Red Planea: an art+education project explorer by Sergio Galán

**The context:**

Imagine for a moment that you are still a teenager and an artist came to your school to build a project with you and your classmates. That is what “Planea” is enabling. Planea is a network of schools – covering different educational stages – agents and cultural institutions devoted to introducing artistic practices, permanently and across disciplines, in public school curriculums.

And what they wanted from us? We were asked to imagine some kind of *tangible* and *explorable* representation of the actors and activities developed over five years of the "Planea" project. They were not really seeking for some insight that may eventually emerge from the dataset; the visualization we were asked to imagine was intended as an overall abstraction, able to display the community that gathered around the project through the network of their interactions.

**the result**

[Our client](http://zemos98.org/) – Zemos98 – was brave enough to support us in the quest for some unconventional solution since the first meeting, when we showed them an unpolished prototype of a *dynamic landscape* where educational centers were represented by a small house pictogram, and their proximity changed according to several descriptors.

The final result is much closer to an “ad hoc” illustration rather than an abstract and more generic network diagram.

There were basically three types of entities to display: the *agents* involved in the artistic practices, the *projects* offered to the educational centers, and the implicit network of *schools* that participate in one, or several, projects.

The dynamic landscape groups together the educational centers as in an aggregated stacked horizontal bar diagram, where pictograms are distributed using a gaussian function. The same aggregated value is shown redundantly as the height of the hills.

Users can select the projects carried out within the “Planea network” in the upper part of the applications. As a result, the sky is populated by stripes and dots, one stripe for every project matching the selection criteria and one small white dot "on top" of every school that participated in it. The distribution of white dots in the sky shows different densities according to the criteria used to horizontally order the educational centers.

The dataset is a JSON dump of the WordPress database that the Planea Network is using on its main website (https://redplanea.org/)