Design

This interview with Robert Simmon was originally published in Task Newsletter #2.

How does one prove the Earth is round?

In February of 1966, during an acid trip on a rooftop in San Francisco, Stewart Brand began contemplating the curvature of the Earth. The horizon sloped away from him on either side, buildings refused to stand parallel, and the flat-earth fallacy became viscerally apparent. He was determined to broadcast this feeling, and called for a solution (in the form of a button), demanding, “Why haven’t we seen a photo of the whole earth?” This paranoia-tinged aphorism would lead to the creation of the Whole Earth Catalogue, a highly influential counterculture magazine that described the tools necessary to maintain a sustainable existence.

Two and a half years later, Apollo 8 astronaut William A. Anders captured what has been called “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,”  an image of the Earth rising from behind the horizon of the moon.(A) Known as “Earthrise,” this photo was taken in a moment of unscripted curiosity, offering not only a view of ourselves, but a view of ourselves from the alien perspective of another world. What started with a serendipitous snapshot, and possibly an LSD trip before that, has become the driving mission of NASA’s Earth Observatory (E.O.) today.

(A)

Exploring the Earth Observatory’s website may be the closest thing to holding a mirror up to the entire world; in the depths of this massive archive, vividly colored and hyper-sharpened satellite imagery portray melting arctic glaciers bumping up against shots of urban expansion next to hurricane data and deforestation patterns. These high-resolution files are precisely annotated and provided free to the public, intended primarily for educational usage. Some images, though, have become ubiquitous in our visual landscape, appearing in commercials, artworks, book covers, billboards, and even the background of your favorite touch-screen phones.

Robert Simmon is the art director of the Earth Observatory, and works for Science Systems and Applications, Inc. under contract to NASA. He and his team are responsible for creating these images, which are often composites of astronaut photography and satellite sensory data. In this interview, Robert discusses true vs. false color, accurate vs. effective data, and the art of designing an image to match what people expect versus designing an image that will change their minds.

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TASK — We are interested in the mission of the Earth Observatory, how these images get used in unexpected ways in culture at large, the E.O.’s relationship to the legacy of Earth imagery from space, and even a little about the design process of creating these images.

Robert Simmon — There are a few different missions for the Earth Observatory. The first is simply to make people aware that NASA looks at the Earth (we’re not just astronauts and Mars missions). We’ve also tried to create a site that’s an authoritative source for information about climate change and the environment. Our stories are reviewed by experts, we base the information on peer-reviewed research, etc. We intentionally present a broad overview of remote sensing and Earth science, as a counterpoint to the traditional mission and instrument-based focus of NASA public outreach. Many of our images present the possibility for new interpretations relevant to debates in popular culture, and I personally try to make a “soft sell” instead of beating people over the head with a certain perspective. I present them with something of a neutral tone, hoping that our audience will draw its own conclusions.

(B)

Since our imagery is predominantly free, it gets picked up and used all over the place. Some images are especially contagious, such as the image of cities at night.(B) I’ve seen this image on magazine covers, newspapers, annual reports, web sites, and elsewhere. I was even on a radio morning talk show once to settle a dispute over whether or not the image was a photograph (it’s not, of course). The second most popular are some of the global renderings.(C) I’ve seen these on ads in bus stops, concert venues, and the default boot screen for the iPhone. With both images, I was simply trying to make an image that lines up with our expectations of what the Earth would look like from space. My design process is very much trying to get out of the way of the data. Inspired principally by Edward Tufte, I try to create graphics as close to 100% data as possible. So a lot of my time is spent removing elements (grid lines, shadows, gradients, etc.) from the default designs of Excel. I’m also very careful about color, both in natural- or true-color satellite imagery (images composed of the red, green, and blue wavelengths of visible light), and in maps of data. Our eyes and brains think certain things should look a certain way (clouds should be white, water blue, sand yellow, etc.) so I often need to correct imagery manually. With maps, most of the default color choices, including the very common “rainbow palette,” actually distort relationships between data. Unfortunately, many scientists are used to a certain presentation, so it takes a lot of convincing to get them to approve a change. A side benefit is that many of the more accurate palettes are easier on the eyes, so they invite closer inspection, rather than a cursory overview. I’m also convinced that a very clean, consistent, and polished design is more believable than a disordered and cluttered one, so I spend a lot of time revising designs until they’re just right.

(C)

TASK — When you said that you often try to make a “soft sell,” were you referring to issues such as climate change and environmental abuse?

RS — Yes. It’s a reflection of NASA’s role in setting climate change policy: NASA is not recommending a specific government action, but collecting data and performing analyses so policy leaders can make informed decisions. A good example is our climate change site and Q & A. We try to let the data speak for themselves.

TASK — You seem to suggest that the reason the Cities at Night image and the Blue Marble image are so popular is because they are designed to match our expectations of what they should look like. I would suggest that the fact that they are beautiful goes a long way as well, but this idea of dealing with pre-conceived notions ties in closely with ideas of Mundane Science Fiction, such as the “consensus future” — a mediocre version of what we tend to agree the future will look like (think Star Trek). Do you differentiate between these expectation-meeting images and other more abstract images that might show the data more accurately?

RS — I think this is an answer to a broader question than what you asked, but “confirmation bias” obviously effects how we interpret imagery. Recently, a climate change “skeptic” (denialist or contrarian are better labels) made his point by selecting a series of NASA images that confirm his preconceptions, even though they are at odds with quantitative analyses of the same data. You can see the discussions here. When dealing with images of data, there’s often a tension between people’s expectations — snow should be white, warm things are red — and accurate/effective representations of data. This is complicated by the expectations of the scientists that I work with, who often have been analyzing data for a decade or more, and are used to a specific presentation. So I have to weigh preconceptions, representational accuracy, and aesthetics, all of which influence the ability of people to interpret a figure.

TASK — The Cities at Night page reveals that Japanese cities appear to glow a bluer-green than other cities of the world and I can’t help but want to draw cultural conclusions from that fact, beyond the use of mercury versus sodium vapor lights …

RS — The difference in lighting types is likely a technological and historical accident, not a cultural difference. But culture absolutely influences the Earth’s surface. For example, the damage created by deforestation and farming practices in Bolivia creates a beautiful patchwork quilt pattern.(D)

(D)

TASK — How easy is it for the layperson to interpret true photographs versus manipulated images of the Earth?

RS — Photographs are usually the easiest type of imagery to understand. Compare these images. An oblique photograph from the International Space Station (E) versus a nadir (looking straight down) photograph from the Space Shuttle (F) versus this radar image.(G) The more abstract, the more difficult to interpret. (I tried to find a topographic map of Everest, but they all have hill shading and other visual cues, so they’re easier to interpret than a pure contour or color-coded map.)

(E)(F)(G)

TASK — I’m very curious about this caption I noticed on several images: “The image has also been sharpened using the sensor’s panchromatic band.” Could you explain how this sharpening process works, and what the “panchromatic band” is? As a print designer, I’m used to sharpening through Photoshop, based on aesthetic and printing criteria. Your process sounds like there is another level of data-accuracy embedded in the sharpening process.

RS — Signal to noise ratio is a critical limiting factor in satellite imaging: the Earth’s surface is a few hundred miles away from the sensor, and there’s a thick layer of atmosphere mucking things up in between. To increase the signal, instrument designers often include a high-resolution panchromatic band, which uses a range of wavelengths (often blue through near-infrared [slightly longer wavelengths than red], although some of the newer instruments use just visible wavelengths) to gather more photons without having to build a bigger telescope. The discrete bands (red, green, blue, etc.) on a sensor have a narrow spectral range, but collect light (more appropriately electromagnetic radiation) over a wide area. For example, Landsat has a 15 meter per pixel panchromatic band, and 30 meter per pixel individual bands (red, green, blue, near infrared, and two shortwave infrared) plus a 90 meter per pixel thermal infrared band. The visualizer (me) then combines the individual channels into an RGB composite. If I need better resolution to show small features, I need to add in the panchromatic band: hence “panchromatic sharpening.” One way to do this is to do tonal correction and color balancing on an image, and then convert to L*a*b in Photoshop. Then I would load the panchromatic band and adjust the tonal range to the pan-band to match the luminance channel of the RGB composite. Resample the RGB image to match the resolution of the pan-band, and then copy the pan-band into the luminance channel.

Easy, right?

The problem is that the panchromatic image usually contains near-infrared light. Vegetation is very, very dark in visible light (it’s converting sunlight into energy after all) but very, very reflective in the near infrared —as reflective as snow. Most pan-sharpened images have vegetation that looks seriously awry, so it’s back to the curves dialog to make adjustments. This method gets pretty good — but not perfect — results. Some software uses algorithms based on the specific wavelengths of each band to adjust the pan-sharpened image, but it still seems to take a lot of tinkering, so I don’t mess with it that often. (For example, most of the data in Google Earth is pan-sharpened, and none of it looks quite right). I prefer to stick with RGB imagery, and only do the pan sharpening when it’s absolutely necessary.

TASK — You mentioned that it was sometimes difficult to change the minds of scientists. Do you find that scientists have an easier time understanding the principle of “goodness of fit”?

RS — My entire design career has been at NASA, and my “clients” are scientists, writers, or public affairs staff. The scientists tend to be entrenched with a specific representation that they’ve worked with for years. I usually change their minds when an image becomes popular, or I can point to a scientific study that validates a method of presentation.

TASK — Some of the more abstract images, such as the patterns of deforestation or the fractal-like glaciers, are beautiful simply as compositions. Your primary goal with these images is to accurately present the data, but do you ever consider these compositions you create on a purely aesthetic level?

RS — I’m a bit obsessed with the aesthetics as a way to promote understanding. There’s reasonably good evidence that information that we find attractive is also more credible, so I think if I make beautiful imagery, people will understand it better. I also think people are more likely to take the time to study and learn from attractive images. I try to design on two levels: an instant understanding of the main point, plus a deeper level of understanding revealed on closer inspection. Beauty helps move people from a glancing view to longer study.

The images I make are not a form of personal expression, so I don’t consider what I’m doing to be art: it’s more engineering, which is my academic background. I use a set of rules derived from graphic design and visualization research (alignment, color choice, visual hierarchy, map projections, etc.) to determine each presentation. I guess that if I were an artist, my artistic statement might be “data are beautiful,” but that would be trite. When dealing with images such as these, self-expression can seem overrated. ✕

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NOTES TO THE INTRO:

Brand/Fuller

Brand had previously attended a lecture by Buckminster Fuller who cited humanity’s belief in a flat, infinite world as the basis of our ignorant behavior. Fuller even coined a term to correct this error, “world-around” instead of “worldwide,” believing that thoughtless use of obsolete scientific terminology only impedes intuition. The modern Flat Earth Society, founded in 1956, still exists today and has made such claims as: the world is a disc, with the north pole at the center; the U.N. logo represents a flat-earth underground movement that almost elected FDR the president of the world; the moon-landing was a hoax based on an Arthur C. Clarke script. Clarke later wrote to NASA’s chief administrator, “Dear Sir, on checking my records, I see that I have never received payment for this work. Could you please look into this matter with some urgency? Otherwise you will be hearing from my solicitors, Messrs Geldsnatch, Geldsnatch and Blubberclutch.”

Proper Attribution

The earthrise photograph has been attributed to both William A. Anders and Frank Borman over the years, both having claimed credit. The general consensus suggests that Borman shot the first “Earthrise” photo in black and white, while Anders shot the more popular color version several seconds later.

“The Most Influential Environmental Photograph Ever Taken”

Galen Rowell, wilderness photographer and climber. The photo (NASA image AS8-14-2383) has been credited with jumpstarting the environmentalism movement and even prompting the creation of Earth Day. Later, Stewart Brand would say, “The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior — the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of the global economy, and so on. I think all of those phenomena were, in some sense, given permission to occur by the photograph of the earth from space.”

Orientation

Anders shot the original earthrise image in relation to lunar orbit, with the horizon of the moon oriented vertically, and the earth to the left. As the image became popularized, it came to assume a more traditional perspective with the earth rising from a horizontal horizon. See above(A).

***the animated radar data at the top was not created by the E.O.

For all your bits & pieces…

Walker Shop

As far as I can tell, Scott Thomas was here at the Walker as recently as last November when we screened the film Typeface, featuring his group The Post Family (verified, I think, by this interview with local letterpress firm Studio on Fire, who also presented their work at the same screening). Though come to think of it, that screening took place only a couple of days after Barack Obama’s election win, so maybe he was still hard at work in Chicago. Regardless, Scott will be speaking at the Walker on Tuesday night about his role as the Design Director of the historic Barack Obama campaign and its groundbreaking branding effort. Joining him will be Sol Sender, the man who spearheaded the development of the Obama logo, possibly the most hope-drenched and emotion-laden piece of vector art to ever enter the public consciousness. The blog posts (and conspiracy theories) about this identity are e n d l e s s, but there’s nothing like hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth. Moderating the discussion will be Paul Schmelzer, editor of the Minnesota Independent news site and author of the blog Eyeteeth. You’ll also be able to check out a special exhibition of posters from Threadless Loves Democracy, a challenge to design the most unique and conceptual call to vote.

Designing Obama
Tuesday, May 12, 2009   7:00 pm
Walker Cinema

It was announced this week that the Walker is the recipient of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Corporate Achievement for 2009. The award is given to institutions that “use design as a strategic tool of its mission and exhibits ingenuity and insight in helping to advance the relationship between design and quality of life in the United States.” Some previous winners were Apple, Google, Target, Aveda, and Nike.

The award recognizes the history of design at the Walker, which dates back to the 1940s, when “design” was referred to as “everyday art,” a concept used to bridge the gap between people’s daily lives and the heady world of modern art. Since then, the Walker has hosted numerous exhibitions displaying the best of product design, graphic design, interior design, and architecture; published the influential magazine Design Quarterly; commissioned world famous designers to create everything from our building expansion to our custom typeface; maintained an in-house design studio and fellowship program; and integrated design into the fabric of the institution.

Now here’s Andrew to tell you all about it:

Speaking of Andrew, Mr. Blauvelt is featured prominently in Gary Hustwit’s new movie Objectified, which played to sold out crowds last night here at the Walker (it was great—definitely a sister film to Helvetica). If Hustwit plans on making a third movie about design, I’m hoping that he chooses to expand upon Andrew’s story about the Bionic Hamster.

In conjunction with the exhibition Text/Messages, the Walker and mnartists.org hosted Multiples Mall, an artist book fair for the Twin Cities (hopefully to become an annual event). We thought it was a good occasion to actually collaborate with each other and so after batting around a number of ideas, we settled on something resembling a labor of love: four pamphlets dedicated to four people who for some reason or another had failed to be heard, or had been overshadowed, or had been unsuccessful in their ambitions, but had nonetheless given us inspiration. Michael Chang: the youngest male tennis player to ever win a Grand Slam championship, never to win again. Michael Collins: the third, relatively unknown astronaut of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission. Anaïs Nin: an obscure literary figure for most of her life, only later receiving widespread attention. And Levi Eshkol, the progressive prime minister of Israel who delivered a passionate but disastrously stuttered radio address and then died shortly thereafter. The four pamphlets were bound together (see rotating covers above) and were also distributed individually to coffee shops (see below).

Our title was derived from the following passage from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which describes a difference between labor and work, in the context of one’s gifts and passing them on. It is printed on the back of the bound copies:

For more about The Gift from a designer’s perspective, see Rob Giampietro’s excellent article for Dot Dot Dot, and his reflections for the most recent issue of Idea magazine.

front covers of individual pamphlets

back covers of individual pamphlets

selected spreads

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And here are some photos from the fair:

Multiples Mall

Members of Hardland Heartland at their booth

Sam Hoolihan showing off his books

Erik Brandt of Geotypografika

Mylinh’s flickr performance:

Here is a small sampling of brochures from the Regis Dialogues and Film Retrospectives, curated by the Film/Video department at the Walker since 1990. The brochures had a variety of formats before 1995, when P. Scott Makela and Santiago Piedrafita created the current template.  We have several of these loose templates for recurring projects (like this) — specifying a size, a few folding variations, or sometimes a certain type of ink — and it’s nice to see how a format can play out over 14 years and through numerous designers. Who needs a graphic identity when you have METALLIC INKS?

Haile Gerima: Assertions of Resistance (1995, P. Scott Makela & Santiago Piedrafita); Stan Brakhage: The Art of Seeing (1999, Daniel Eatock); The Great Ecstasy of the Filmmaker Herzog (1999, Erin Mulcahy); John Waters: Shock Value (2000, Sean Deyoe); Léos Carax: L’amour Fou (Crazy Love) (2000, Santiago Piedrafita); Agnès Varda (2001, Jodie Gatlin); Tales of the City: Hanif Kureishi’s Rough Guide to London (2001, Linda Byrne); Gus Van Sant: On the Road Again (2003, Alex DeArmond); Guy Maddin: Pages from a Filmmakers Diary (2004, Chad Kloepfer); Alexander Payne: Sideways Glance at America (2005, Matthew Rezac); Ang Lee with James Schamus: East Meets Western (2005, Chad Kloepfer); Isabella Rossellini: Illuminated (2006, Emmet Byrne); Béla Tarr: Mysterious Harmonies (2007, Emmet Byrne); Miloš Forman: Cinema of Resistance (2008, Chad Kloepfer)

For the complete list of Regis Dialogues, which is incredible, see here.

And here are two more early retrospectives, before the current format was created:

The Films of John Cassavetes (1989, Glen Suokko); Wim Wenders: In the Course of Time (1991, Mark Nelson)

Photo: CITYDESKSTUDIO

Local architects CITYDESKSTUDIO placed an interesting ad up on Craigslist yesterday: they’re selling a (used) 1978 skyway. (Wait hold up…has anyone tried to sell a bridge on Craigslist yet?). The skyway, which used to connect the JC Penny’s with the Power department stores over S. 5th street, was retired to make way for Minneapolis’ light rail project. Through the years millions of people have passed through it and the rest of our network in the sky, which covers an area of 69 city blocks. If you’re interested, check out Catherine Opie’s photographs and documentation of our relationships with these transient spaces in her Skyways & Ice Houses project from 2002. And I assume this was unrealized, but CITYDESKSTUDIO visualized one potential use for this iconic structure–which has seen such frenzied activity–as an almost rustic (rusty?) lake retreat.

We’re going to be posting selections from the Walker design archives in the coming months, starting here with one of my favorites: the exhibition catalogue for Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972. This book is from way back in 2001 and was designed by Linda Byrne. Below is a description of the project, followed by images of the book and related marketing materials.

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This catalogue documents an exhibition that examines the work of 14 Italian artists who explored a wide range of common materials to create extraordinary works. The term “arte povera,” literally “poor art,” has led to the use of cardboard and other “cheap” materials for other books on the subject. The challenge was to avoid this pattern, which we did by looking to the spirit of Italian design in the 1960s and its inventive use of materials. Drawing inspiration from the ten-year period bracketed by the exhibition, the book deploys a range of graphic devices without mimicking specific historical styles. The tactile nature of the artists works is referenced, for example, in the range of papers used throughout the book; each delineating a different section (essays, timeline, artworks, backmatter). The materiality of the book was enhanced by using several different papers to define particular sections and by flush trimming the book and not using a dust jacket. Large horizontal images were turned on edge to save space, which in turn enhanced the physicality of the book by shifting its orientation. Devices such as a shifting red bar that overprints the text and moves through the essays and timeline and the oversized endnotes numbers are details that enhance the graphic image of the book.

It seems too good to be true, but SF author Samuel R. Delany is speaking at the Walker on November 15th, in conjunction with the exhibition Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis. Of his mind-bending masterpiece Dhalgren, critic Kate McKinney Maddalena writes  “… [it] ranks Delany with Samuel Beckett; I would teach it as a Nouveau Roman alongside the work of Duras and Borges.” If you’re new to Delany, I might start with Babel-17, in which he manages to extend the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to it’s unnatural and delirious conclusion.

It seemed as good a time as any to post some of my favorite science fiction book covers. Many designers unconsciously scan bookstore shelves for the work of Fred Troller, or Penguin paperbacks in general (omg Penguin Books has an online dating service?), or maybe now it’s Jon Gray, but for me it’s this series of Bantam science fiction covers from the ’70s and ’80s. I’ve found maybe 10 of these guys and a whole slew of rip-offs from other publishers. (Don’t ask me why I assume this series is the original and not itself a ripoff—I just know it. In my heart. They’re better.) The combination of the retro-futuristic illustrations, the bastardized Futura Black, and the sobriety of the layout is a beautiful example of restraint in a genre that relies on the fantastic. ***One detail you can’t see here is that the titles are all printed in metallic ink. ***I also threw in the cover for A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller, Jr., which is another amazing post-apocalyptic novel.

They weren’t sure, but Bantam publishing thinks that Leonard Leone was most likely the art director for these books. I managed to talk to him on the phone a few months ago, but that’s a story for another day . . . (he seemed more interested in talking about some books he designed in the basement of the White House than these science fiction paperbacks, go figure).

And if you want to see a more recent interpretation of Delany’s science fiction novels, look here. Otherwise, make sure to check out the lecture!