Narragansett Bay is home to a wide variety of organisms. Some can be seen with the naked eye, but many others are microscopic. Although they are small in size, these organisms play a huge role in the ecosystem. In this work, we chose to represent the major groupings of these diminutive, but mighty, creatures as hexagonal tiles as well as the carbon dioxide that fuels this system. We also chose to represent the relationships between these groups by placing interacting tiles adjacent to one other.

The actions of these microbes support the food web in the bay in addition to helping to regulate the climate. Every actor is essential, from the producers that transform the carbon dioxide into more useful forms to the consumers that transport the transformed carbon up the food chain to the diverse groups of viruses that attack every living thing in the food web. 

“Participating in the 2022 Vis-a-thon was an immensely positive experience. At the beginning, I thought that the project would involve the creation of a puzzle that represented the different groups of plankton using the pieces and represented the interactions between those groups with the interlocking edges on the sides of the puzzle pieces. After speaking with Nadia, my collaborator, and Joy, our critic, we decided to use plexiglass and to use a laser cutter to create the tiles. In the interest of time, we also decided to represent the relationships between the plankton groups by placing tiles next to one another instead of creating puzzle pieces that would take a lot longer to cut. I then spent some time playing with different shapes using google drawings and presented some of them during my next meeting with Nadia.”

- DB Richardson

“We decided to use hexagons with different colors to represent the different groups of plankton. I selected green for the producers, fluorescent blue for carbon dioxide, and dark blue for the viruses and consumers. We also decided to include some hand-drawn images of some of the groups of plankton on the tiles. I spent some time drawing a few sketches of a few of the microscopic organisms in the bay and Nadia converted those images into Adobe Illustrator files that could be used by the laser cutter to etch the images onto plexiglass.”

- DB Richardson

“On the Vis-a-thon weekend, we were able to convert these ideas into real objects. During this process, I was shocked at how much detail the laser cutter was able to transfer to the tile and how difficult it was to remove the adhesive paper from the plexiglass after the etching was complete. We decided to cut the viruses first. After looking at the first few, we decided that we didn’t like the dark blue as much as the fluorescent blue, so we etched the remaining consumers into the fluorescent blue plexi.”

- DB Richardson