The Exploratory Instrument
Stuck situations — Interactive visual system
An interactive system built to make the extreme complexity of fruit fly neuron connectivity navigable for researchers.
The friction
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute had mapped the neural connectivity of a fruit fly brain — a dataset of extreme density that their own team struggled to navigate. Standard visualization approaches produced unreadable tangles. The complexity was real and the stakes were high: researchers needed to be able to explore and communicate their findings, not just store them.
The parameter shift
Rather than trying to simplify the data, I built a system capable of holding its full complexity. Working in the domain of the maker — before any chart type or layout was decided — I deconstructed the parameters: what does neural connectivity actually mean spatially? What needs to be comparable? What needs to be explorable versus fixed?
The result was a system so architecturally robust that it effectively replicated the institute's own internal analytical tools. It had to be consciously scaled back to function as a companion to the published research rather than replace their entire workflow.
The system
A bespoke interactive application allowing researchers to navigate between brain regions, trace individual neuron pathways, and compare connectivity patterns across the dataset. One-of-a-kind by design — no template existed for this problem.
The impact
Researchers could, for the first time, visually explore and communicate the full topology of the fruit fly connectome in a way that was both analytically rigorous and publicly accessible. The system was published alongside the research.