Data art

Christopher Gardner

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Two 15-foot-high screens showing rotating animated graphs of global economic data—on health care, Internet penetration, financial markets, and much else—greet you as you enter Evans Hall, the new home of the Yale School of Management. (Between the screens is a mural by Sol LeWitt.) Created for the international conference that marked the building’s grand opening in January, the graphs are likely to become a permanent feature; their global and data-rich nature “reflects the work of the school,” says Nathan Williams, SOM’s director of marketing and public relations. The business schools in SOM’s Global Network for Advanced Management provided the data; Williams’s team “teased out the stories”; and a graphic design firm, Unified Field Inc., turned them all into visuals. This May the screens won the environmental graphic design category at the New York Design Awards.