about the workshop
For over forty years, the Exploratorium has created exhibits that allow visitors to interact and experiment with physical, cognitive, and perceptual phenomena. When modern science operates at much larger scales and much longer timeframes, a different approach is required. We are convening a workshop to address the challenges of bringing scientific data visualizations to the museum floor—and making them as engaging and explorable as the rest of our collection.
This workshop will bring together exhibit developers, scientists, and designers and developers of data visualizations. We will focus on prototyping systems for interaction with geospatial datasets describing current environmental science. This free, day-long workshop will take place on Saturday, June 11 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
The day will begin with short presentations by staff and scientists from the Exploratorium and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describing the science, the process of working with these data, and an overview of the Exploratorium’s exhibit-development process. As we move into the day, we will collectively prototype the ideas generated by the morning’s discussion.
For this workshop, we’ll be working with data describing tracks of pelagic (open ocean) predators. The Exploratorium is 2 years into a 5-year partnership with NOAA designed to bring their science to the public. Through this partnership, we’ve learned of research by NOAA and other organizations on the travels of whales, tuna, seals, turtles, sharks, and other pelagic predators. The past 10 years of these data are publicly available on www.gtopp.org; we will provide the raw data to workshop participants.
Application
We will select a well-balanced group of participants to make the workshop beneficial to both the Exploratorium and participants alike. If you are interested in participating, please fill out the form below.
We are looking specifically for people with hands-on experience in creating visualizations as designers and/or developers. Experience with geotemporal datasets is a plus.
We are not offering travel expenses or a stipend, so we encourage local applicants but welcome applications from anywhere and anyone. To make the workshop valuable for all, participants will be chosen based on complimentary skill sets. If you aren’t chosen this time around, we may well contact you for a future workshop. The workshop results will be documented and freely available to the public.