the day sharing recent projects and discussing topics centered around the convergence of art and technology.
Last Friday, we had a chapter of Girls Who Code, a group of 20 girls between the ages of 15-18, in the studio for a visit. They shared great tips on how a succulent garden could really liven up our studio space, and gave a convincing discourse on why the chocolate chip is superior to the raisin, but more importantly they asked tons of really thoughtful and insightful questions about our projects, process, and goals here at Fathom.
From digging into data visualization libraries to exploring the capabilities of custom shaders, folks at Fathom are always looking for ways to improve their computing skills. This summer, several of us are learning Python.
In between the release of No Ceilings and working on Space Monkeys & Tiger Wine, I visited Kew Gardens, home to the most diverse collection of plant species in the world. While reading up on the gardens in preparation for my trip, I came upon a recent paper by four female researchers looking at the gender gap in the field of botany.
We're pleased to announce the release of the No Ceilings data... in 3D. Yes, we know everything is cooler in 3D (the IMAX, Jurassic World, printing, real life), but our decision to represent the No Ceilings map as a 3D globe for mobile devices is better attributed to the design and processing limitations of phones rather than an attempt at enhancing our street cred.