One of the best parts about this class was the opportunity to learn from my international peers. Professor Alberto Cairo reached out to students in the graduate program in the School of Communication at the University of Miami along with a few undergraduate students who had taken infographics courses with him in the past about this conference hosted by University of Iuav in Venice, Italy. Naturally, since I had never been to Europe and I wanted to learn more about visual design, I jumped on the opportunity. A few months later, I found myself in in Venice! The conference was unlike most of the other conferences that I have been to which are mainly centered around ecological systems. The students aiming to get their masters at the University of Iuav were actually watching us and collecting data on us throughout the weeklong conference after which they gave us data visualizations about various aspects our stay. There were students from many different countries (Germany, Switzerland, United States, Italy)! In my communication with the students from Europe, I realized a key difference between the European and American education system - American education allows for way more elective coursework. While I am naturally inclined towards visual mediums as means for communication, majority of my time is spent thinking about mutualisms (ecological interactions in which all partners benefit from the interaction). Many of the students at the conference live and breath design. It was refreshing and inspiring to see people put so much thought into the font that is used on the work product or what line-weight to use on an illustration. Since the conference was aimed at teaching us how to work in an interdisciplinary team to create a project on a given prompt (all of the prompts were about Venice). The time that I wnet was actually during “acqua alta” when Venice has record high floods. The theme of my project was “Vence and Water: Do Mix.” The workshop was led by Professor Stohl who is hilarious and allowed us the freedom to think. All the students shouted ideas which were frantically written on the board by Professor Stohl. There was something really different about this workshop - there were students that live in Venice that were also shouting ideas. We got to ask them questions about what they would want to see done with the project. They wanted an application that better represents the data that was given to them by the government! Typically flood-data is represented on a map. However, since tides are so quick and the altimetry of Venetian streets is so varied, the government has yet found a way to map the flood data. The goal of our application is to communicate what streets would be flooded and allow Venetians to use it as a navigation tool, but also allow tourists to have an intuition of the levels of the tide i.e. 800cm tide is actually below the ground of Venice so nothing would have to change. However, if a tourist is told that the flood is going to 800cm they would dress in rubber overalls! venice