My project is an innovative multimedia system for Icelandic weather information. It encourages viewers to establish a more personal connection with information that connects to their cultural, emotional, and aesthetic values, to accelerate a more interactive and collective understanding of weather conditions in Iceland. This approach not only reports weather trends but also explores a more natural relationship between information and perception.

In this information era, conventional design method seems to be a limited tool to describe the dynamically changing world. This project explores our relationship with information and how it is transformed from the physical to the digital environment, paralleled with the development of graphic design method. It aims to arrive at an explicit understanding about both subjects: information and design. It proposes a new way of thinking about how visual language can help us understand the information environment better. To do this, I invoke James Gibson’s Direct Perception Theory and its bottom up approach in order to picture solutions for graphic design to meet human information needs in the digital environment. My project examines humans in their information environments and how designers can use computational methods in visual communication to interpret a fundamental source of information, the database.

For the visual representation I am focusing on an ecological approach rather than semiotics of design. It is based on an understanding of how we perceive information directly from physical environments. It explores how to interpret this knowledge to better adapt digital visual interplay to our ecosystem so that it harmonises with our daily lives and thereby generates a more spontaneous understanding from the users in the digital environment.

For the design field this project offers an opportunity to jump out of conventional methods and think not only in utilitarian ways of understanding information, but also to venture solutions with this dynamic data in a variety of contexts and in interrelationship with a multiplicity of human and technical systems for enhanced social use and meaning. Ultimately, harmonising technology with natural human perception leads to greater well-being. It also provides a potential value to develop into an educational tool, for the younger generation to establish a more comprehensive understanding of weather.