Visualizing Garbage

At VizThink '09, Ole Qvist-Sorensen challenged the audience during his general session presentation, "Survival Academy: Imagining a Better World with Visual Language, Thinking and Practice," how we as visual thinkers could contribute to saving the world by putting our talents to work on global problems. That struck a chord with me, so one of my take-away goals from VizThink has been to get involved with at least one global issue that concerns me and apply visual thinking to address or raise awareness of the issue. Ole referenced Sylvia Earle's recent TED wish which struck yet another chord and so I've decided to apply some visual thinking to the issue of raising awareness of the plight of our oceans. My original thought was to develop an online visual explanation either as a presentation and/or video. But I thought it also might be interesting to start up a blog wherein I can capture some of content ideas for the explanation as well as publish snippets from the explanation as I develop them. So, I've started yet another blog. One of the compelling issue I think needs highlighting in the visual explanation is what's known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. There's a lot of visuals and infographics available on the web to depict this, but I thought it would be fun to develop my own infographic. The first draft is below.