For Dan Boyarski’s studio class, we had to design a data visualization telling the class something about ourselves however we chose.I chose to tell my life story thus far by using architecture – a tower with rooms on each floor – as visual metaphor.

Process

I divided the building into four rooms each denoted by a distinct color scheme representing a certain aspect of my life (family, social relationships, studies, work, mind), and each floor representing a certain point in time, starting from my birth at the ground floor to my flight to America at the top. The structure would deform and rooms would grow and shrink according to what dominated my life at the time. After sketching out some concepts, I modelled and textured the tower in Google Sketchup.

Final Piece

I then broke apart deformations of the model into separate floors, and exported them into Adobe Photoshop, where I illustrated the various rooms using a Wacom tablet. Interspersing the hand drawn visuals with snippets of sufi poetry and descriptions of what was going on in my life at the time, the poster gave an idea of where I had come from and what I valued.