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About the Team

Adobe’s partnership with the Encyclopedia of Life project began with TED ’07. The vision E.O. Wilson presented at TED of “an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth” was very compelling. At a follow up “Tedsters” dinner in Chicago, Simon Smith suggested that we at Adobe might be able to contribute something meaningful to this world changing effort.

A few short weeks later Adobe’s experience design team (XD) had gotten involved, with Marcos Weskamp leading the way as lead experience designer, and Gever Tulley on board as lead technology architect.

Below are a few screenshots of what they’ve been able to create over the few weeks since that fateful dinner in Chicago.

As you can see from the work above, Marcos’ has a unique ability to let data lead him towards the right visualization. He eventually settled on using a variation of the “treemap” algorithm that Ben Shneiderman and his team from the University of Maryland had developed. Gever Tulley wrestled 1.8 million nodes of data into a form that could be easily digested and matched with relevant pictures. Together, Marcos and Gever were able to craft an extremely compelling experience out of this sea of information. Great design and technical ingenuity overcame what many would have considered an insurmountable problem: too much data, and too little screen real estate.

A live prototype version of this visualization will be demonstrated at TED 2008 in Monterey, CA. A public beta version of the visualization will be made available on the Encyclopedia of Life’s website at a later date.

And we’re just getting started…consider a visualization that allows you to instantly see where an organism fits in the food chain. With a click, students around the world could see how changes to their local ecosystem could have ramifications that stretch around the globe.

Or imagine the addition of a time slider that would allow visitors to move into the past and see how biodiversity has changed over time based on the latest scientific data. The Cambrian explosion would be something you feel, not just read about. Boxes would gray out as major extinctions of the planet pass by. And perhaps more ominously, additional boxes would gray out as visitors move the slider into the future and the projected effects of global warming reverberate within the earth’s ecosystem. We’re giving a voice to the data.

And perhaps this is why we’re so passionate about this project. It’s the marriage of world-class people, amazing data, Adobe technology, and artisan design that will allow the world to experience the biodiversity of the planet through the humble means of a computer screen. No one will walk away unchanged. Through this amazing visualization we’ll open people’s eyes to the world around them, inspiring a new generation of scientists and backyard explorers. Every species of the planet will have been given a voice, and they will not be ignored.

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