Data Design and the Orchestra
A data designer in residence at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra — visualising 20 years of repertoire, 14 years of subscriber data, and historical ticket sales to reveal patterns within the organisation.
OOM Creative’s founder Greg More was a data designer in residence at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) from 2011–12: a residency co-funded by Australia Council for the Arts to situate data, design, and technical expertise within an arts organisation.
The residency explored three bodies of data:
- 20 years of repertoire data to illustrate relationships between performances, series, and composers over time
- 14 years of subscriber data to present changes in the MSO audience
- Historical and contemporary ticket sales data
For the residency, OOM Creative worked with new web-based visualisation libraries to enable visualisations to be available across a range of devices from laptops to iPads, and also designed data models and systems to enable visualisations to be easily updated with the seasonal activities of the MSO.
Outcomes
- Through examining and presenting patterns in data, there was a better connection between development and marketing departments
- Understanding of longer-term trends in data enabled better comparison between seasons
- Presenting visual prototypes at weekly sales meetings allowed ticketing data to be understood in relationship to seasonal trends