SketchoFew — Data Visualization / 2024
An interactive data visualization exploring the ocean carbon cycle — translating the abstract journey of carbon through marine ecosystems into a living, legible visual language.
01 — Research
We began by mapping the science: how carbon enters the ocean, moves between reservoirs, and returns to the atmosphere. Interviews with researchers and close reading of the source papers helped us frame which relationships mattered most, and where a visual approach could reveal what raw numbers could not.
Carbon flow diagram
Reservoir mapping
Field research
Concept board
Data notes
02 — Synthesis
The full carbon system is dense with variables. We distilled it into a small set of legible relationships — flux, residence time, and reservoir exchange — that a single visual metaphor could carry without oversimplifying the underlying science.
System map — variables reduced to core relationships
03 — Goal
Build an interactive visual system that turns carbon-cycle data into an intuitive, explorable form — legible at a glance, yet rich enough to reward close reading.
04 — Ideation
Dozens of hand studies tested how a natural form — branches, shells, petals — could encode quantities like flux and residence time while still reading as a single organism.
05 — Form
Materializing the data — evoking what is behind the numbers. Each generative form is driven directly by the dataset, so the shape you see is the data itself, not a decoration of it.
Generative form 01
Generative form 02
Generative form 03
Interactive Data Visualization for Carbon Cycle Science
The CLOVE — interactive petal visualization
Residence time tree
Residence Time Tree
Branch length encodes how long carbon lingers in each reservoir. The longer the branch, the slower the turnover — making residence time something you can read at a glance.
Shell relationship diagram
Shell Relationship Diagram
Nested shells show how reservoirs contain and exchange with one another. Concentric layers reveal dependency without a single number on the page.
Aggregate flux petal plot
Aggregate Flux Petal Plot
Each colored petal maps a flux pathway; its size reflects magnitude. Together the petals form a single bloom that summarizes the whole system’s balance.
Garden petal plot
Garden Petal Plot
Multiple blooms placed side by side turn a dataset into a garden — letting you compare scenarios, regions, or years as a field of forms rather than a table.
06 — Reflection
CLOVE showed us that data doesn’t have to be simplified to be understood — it has to be given a form worth reading. Translating a scientific model into a living visual language made the carbon cycle feel less like a chart and more like something alive.
The CLOVE team