In a 3- or 4-person team, you’ll have 24 hours (from 12:00 PM on Saturday to 12:00 PM on Sunday) to design a solution to a real world problem that we will give at the start of the Marathon. You will gain access to a selection of open data sets to work with on Visualizing.org (and you can use any other data set you want so long as it’s open). You’ll collaborate with your team through the night to come up with your entry, designing alongside 100 or so other students in a stimulating and fun space. Any format is welcome, so long as it can be uploaded on Visualizing.org. There will be plenty of good food and drink and some surprises along the way to keep you going. At the end of 24 hours you will upload your entry to Visualizing.org. Winners will be selected by our esteemed jury.

Each member of the winning team will receive a specially engraved iPad 2 and the winning project will be featured on Visualizing.org.

2010 Trophy
designed by SJET

The winning school will receive the Visualizing Trophy.

We will also name two Honorable Mentions in each city.

GE Grand Prize

The GE Grand Prize will be awarded to the project that best illuminates a new insight or solution to a complex problem through data visualization. A $10,000 “Imagination at Work” grant will be rewarded to the winning university to support research, development, and/or education that takes the project forward. The winner will receive global recognition on GE websites and through communications.

The Winner and Honorable Mentions from each city are eligible to participate. Each team will be asked to submit a brief abstract to the jury.

Grand Prize Winner

Read the announcement

Check out the entries, winners and challenges for each city.

Sydney, Australia (September 24-25)
All Entries | Winner | Challenge

São Paulo, Brazil (October 22-23)
All Entries | Winner | Challenge

New York, USA (November 5-6)
All Entries | Recap | Winner | Challenge

London, UK (November 12-13)
All Entries | Winner | Challenge

Berlin, Germany (December 3-4)
All Entries | Winner | Challenge

• Gregor Aisch, Driven By Data
• Kathleen Balson, CSIRO
• Maria Cristina Ferreira de Oliveira
• Ben Hosken, Flink Labs
• Nova Jiang, Eyebeam Art + Technology Center
• Andy Kirk, Visualising Data
• Robert Kirkpatrick, UN Global Pulse
• David McCandless, Information is Beautiful
• Eddie Opara, Pentagram
• Sergio Pecanha, New York Times
• Stefanie Posavec
• Carlo Ratti, MIT SENSEable City Lab
• Fabio Sales, Estado de Sao Paulo
• Moritz Stefaner

• You must be enrolled as a student at one of our Academic Partners (if your university is not yet an Academic Partner you can still register, just let us know so we can contact them).
• Members of a team must be from the same university.
• You must be of legal age in your country to compete.
• There is no cost to register.
• Students will compete in teams of 3 or 4 students. At the time of registration, you do not need to be part of a team. If you haven’t yet formed a team or if your team is smaller than 3, get in touch and we’ll try to help.
• If you competed in the 2010 Visualizing Marathon you may compete in the 2011 Marathon.