The Invisible Infrastructure

The size of the U.S. economy in data

Created for The Atlantic in partnership with Seagate, The Invisible Infrastructure visualises the size of the U.S. economy in data across fourteen different industry sectors.

Each sector is represented by a spinning cube, it's size governed by the amount of data for that year. Each industry sector can be selected of deselected, changing the data total at the bottom, whilst changing the year changes the order of each industry. It's interesting to see how health care gradually rises in data use over the years. Selecting a cube allows you to read more about that industry.

Created in Javascript using a combination of three.js, d3.js and p5.js, when this went live it was the first thing I'd made on the web for many years. I used to do a lot of this kind of work, but with the demise of Flash it seemed much harder for me to create the sort of experiences I wanted to make in the browser. Now though things are a lot different and using the three Javascript frameworks I previously mentioned it's possible to create these things again and more or less have a consistent experience across different browsers.

Special thanks to Emersson Barillas and Jennifer Sun at The Atlantic for working with me on this project.