This page is build to show what I did during my two year research at the Transmedia program for Media, Art and Design at Sint-Lukas Brussels.
My research during my postgraduate studies was in the field of graphic design and more precisely, information visualization.

2nd year at Transmedia

Graphic Design is about representing information or concepts visually, through a graphical language. The vector graphical language is very extensive but can be narrowed by looking at its basic rudiments, for instance colour, shape, size.
The “line” is one of the essential graphical elements from which a designer starts building his creations.

Phase 1 – graphical language – the line

A line includes an enormous amount of possible visual representations. It can have different dimensions, size, thickness, static or dynamic, straight or curved, open or closed, it can represent a zone, a flow, a connection, a direction, a distance….

For my Transmedia project I researched on all these possible representations of a line through the thematic of borders.
Borders on a geographical map already have an existing visual form, a line (sometimes) or a zone, with a certain colour, thickness or so. But a lot more invisible layers of these borders can be represented and can transform the shape of the line.
So overall I thought of how border features modify the form of the graphical line.

Some border features which I visualized are growth, movement, elasticity, permeability, threshold, the multidirectional way of the border, its layers, the border as the third element, etc.

All these features can be found in natural, biological, human-made and digital borders. For each of them I chose some specific cases which worked as the foundation for my experiments.
Borders in all these cases have a similar functioning, there’s passage or blockage, contact or confrontation, they are fixed or shifting. And because there functioning is quite the same I could use metaphorical imagery, for instance the biological cell membrane is used as inspiration for some of my visuals for political borders.

I write about the border as an interface, because they both function in between two elements/ systems and let them communicate with each other. And what I did is, I translated information (or these border features) into a graphical representation, so that it becomes visible or understandable for the viewer.
An interface has a different shape, size, maybe colour when looked from a different perspective and I applied this same principle on borders.
Tara lemmey wrote an interesting article in Wired Magazine ‘Obstacles, or on the edge?’ The article analyses the sense of borders from different viewpoints. She analyses the more dynamic sense of borders. To be on the verge, brink or threshold and the innovations that occur through different types of borders as geological, biological, intellectual and cultural. link

Phase 2 – border visualizations

My focus was on three types of borders: Human-made, natural and digital borders.

I started with a re-interpretation of static geographical borderlines, in this case the borderline between Mexico and the US.
By simply rotating, scaling and re-ordering the line, a new shape appears.  But also the form of the line will change at a certain point to a straight line again, where all the specific properties become invisible.

Another way of re-interpreting the borderline is by visualizing the threshold between two systems (or countries). The border as the space in between, the border as the third element.

For instance this reshaping could lead to a fast visual interpretation of the intensity of a border on different grounds.
In these visuals I used existing data from IMF and CIA World Factbook, to show the visual possibilities. I applied 10 possible criteria which define the difference between the two countries. But they only function as example input for the visual. By re-ordering the data a different visual output can be discovered.

The principle is very simple, the thinner the line, the thinner the border between the two, the thicker the line, the bigger the threshold between them.
Some of the shapes that you see here follow the direction of the geographical borderline.

After these experiments I thought of how I could represent this in a circular shape.
This is inspired by biological cells and their membranes. It makes the visual more compact and I felt that the difference between borders was easier to view in the circular shape.
The same data is represented. Does the data change then the size of the bubbles would also change.

Imposing different layers on top of each other so visual comparisons between diverse borders could be made. Here you see a comparison between US-Mexico, Belgium-The Netherlands and Serbia-Kosovo. Three totally different borders and this visualization can show directly the differences between them.

After I made these visuals I experimented by bringing together all the different outcomes in an abstract landscape, through posters.

Another more dynamic sense of a border is permeability and the border shift that is linked/ connected to this. The flow of information/ goods/ people/ material/ fluids goes back and forth between entities on either side. The border protects, blocks, or opens for this flow. This dynamic works in multi directional ways.
An example of this is the flow of migration from Mexico to the US and the flow of money going back to Mexico as a result of this migration.

This is also applicable on other types of borders as natural, biological or internet borders.

An example of an internet border is the Golden Shield, which is the great firewall of china. It’s use is to purify the internet and block content. The shield checks all requested URL’s against a blacklist of thousands of internet addresses. Certain site entries are blocked, so there’s no access to them. For instance political information on BBC news site (riot in Tibet).

Phase 3 – zoom as a method to determine/ visualize the border on different levels

As you could see in my designs, I already used zooming as a method for visualizing detailed border features and dynamics which are invisible for the human eye.
From macro to micro, borders are surrounded by other borders. (from the universe, to the earth, to human cells).
When we use a zoom on graphics new shapes and forms appear, while others disappear.
Zooming into a line, becomes a zone, becomes pixels, these pixels could again be contoured with a line, and so on. By zooming and scaling we can thus come to a similar image as the starting point.

These images show a small zoom storyboard, starting from a geographical borderline (US-Mexico) and it reveals different graphical layers. Zooming into a thin line, can become a shape consisting out of graphical elements as squares (or pixels) or dots.
Further zoom into this borderline represents illegal migration through colour changes, with a night vision image as part of these pixels.

I did the same exercise but changed the pixels with dots. This because the a line is build out of points thus points give shape to the line. These dots on their turn reveal the permeability of a border based on migration.

The idea is to keep zooming and scaling into the graphical interpretations of the border to come eventually back to the line again.

This research process is further visualized in a flash presentation, posters, screen loops and in motion film. Bellow a selection of the posters.

1st year at Transmedia