our perception of the dead

13/04/2020

There is something that has been on my mind this week and that’s how we perceive the dead. I know it makes me look like quite the pessimist but I’m not just talking about COVID–19 (hopefully anyway). You see in a time like this where a pandemic runs rampant even on our doorstep we can’t help but display the thousands of infected people as numbers. As of now there are 9,655 total cases in Ireland but I haven’t a notion of the lives of them. Most will recover but some will die. We are no different to the species that live around us and lived before us when it comes to viral/bacterial diseases. This sets my second topic of our perception of the dead and the design of the extinct world that lived before us and many generations before us.

Numbers don’t lie. When used correctly numbers in the right context and grouped together tell the true story. Using graphs we can show what the Coronavirus of 2019/2020 is up to. Using a variety of different scales we can begin to tell the story of Ireland’s war with the virus. Take the 1,515 cases added quite recently. I remember looking at this figure in shock and fear, have we really spiked this much? But no, these were tests only returning after weeks. I’ve been designing my own graphs as of recently because the online graphs include the massive jumps which to me don’t tell us much at all about the daily change by percentage. Putting new cases (3 day average) against the days using a logarithmic scale as the y-axis it is possible to see the peak and then the decline of cases. Without the design of the log scale then this curve could not be seen for much longer, which when in a situation like this there is no time to waste.

In the intro I eluded to the design of extinct creatures or I suppose how we imagine them based on the evidence and scientific knowledge that we have to date. I’m not lying when I say I loved the Jurassic Park films with an incredible passion. I really enjoyed the interaction of man and dinosaurs, showcasing them as the animals they once were and not these mythical creatures which are out of the realm of possibility. But this all changed once I got a basic understanding of palaeontology. The crown jewel of the dinosaur world, the Tyrannosaurus Rex was poorly represented such as the arms. If the claws pointed perpendicularly to the ground like in the film I’m sorry to say but the poor fella would have broken wrists. Also the velociraptors aren’t velociraptors…in the slightest…

But this isn’t a rant about a questionable franchise but the celebration of how designing a dinosaur has reduced in scepticism and increased in scientific evidence. Many great paleo artists such as John Conway, Mark Witton and Emily Willoughby apply their palaeontological expertise to their skill of art and design a rendition of a creature that once lived up to a couple of hundred millions ago. While some focus on the creatures alone, their feathers, (yes some had feathers; birds aren’t called avian dinosaurs for no reason) colouring, muscles etc, others design the context of these animals; how they moved, how they interacted with their own species and others around and of course the display of the environment it had once lived in. It is with this that makes it an absolute certainty that we are living in the “Golden Age of Dinosaurs”.