“Visualizing Alzheimer’s Disease Research: A Classroom Collaboration of Design and Science” by Zender and Crutcher

“There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing.” -Benjamin Fry, http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/

As the quote suggests, there is a need for new techniques to visualize both emerging and accumulated data in complex fields such as the biological sciences. This paper reports on the early exploration of visualization techniques through the interdisciplinary development of a research data visualization tool at the University of Cincinnati. Undergraduate Digital Design students under the combined instruction of design and biomedical faculty formed collaborative teams to develop a prototype visual-verbal, web-based, dynamic information model (DISPLAY) for extracting, comparing and manipulating research findings related to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Although the initial prototype focused on AD, the goal was to identify principles and techniques applicable to all types of biological data.