Less couch — more culture.
If our mission was getting folks out of their homes and into the rich cultural offerings of their city, Trill’s vision was to become an essential source of high quality, actionable data for the performing arts. We saw an opportunity to make good on both when Trill was invited to showcase at the annual TEDx Cambridge conference.
Design process
In under a year Trill had amassed one of the most comprehensive show databases in the city, and with that came some great data. I sought a visualization form that could show off the breadth and depth of that data as well as inviting people to connect with shows they’d seen in the past.
I started with a sketch in Processing that mapped live show venues in Boston. Ultimately I broke with true geographic representation and arrived at a form that would loosely reference geography while remaining spaced out enough to allow people to get close and read. The printed result filled a six foot banner in the TEDx conference showcase.
At the show itself we offered guests a sheet of three translucent stickers and invited them to place a sticker on their three favorite venues.
What emerged was a heat map of the preferences of the TEDx audience, which in itself was a great success. Even better were the conversations overheard up at the front of the crowd itself: strangers sharing live show experiences, native Cantabrigians sharing their favorite spots with newcomers, and newcomers spending time reading each piece of the visualization to get ideas for new places to try.
Who said a booth had to the boring?