Establish a visual hierarchy
Keep the environment as the canvas, make persistent UI restrained, and emphasize what is active or selected. The eye should always know where to go first.
Synthetic Canada is an interactive decision environment for exploring how policy, infrastructure, economics, climate, population and place interact across Canada.
The challenge wasn’t simply visualizing more data. It was helping decision-makers understand how one decision can ripple through systems they may not normally consider — and eventually into the life of an individual person.
The experience brought together systems that are usually discussed separately. Every additional layer made the model richer technically — but risked turning the interface into noise for senior decision-makers who were not GIS specialists.
How do we expose the complexity of the system without making the experience feel complex to use?
The challenge wasn’t a lack of information. It was deciding what deserved attention — and when.
Data, maps, controls, labels and spatial layers could not be designed independently. They had to work as one composition. So we created rules for complexity.
Keep the environment as the canvas, make persistent UI restrained, and emphasize what is active or selected. The eye should always know where to go first.
Use colour to identify scenarios, states and data types — and limit strong colour elsewhere. If everything glows, nothing is highlighted.
Infrastructure, transportation, places, people and actions needed consistent anchors that could travel between the 2D interface and 3D environment.
Start with an overview. Surface attributes, entity details and deeper controls when the user asks for them.
Keep the intelligence complex. Make access to it progressive.
The map establishes place before additional layers compete for attention.
Consistent symbols distinguish infrastructure and education within the same environment.
Entity attributes appear within the environment, alongside relevant scenario data.
The same environment needed to work as an overview, an exploratory space and a detailed analytical tool.
Users needed to understand what variables were present, what they could manipulate, what was influencing the result, and how deep they could go. Capability and confidence had to grow together.
The model didn’t need to become simpler. The entry point did.
We designed progressive levels of interaction: a guided default, deeper exploration and technical detail. The intelligence stayed intact; the interface presented a smaller, more relevant amount at any one time.
Population controls, comparative metrics and individual attributes share the same view.
A focused story introduces international student flows before inviting deeper exploration.
Move into a specific question: how many years of saving does a four-year program represent?
Simplifying the interface didn’t mean removing complexity. It meant sequencing it.
Changes to immigration, infrastructure, transportation or trade are never isolated. Their consequences travel.
Infrastructure affects access → economic opportunity → migration → housing, services and education. Environmental conditions alter infrastructure risk. National decisions become community and individual consequences.
We stopped treating scale as zoom. We turned it into the structure of the story.
Global and geopolitical forces, trade, transport and environmental conditions establish the world around the decision.
Infrastructure, population, economics, policy and regional differences become a space to manipulate, examine and compare.
The abstract national outcome becomes a lived outcome through households, individual people and vulnerability.
Forces and dependencies beyond a single border.
See how infrastructure and transport form a national system.
Regional consequences become visible through people and living conditions.
The three scales weren’t just navigation levels. They became the narrative architecture of the experience.
Moving between scales was not automatically understandable. People needed to know where they were and what question they were answering. With too little structure, they felt lost; with too much, the tool became a presentation. We had to balance guided storytelling with open exploration.
A reading guide to the original journey below: follow a story, explore its entities and layers, then return to the wider experience.
After moving from Canada, to province, to community, the scenarios arrived at people: personas, households, vulnerability and outcomes. The human layer changed the experience.
National choices were no longer abstract. Users went quiet because the unit of analysis had become someone whose life could be affected.
From “Which scenario performs better?” to “Who does my decision help — and who might it hurt?”
Income, living costs and affected population groups make an economic shock tangible.
National decisions look very different when the unit of analysis becomes a person. The regional scenario is paired with a synthetic person's household details to connect system-level patterns with the effects of a rent increase.
Showing too many options simultaneously made capability feel like cognitive load.
Visual layers competed for attention when they did not share a clear hierarchy.
We initially underestimated how much orientation people needed between scales.
Analytical capability reduced confidence when the interface did not explain what mattered.
We had to keep balancing an approachable path for nontechnical users with access to the deeper mechanics.
Simplification is not merely reduction. It is preserving the intelligence of a system while giving people a clear way through it.
Supports both guided storytelling and open exploration.
Moves coherently from global forces to national systems to individual lives.
Provides detail, control and comparison without overwhelming the starting point.
Makes the human consequences of abstract decisions visible.