by Edit Staff
July 24, 2006
SourceComplexity is everywhere. It's a structural and organizational principle that reaches almost every field imaginable, from genetics and social networks to food webs and stock markets. Contemporary scientific and technological accomplishments—including mapping the human genome, decoding neural networks and opening up the ocean to exploration—have seen our ability to generate and acquire information outpace our ability to make sense of it. With a surfeit of facts and few ways to synthesize them, "meaningful information" quickly becomes an oxymoron.
As our cultural artifacts are increasingly measured in gigabytes and terabytes, organizing, sorting and displaying information in an efficient way is crucial to advancing knowledge. From the incredibly vast (the history of science) to the very small (protein complexes), science's visual dialect renders it both more dynamic and more innovative.
Collected here are a few of the many intriguing, and often beautiful, images that illustrate how the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
—Manuel Lima is an interaction designer at R/GA Interactive and teaches information design at the Parsons School of Design. He has worked for the Museum of the Moving Image and with the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.