Affective Palettes for Scientific Visualization: Grounding Environmental Data in the Natural World

As computing capacity increases and data grows in both size and complexity, we are capable of understanding our surroundings with increasing nuance. Visualizing this often-multivariate environmental data presents complex visual scenes to be navigated, parsed, analyzed, and communicated. We draw from both the natural world and artistic color theory to present 1) a new color system, designed to establish an affective connection between big environmental data and its original source material, 2) a tool for extracting these workable palettes from natural imagery, and 3) a selection of pre-made linear colormaps and discrete color sets drawn from natural environments.