The Art of Insight

Chapter 21The Jack‐of‐All‐Trades

with Simon Ducroquet

Figure 21.1: “Capivara Weather”

Simon Ducroquet / https://cargocollective.com/ducroquet/

CAPIVARA‐WEATHER / last accessed June 19, 2023

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

—Rebecca Solnit

I've never been a devoted video gamer but I was able to understand something that the Brazilian news designer Simon Ducroquet told me about Doom, the pioneering first‐person shooter released in 1993:

Remember that you could go beyond playing the game and design your own levels for it? Well, I did that. I truly was a nerdy guy when I was in school and in college—I still am!

I do remember Doom. I had a college friend who created scenarios for it. One was a reproduction of the magnificent cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the city where I studied journalism. Those were the days.

Why did Simon and I talk about a video game for a visualization book, you might wonder? He was demonstrating a recent side project, which draws some inspiration from video games and was still in development. It's a phone application that recommends what to wear, depending on the weather. Instead of showing humans in the app, though, he Simon used cartoon ...