Data for Change
Can Data Visualization help us better understand and grapple with our mortality? Are there ways to visualize death that go beyond the one-dimensional representations of circles or timelines? Can we tell personal, intimate stories using large-scale data sets? These are questions I asked myself when crafting Memory Blossoms, a data visualized object that also serves as an object of remembrance for the deceased. Using a data humanism and generative design approach, Memory Blossoms aims to provoke a conversation and reflection on death by connecting personal data around our mortality with large-scale data associated with the cycles of nature and earth. This article will explore the design process behind Memory Blossoms, the Japanese cultural context it’s designed within, __ and I hope, will show ways data visualization can help take a big and scary topic like death, and turn it into something that people can hold space for with greater comfort.
Initial Studies: Exploring Data Humanism
Because of the intimate, vulnerable nature of studying death, I was inspired to begin my data visualization studies through the lens of Data humanism as presented by designer Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec in Dear Data. Essentially, data humanism is based on the reality that data is more than numbers. Data is intimately connected to human stories, and through creative visualizations, can convey empathy, imperfections, and other human qualities.
I started the process by logging and sketching my own datasets, on topics like how many times I’ve interacted with people or the numbers of books I’ve read. I produced hand-drawn data visualizations on 5" x 7" cards with primary school art supplies. These initial studies revealed an important pattern that became pivotal to the subsequent development of this project: the visualizations were all taking a cyclical form, which I realized had a much bigger implication on how we can study death.
Core Insight: Composite cyclical shapes as a form to visualize mortality
Cyclical shapes are significant because of how they’re used to represent time, and mortality and death are intimately connected to the nature of time. Human lifespans are often conceptualized by one-dimensional circles or lines, like showing a clock or a historical timeline. But through the cyclical, yet multi-variable data visualizations I constructed, I realized I wanted to push the boundaries of how data visualization can show time. In this project, Memory Blossoms sees time as multiple circles in parallel, seeking to show how our lifespans interrelate with the lifespans of our ancestors and the life cycles of the nature that surrounds us.
Concept development: Cherry Blossoms as a formative metaphor
I built upon the concept of visualizing time cyclically, through a composite of circles, by connecting it to the symbolic flower of spring in Japan: the cherry blossom. Being Japanese, I grew up associating the cherry blossom with a time of renewal in Japan. The flower is deeply tied to the memory of Japanese people because graduation ceremonies are held in late March and entrance ceremonies are held in early April across the country, right when the cherry blossoms bloom. The cherry blossom is also a reflection on mortality, because its tremendous beauty is underscored by the fact that the season only lasts for a short period of time, and the blooming period lasts merely a week. With this metaphor in mind, I saw an opportunity to tell a new kind of story around death using large-scale data-sets around nature, and specifically, cherry blossoms.
Data visualization: Age and peak-bloom dates create curvy petal form
The next step in the process was to find the relevant data sets.
In regards to the life cycle of cherry blossoms, Yasuyuki Aono, Keiko Kazui, and Shizuka Saito, a group of scientists, collected a phenological data series of cherry tree flowering in Kyoto, Japan, from 800 AD to 2021. Below is the scatter plot of cherry blossom peak-bloom date based on the data they collected, which I then used to create the form of the cherry blossom.
The cherry blossoms then become a poetic version of a radar plot. Moving around the outside circle of the blossom radial chart we find different years, such as my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and my own life span. As we move outwards from the center of the circle, we find the date in the year when the cherry blossoms blossomed. Lastly, the number of petals that appear on the flower is related to the number of years the person has lived. A younger person has fewer petals and an older person has more petals. For example, the cherry blossom radial chart layout below is a visualization of the peak-bloom dates during the March 29 to April 17 period, across a lifespan from years 1988 to 2017. While this prototype uses peak-bloom dates in Kyoto, Japan, I could apply different datasets for each individual based on their location.
Generative design: building the digital form
Generative Design tools such as Grasshopper 3D and Rhinoceros 3D make it possible to create a variety of cherry blossoms using data from multiple locations in Japan, each with their own flowering dates.
This is important because cherry blossoms usually open first in the southern region of Japan, where temperatures rise earlier, and blooming progresses northward, as illustrated in Figure 9.
While Memory Blossoms is a prototype of an object that reflects on human life spans through the lens of the natural life cycle of Japanese cherry blossoms, using generative design tools, there is the ability to apply this in other contexts. For example, for people connected to U.S. landscapes, there could be a version based on the blooming cycles of roses or other plant types that are connected to the specific person’s story.
Your Blossoms: Create your own
In conclusion, Memory Blossoms, which is generated through data, empowers the living to interact with the deceased in a more comfortable way. It also provokes a reflection from the living. It keeps reminding us of how beautiful and fragile our life is, because of our mortality. Ultimately, it reminds us of one of the intentions of generative design using personalized data, which can be to visualize a version of ourselves through provocative form.
I built a Memory Blossoms Generator with D3.js Observable. You can create your own Memory Blossoms with your favorite color palettes and time period.
It could be a gift for a family, friends, and whoever you have in your mind. Please visit my Observable notebook and download your personalized version.
I could not have written this article without the support of Alexandria Rengifo, and my peers who I’ve studied and learned with at the Institute of Design.
