Now that we have entered yet another wave of the pandemic, we continue to require creative design solutions to adapt how we live and work. In this series, DIAC collects some of the recent design success stories to share with you.
Datascapes Depict Safe Social Distancing on Campus
Nadia Amoroso turns critical data into art. She is a landscape architect in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development at the University of Guelph. Throughout her career she has been interested in exploring new and compelling ways of presenting critical data to engage the public with important information they need to know.
Professor Amoroso uses a process called datascaping to represent data in visualization maps or digital landscapes. She often transforms these digital maps into 3D sculptures which become works of art in their own right.
When the campus at the University of Guelph closed during the pandemic, like so many other campuses across Canada, Professor Amoroso set out to map the density of pedestrian traffic before and during COVID-19. These maps highlighted spaces that could allow for safe social distancing once the campus reopened. On the project, she worked with two master of landscape architecture students, Christine Pedersen and Sihao Chen.
To capture the pre-COVID pedestrian traffic on campus and highlight the high density areas, she used aerial views and time-lapsed videos. The maps show where 2-metre distancing was possible within the open space and marked these spaces with special “social-distancing visuals”. Cities including New York, San Francisco and Toronto. have used datascapes to indicate gathering spaces and the team was inspired by this work.
With the datascapes, the team took the project one step further by making models using a 3-D printer to tell the story to a wider audience. The models were displayed in the Landscape Architecture Building on campus. Professor Amoroso is looking for other venues to share the sculptures with the public in and around Guelph.
