Garden of Health

Adventist Health is a California based medical provider focused on preventive medicine as a core part of it’s practice.  Schema Design was commissioned to create a data visualization for their Roseville HQ lobby utilizing near real-time patient interactions with the health network across physical sites.

This project was my first collaboration with the Schema Design studio, who brought me in midway through the project to provide both creative and technical support.  By the time that I arrived into the project the concept of a garden of flowers filled with butterflies had been approved by the client.  The flowers represented patients currently receiving care within the health network and butterflies represented healthcare providers working with these patients.

Creative director Sergei Larionov and technical director Jeff MacInnes had made significant headway with the concept, data wrangling, and an overall development framework based on three.js.   The data wrangling, which was complete by the time I joined the project, was particularly complex as the personally sensitive patient data had to be anonymized and offset before it could be shared via a secure API.

My contribution to the piece began with the client not being completely satisfied with the initial design direction.  After becoming familiar with their feedback I recommended we take classical still life painting as a visual reference, particularly baroque era paintings of flower arrangements.  This visual direction was brought to the client and was approved.

To achieve this look we created a flower designing web app just for this project that allowed adjustments of parameters to create unique, fantastical, breeds of flowers.  These flowers used GLSL shaders to both modify their coloring and shape.  These custom shaders were built from scratch to elicit the aesthetics of still life paintings, including a custom lighting shader to give them a dramatic chiaroscuro effect.  Additional animation effects, like wind and changes in time of day, were also generated using shaders.