Mass spectrometry can detect thousands of substances in river water—but naming them is a different problem. The gap between what is there and what can be identified is hard to communicate without turning the story into a list of chemical codes.

For this research project by CORRECTIV on unknown substances in the Rhine, I helped develop a visual language that treats that gap as the central motif. We used a particle-based system as a quantitative metaphor: not as decoration, but as a way to carry counts, uncertainty, and selection across the narrative—scaling from “the Rhine as a whole” down to individual probe findings.

Visual System

Particles represent substances and can be reduced, highlighted, and resolved into specific entities as the reader scrolls. This allowed us to move between orders of magnitude without switching metaphors: the same visual material can express the overwhelming total, the narrowed-down subset of relevant unknowns, and the moment where an abstract point becomes a concrete location and finding.

Narrative Structure

• Chapter 1: A broad statement about the overall scale—tens of thousands of detected substances versus only a small fraction that can be clearly identified.
• Chapter 2: A reduction to the 40–50 unknown substances found in CORRECTIV’s own probes, with the ability to spotlight individual substances via callouts and contextual details.
• Chapter 3: A shift towards the industrial landscape along the Rhine—mapping chemical companies and linking them to the broader dynamic of substances entering the river.

Across all chapters, my role covered co-conceptualisation, interaction and visual design, and the front-end implementation of the visualisations. This project was a collaboration with CORRECTIV.Studio. Read the article →