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Pascale Osterwalder

Awarded

Pascale Osterwalder

'Wolfsspur - Visualisierung eines Unsichtbaren' (diploma work)

Graphic Design

Jury report

Tracing the invisible
The work 'Wolf­sspur' of vi­sual de­signer Pas­cale Os­ter­walder is based on some­thing mostly in­vis­i­ble: the wolf. The species, erad­i­cated in Switzer­land since 1881, has only re­cently re­turned and stirs emo­tions par­tic­u­larly when they tear sheep to pieces at night. For three years now, a wolf that im­mi­grated from Italy has been ob­served in the Sur­selva in the Graubünden, as one of only three doc­u­mented and now pro­tected wolves on Swiss soil. Yet the wolf is hardly ever di­rectly vis­i­ble. Only the dam­age it causes is. Pas­cale Os­ter­walder col­lab­o­rated with a game war­den, who took over the role of a me­di­a­tor be­tween the wolf and the de­signer. The mon­i­tor­ing of the game war­den is meant to pro­duce data to en­able a co­ex­is­tence of wolf and farm an­i­mal. The re­mark­able achieve­ment of 'Wolf­sspur' is a cus­tomised pro­gramme for the vi­su­al­i­sa­tion of data. The idea is to archive and bun­dle the data, put it into graphs and net­work it, and then pub­lish it via the in­ter­net. Ex­cept on a few im­ages taken by a self-trig­gered cam­era the wolf also re­mains in­vis­i­ble on the in­for­ma­tion plat­form. But there is plenty of in­for­ma­tion about him: a map, for ex­am­ple, vi­su­alises the mi­grant move­ment of the an­i­mal. The work de­vel­oped as a diploma the­sis at the Hochschule für Gestal­tung und Kunst Zürich. The de­signer and web de­signer aimed to arrange the huge amount of data in a man­age­able way that it can be overviewed. The in­ter­face is de­signed in a very re­duced and user friendly way. The longer the surfer clicks his way through the web­site, the more in­ter­est­ing the pro­ject be­comes. It turns out to be an in­tel­li­gent tool, able to be de­vel­oped and up­dated. The work is con­vinc­ing be­cause it deals with an issue at­trac­tively, shows high in­for­ma­tion den­sity and has an equally high in­for­ma­tion value for both in­ter­ested lay­men and re­searchers, yes even for the par­tic­i­pat­ing game war­den.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Pascale Osterwalder
Born in
1979
Education
Designerin FH in Visueller Kommunikation

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