On September 24-25, the Visualizing Marathon 2011 kicked off with 16 teams from universities throughout Sydney, Australia. Held at the Australian Technology Park, the event featured insightful workshops by Ben Hosken of Flink Labs and an evening discussion with Kathleen Balson of CSIRO.

Sydney Trophy, designed by SJET

Students in a variety of design fields came together for the marathon and — fueled by creativity, energy drinks, ping pong and more — powered through 24 hours of work to produce amazing visualizations about Australia’s changing demographics and health care.

Congratulations to winners Remi Bouskila, Adam Connellan, Julie Flestado and John Le from the University of Technology, Sydney for their winning project Guess What Australia. The judges praised the team for creating an engaging narrative with the data. Their visualization offers clarity and focus and helps the reader understand the impact of this growing issue.

Additional congratulations to Fiona Learned, Josephine Lie and Tiia Metzke for their entry, Growing Pains, and Sofya Karmazina, Ekaterina Marina and Maxim Volkhin for theirs, titled Australia’s Changing Demographics and Health Care. Both teams were selected as Honorable Mentions and praised for their “smart visuals, abundance of detail and beautiful graphics.”

Lastly, a special thanks to all of the Academic Partners (University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, and University of Technology, Sydney), CSIRO, Flink Labs and the Australian Technology Park for their support and participation. And a HUGE thanks to all of the students for your drive, creativity and hard work. The entries are an impressive array of visualizations and we look forward to seeing your future work!

View all of the entries.

Interested in participating? Registration is still open for New York, London and Berlin.