TL;DR — Visual Weather is my bachelor thesis. I completed the thesis in Constance in 2018. The topic was data visualization in digital media. I conducted many experiments on this topic. It came down to four variants of how to display weather data. The data was presented from very simple to completely abstract. In this project I acquired programming skills.
Weather Data in the highest abstraction level 4
People have been deriving information from data for a long time. New technologies and advancements in data science, i.e. the extraction of knowledge from data are driving this trend forward. Data can be analyzed and therefore visualized in a very short time.
Decisions - whether made by a company, a society or an individual - are usually preferred to be based on data rather than on gut instinct. Threrefore the requirements for data visualizations are constantly increasing. People are used to have access to information at any time and from anywhere. Thanks to new technologies, we are connected to the world and receive news almost in real time directly on our smartphones.
This also changes the requirements for infographics. Data visualization doesn't need to be reinvented, but visualizations increasingly need to happen in real time. This places new demands on graphics. Graphics can no longer be designed just for a static data set. They must be able to respond to constantly changing data.
The simplest representation level 1
Weather app, abstraction level 2
The special thing about data visualizations is that any visualization in any medium - whether in print or digital - must work. Data must not be distorted or omitted. Individual solutions must always be found for each medium.
We want to absorb the information as fast as possible. Thus, more and more intuitive visualizations are required. By working with weather data exactly these parameters are given.
Weather data is visualized in four different information levels. From a very sober to a very abstract representation, the viewer is confronted with the possibilities of digital data visualizations. Each can choose which visualization is best. They all try to bring the same information to the user.
Real weather data represented in oil paintings, level 3
Exhibition of my thesis in constance, 2018