Inspired by curiosity
A conference whose theme includes “inspired by curiosity” naturally lends itself to asking questions. So here’s one: How might we represent virtual SAS Global Forum with all its energy, buzz and opportunity in an art piece?
For an analytics company, the natural answer was to start with data. And virtual SAS Global Forum is a treasure trove of data. It draws thousands of people from all over the globe with a variety of backgrounds, skills and interests, and gathers them all in one “place” for a week of connecting, learning, growing and feeding their curiosity.
This energy is captured in the data. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to represent it.
SAS Data Artist Jessica Peter did so by creating an art piece inspired by the participants of SAS Global Forum themselves.
“I needed a way into the data that was meaningful to me,” Peter says. “Being with people is meaningful to me. This has never been so intensely felt as it has this past year because of COVID."
Inspiration becomes art
While content type provides the glyphs’ structure, focus area informs their color: Sky blue for AI, magenta for health and life sciences, purple for manufacturing, and so on.
In this way, each participant creates their own unique signature of their time at SAS Global Forum 2021 while also getting a sense of conference activity as a whole.
Peter named the piece “Gratitude,” as a reminder of the gratitude she feels for times when we could all be together safely – something that perhaps we took for granted when we had it.
“Gratitude” is a collection of the participant signatures selected by engagement, ringed by an ellipse representing the SAS Global Forum site traffic as a sound wave.
Collaboration
SAS has an incredibly giving workforce. If you ask someone for help with a project you will get it. In this case, the person who helped Peter bring her piece to life was Jennifer Sabourin, Senior Software Developer and Data Scientist.
With Peter providing the artistic direction and Sabourin providing the creative coding and data wrangling, the two collaborated in an iterative process to arrive at the final composition.
Sabourin created an easy-to-use tool that extrapolated the key technical components of the design. This enabled Peter to easily modify attributes and directly alter the appearance of the art and allowed the two to iterate quickly and effectively without communication errors.
While the project is a standalone application, Sabourin incorporated base SAS code to handle the data wrangling necessary to build the final art piece.
The result? A tangible representation of the conference’s energy, buzz and life as one might have felt experienced it as an in-person event. This creative use of data gives attendees a truly unique way to understand their virtual experience.
Final SAS® Global Forum Data Art Compositions
What is data art?
At a technology company like SAS, “analytics,” “data visualization” and “artificial intelligence” are common, everyday terms. But it can be easy to forget that they don’t always resonate with a general audience.
So how do we help nontechnical people connect to SAS and the stories behind data? Doing it through art is the ultimate form of democratizing analytics: a personalized aesthetic dialog.
“Art is approachable, and it evokes curiosity and emotion,” Peter says. “When you inform the art with data, it lets people approach hard topics in delightful and non-threatening ways. Anybody can appreciate it. You don’t have to know data science or statistics to benefit from what’s going on.”