Joris Maltha + Daniel Gross, catalogtree

"It's the business of every graphic designer to make visible that which somebody else is not able to see," says Daniel Gross, one half of the design team Catalogtree. Along with creative partner Joris Maltha, Gross compiles, combines, and analyzes data about the complicated behaviors of human networks and crowds in order to illuminate otherwise-invisible trends. To find patterns in reams of raw data, Maltha and Gross program sets of rules that govern how data should behave and let the results play out as they may. "The system generates from itself something that is really quite beautiful in the end," Maltha says.
Photo: Thijs Wolzak

"Flocking Diplomats" examines the behavior of foreign ambassadors in the US whose diplomatic immunity covers fines for traffic violations and other infractions. To create this poster, Maltha and Gross visualized more than two decades of data on parking tickets earned by ambassadors in New York City. The image has different effects at different levels: When viewed up close, it shows a huge spike in parking tickets earned by diplomats around lunchtime on weekdays. On a larger scale, the poster reveals more macro trends, such as a dramatic drop in violations shortly after September 11, 2001.

Anticipating a future in which we can learn to read our genome like a book, Seed commissioned Catalogtree to design a Personal Genome Card: a place where an individual's genetic information could be easily referenced. To use Catalogtree's card, the bearer would speak into a small microphone and ask a yes-or-no question. The card would analyze the remotely stored genome to come up with an answer. It would then change color: Red signifies a pure "yes," yellow means "no," and colors in between show varying levels of uncertainty. As we get better at interpreting the human genome, Catalogtree notes, more questions will be answered with a higher degree of confidence.

The front of the card bears a unique visual pattern derived from the 13 chromosomal loci, or chromosomal positions, used in genetic profiling. The profiling process exploits short tandem repeats — variations in the number of times a short sequence of base pairs is repeated in a person's DNA. Two unrelated humans usually have a different number of repeats at a given locus. This structure is translated to a series of circles; different diameters are used for different bases. The circles are dropped into a container, and a line is drawn through their centers, creating an individualized drawing on every card.

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