Getting the chance to participate in the Creative Drive-scholarship was a quite interesting experience and a nice opportunity to get in contact with a lot of creative and skilled people. I was attracted to the project since it was about data-visualisation and the try to find images that could represent the creative business in Germany to people that do not know about the details or how this special business works.

To achieve the goal of finding a concept that makes the creative business visible, we developed and melted ideas and styles together to experiment with different layers that carry information on different levels. The outcome is a cityscape formed from statistical data and overlayed and expanded with illustrations and other grafical elements to cover more then just the naked data. There are five zoom steps showing the business from a single person up to a view that compares the creative business of European countries. Since there was a limitation of time we were not able to adapt this concept into a interactive data visualization tool. Because of missing data, we were not able to cover all the other business field in Germany, Europe and the rest of the world.

Datavisualization and Programming

We started with aprovided set of data, that was collected from all tax declarations of everyone who works in the creative business in germany. In the next step the data was organised and recalculated with the help of some Python-scripts into various formats so we could use them to create shapes in Adobe Illustrator and Cinema4D.

All data was recalculated into different sets of of geometric shapes and volumes. So, the same data was transformed into circles, squares, boxes, zylinders, spheres and so on. This made it possible to see, what shapes would work best to represent compareble numbers. We ended up in finding a city scape the ideal association with the diverse businesses in the kultural business.

To display all data we found different zoom levels usefull. So you can go into a specific area and get more detailed informations when going closer to it. So, we formed different models that allowed to compare european countries, in every country the different businesses and in every business the sub structures until you get to a single person.

Only the limited amount of time stopped us from the idea to transform worldwide financial data into a abstract zoomable globe. This would allow to explore all businesses worldwide, connected people, income and changes over time.