EXPERIMENTS IN INFORMATION DESIGN — Week 7

Photoviz

Topic

How can photographic images become data—and how can information design use photographic techniques to make insights visible?

Photoviz explores the interplay between photography as an aesthetic medium and photography as a data carrier. The goal of this week is to use photographic practices in ways that allow information to be extracted from images or generated through photographic processes themselves.

Assignment

Develop a small project, experiment, or visual study within one week that explores the potential of photography in the context of information design.

You are completely free in determining the form your outcome takes:

• Visualization
• Photography
• A series of photographic experiments
• Data analysis based on photographic material
• Installation, website, publication, or print
• Or any hybrid format

What matters is that you think about photography as data material.

Possible Approaches (Inspiration, not mandatory)

1. Photos as Data

How can photographs be read, analyzed, or transformed as datasets?
Examples:

• Structuring all photos from 2025 by color, location, time, or motif
• Using EXIF data as a form of visualization
• Making patterns, frequencies, or absences visible
• Color histograms, image statistics, pixel-based analyses

2. Photographic Traces & Autographic Design

Photography as a trace of action, movement, memory.

• What does a photograph show that it does not intend to show?
• What traces do you leave through your devices, bodies, or routines?

3. Photographic Techniques as Information Processes

Use techniques that gather or condense data about the world:

• Schlieren photography (visualizing flows)
• Long exposure (rendering time as image)
• Multiple exposure (condensing moments)
• Slit-scan / time-slice (temporal distortions and timelines)

4. Image Processing & Post-Processing as Visualization

Digital transformation as a tool for information design:

• Mosaic, collage, stacking
• Averaging many images (e.g., layering every day of the year)
• Blending modes for pattern extraction
• Pixel sorting, segmentation, K-means
• Generative processes using photographic input

Guiding Questions

• What kinds of information does photography generate that other media do not?
• How can you understand photography as a sensor?
• What patterns only emerge through photographic repetition, collection, or accumulation?
• When does an image become a dataset—and when does it become a visualization?
• Which aspects of photography (time, movement, light, perspective) can themselves become variables?

Output

• A small experiment or project
• A short description of your idea and methodology
• One to three visualizations or results
• A finished work is not expected—the focus is on exploratory experimentation