Data Design and the Orchestra

Visualising audience, ticketing and repertoire data

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 Arts to situate data, design and technical expertise within an arts organisation.

The residency explored this 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 have worked with new web base visualisation libraries to enable visualisations to be available on a range from devices from laptops to iPads, and also designing data models and systems to enable visualisations to be easily updated with the seasonal activities of the MSO.

Quick takeaways:

• 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 weeking sales meetings allowed ticketing data to understood in relationship to sessional trends.