The International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge Award Winners!

I’d like to say that I’ve been a long-time follower of this award, but I’d be lying. The ISEVC (much easier than typing it out each time) is sponsored jointly by the journal Science, a nonprofit international science society, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and is intended to “captivate and engage the viewer by revealing the hidden meaning and intricate details of our world in visual form.” The winners have just been announced! The competition is in its seventh year and is equally focused on science as it is on the visual arts. The criteria for judging the entries include “visual impact, effective communication, freshness and originality.”

The winner (pictured here on the February cover) was for Branching Morphogenesis, “an installation made from more than 75,000 interconnected cable zip ties, [and] illustrates the predicted forces generated by human lung endothelial cells as they form networks within an extracellular matrix over time.” As a example of the challenge, NPR explained “let’s say you want to know how human lung cells interact with their surroundings. You could take a picture of what you see through the microscope…what if you took 75,000 cable zip ties and used them to create an 11.5-foot-tall sculpture that represents those interactions in three dimensions?” That was exactly what Branching Morphogenesis did.