The challenge
Data increasingly determine our daily lives. Omnipresent in the media, workplace, and public sphere, they increasingly reflect global and socially relevant events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and social changes. The more data available, the more complicated it becomes to understand and draw conclusions from them. The fundamental problem here is humans’ limited ability to interpret large amounts of data or information. Visualizations and interactive systems can be effective methods for enhancing this ability.

Approach
Over the past 15 years, I have systematically explored how information visualization and algorithms can be used to bridge complex societal problems, decision-makers, and society as a whole. For the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I developed the style guides for the world climate reports and associated guidelines for visualizing climate data, complex concepts, and data types. The particular challenges of this task lay in the multitude of figures and technical data, as well as the political constraints that arise in an international body like the IPCC. The visualization concepts had to not only meticulously meet all technical requirements but also be politically neutral, intuitively unbiased, and leave little room for interpretation.

For the IPCC, I led two reports and developed more than 1000 visualizations that were published by Cambridge Press, Spiegel Online, Nature Climate Change, Environmental Science and Policy, and other relevant contexts.