Mapping the EU defence ecosystem
Coordinated views of EU defence institutions, policies, funding and EDF projects, with every link traceable to its source.
Sole designer & developer · Data curation
React · TypeScript · D3.js · Vite · Playwright · axe-core
Independent project · Grounded in roles at DG DEFIS and ASD Europe
Explore the ecosystem.
Select a station in the metro map or a node in the network. Its documented relationships, sources, timeline and funding stay linked across every view, and the URL records the state so any view can be shared. Best on a wide screen; on narrow screens the views stack.
The challenge
European defence policy is spread across institutions, legal instruments, funding programmes and hundreds of funded projects, and the relationships between them change over time. Schematic overviews such as policy “metro” maps make the landscape memorable, but they cannot say what a connection means, when it held or where it is documented. The design problem: keep a readable overview while every relationship, amount and date stays inspectable and honest about its evidence.
My contribution
I designed and built the application on my own, from the data model and source review to the interface, interaction design and testing. The domain knowledge comes from two professional roles. At the European Commission’s DG DEFIS, I supported monitoring of the European Defence Fund and EUDIS, including a KPI framework for SMEs, start-ups and other non-traditional participants. At ASD Europe, I coordinated governance of the six ASD/AIA S-Series specifications. Both roles showed how hard this landscape is to read, for newcomers and specialists alike.
Design process
I started from task abstraction for three personas: learners orienting themselves, policy investigators tracing responsibility, legal basis and change over time, and industry users looking for EDF calls, projects and partners. These map to overview, entity exploration, targeted filtering and temporal exploration tasks. The encodings follow the evidence model. Thematic lanes in the metro map classify; they imply no relationship or sequence. Documented relationships are thin directed links, and analyst interpretations are always dashed. Shape encodes entity type, never amount or influence. The funding chart keeps each financial measure separate (annual budget, payment, legal ceiling, loan maximum) and never sums across them. An expert heuristic review and a UX audit drove successive revisions, including a three-column layout that keeps the overview, the network and the evidence in view together.
Implementation
A single React-owned SVG renders the semantic metro map; D3 handles camera behaviour and a deterministic, precomputed network layout, so date and route filters remove marks without moving anything. Selection, historical date and filters are shared by the metro map, network graph, policy timeline and annual funding chart, and the full state is serialised to the URL. The curated graph holds 124 entities and 179 documented relationships, linked to official EU sources. A 2021–2025 EDF catalogue adds 285 Commission project factsheets and 4,201 consortium rows, disclosed progressively from programme to call year to project to consortium. Six authored stories (48 evidence-linked steps) guide new readers through the same views. Everything runs in the browser with no backend, and a Playwright suite with axe accessibility scans covers navigation, filtering and URL restoration.
Outcomes & limitations
The application is a working research demonstrator with a data snapshot of 29 October 2026. It has been assessed through an expert heuristic review with task walkthroughs for each persona and automated accessibility checks, not yet a study with representative users; moderated sessions with each persona are the next step. Open issues include metro station labels that render below the 11px legibility target in the three-column layout. The EDF catalogue was extracted automatically and has not yet been reviewed by hand. A selected project is not evidence of a signed grant, payment or delivered capability, and the interface says so.
Sources & scope
Data snapshot: 29 October 2026. Legal, institutional and financial facts come from official sources (EUR-Lex, the European Commission, the Council, EDA, EEAS and OCCAR); press and commentary are used only as leads. Funding amounts keep their original measure, period and source, and gaps are shown as missing rather than zero.
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