After a two month break — our sec­ond, and very lovely baby arrived — I am sort of back at the desk, so here are some news and my cur­rent plans to get every­one up to speed.

I am much look­ing for­ward to speak­ing at decoded con­fer­ence Octo­ber 23 in Munich, along with Mario Klinge­mann, Mas­simo Manzi, the Gen­er­a­tives Design book team and many oth­ers. Thanks already for envis pre­cisely and reppa.net for orga­niz­ing the event, I am sure it is going to be a great lit­tle con­fer­ence. I think it is wise to get your tick­ets now, as the first early bird batch has sold out rather quickly…

Also, I will be teach­ing smaller work­shops at TU Dres­den and HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd in late November.

As a lit­tle diver­sion, and because I found the data set quite inter­est­ing, I made a lit­tle visu­al­iza­tion of WNYC’s Map your moves dataset.

A lit­tle tree nav­i­ga­tion I did for the organic edunet por­tal.

Update: revisit will be on dis­play at the alphav­ille fes­ti­val in Lon­don later this month.

Gen­er­ally, I am really behind on doc­u­ment­ing projects (Skype, dpa, …), but I hope I can catch in the next few weeks. One rea­son is that I would love to unify my two sites into one smart word­press port­fo­lio sys­tem, but this will take a while… Any­ways, good to be back and see you around! Did I miss anything? ;)

A cou­ple of months ago, I came across a very insight­ful arti­cle with high rel­e­vance for infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion: “More with less” in the always excel­lent ACM inter­ac­tions. It made me think quite a bit, and might also help some to under­stand a designer’s approach to visu­al­iza­tion a bit bet­ter, so here is the gist of the story (the fol­low­ing sec­tion mostly para­phrases the orig­i­nal article).

(more…)

In the past, I have prof­ited immensely from using open source projects, fore­most flare, but also many other libraries. I would like to give some­thing back by open sourc­ing my favorite toy, the Elas­tic Lists project on github: github.com/MoritzStefaner/Elastic-Lists.

Have fun with it! Please keep in mind I am not a devel­oper by train­ing and these are side projects. Espe­cially excuse the sketchy doc­u­men­ta­tion. So if you start work­ing with the code, and run into issues, feel free to file bug reports or add ques­tions to the FAQ.

Heck, and while I am at it, why not pub­lish revisit as well: github.com/MoritzStefaner/revisit

“Beau­ti­ful Visu­al­iza­tion – Look­ing at data through the eyes of experts” is out (at least the ebook edi­tion). I am proud to be among the authors, along with giants like Aaron Koblin, Fer­nanda Viega and Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg, Jer Thorp or Jes­sica Hagy. I mostly flipped through the book up to now, but from what I can see, it com­prises a great col­lec­tion of case stud­ies and reflec­tions by prac­ti­tion­ers from the field. So if you always won­dered about the sto­ries and con­sid­er­a­tions behind great visu­al­iza­tions, this could be a very use­ful resource. My chap­ter deals with the process behind X by Y, and is avail­able as a pre-print down­load (2.3MB pdf). I would love to see this book printed, too — if you feel the same, why not pre-order the print edi­tion to speed up the process?

Also note­wor­thy: All roy­al­ties from this book will be donated to Archi­tec­ture for Human­ity.

Just a quick post to let you know that I put a new project online: revisit – a real–time visu­al­iza­tion of the last few hun­dred tweets around a topic. In con­trast to the usual twit­ter walls, it try to cap­ture some of the tem­po­ral dynam­ics as well as the con­ver­sa­tional aspects of twit­ter. Scroll down for cus­tomiza­tion options! Hope you like it — it will be at dis­play at the see con­fer­ence tomor­row, but for those of you who are not there, here is the live ver­sion so you can see what you are missing :)

In its five years of exis­tence, the see con­fer­ence man­aged to bring quite a few of the most excit­ing speak­ers from design, art, archi­tec­ture and new tech­nolo­gies on stage to talk about their per­spec­tive on infor­ma­tion visualization.

This year’s con­fer­ence takes place on April 17, 2010 at the Kul­turzen­trum Schlachthof Wies­baden (Ger­many) and fea­tures the fol­low­ing line-up:

• Gideon Obarzanek, the founder of Chunky Move, an Aus­tralian dance com­pany known for “genre-defying dance performance”
• Joshua Prince-Ramus, Pres­i­dent of REX, a cutting-edge archi­tec­ture firm
• Nicholas Fel­ton (feltron.com), a New York based infor­ma­tion designer, co-founder of daytum.com and prob­a­bly best known for his per­sonal annual reports
• Hannes Koch from rAn­dom Inter­na­tional, a London-based art and design collective
• Kent Demaine from OOOii, who design future inter­faces for Hol­ly­wood and, among oth­ers, brought us the vision­ary inter­face design for Minor­ity Report
• and amys­tery keynote speaker. (I love mysteries!)

Some tick­ets are still left, but not ter­ri­bly many, so bet­ter reg­is­ter sooner than later. For those of you who can­not make it, there will be a live video stream of the event, and archived video record­ings later. The recorded talks of the past con­fer­ences are well worth a visit too, with speak­ers rang­ing from Casey Reas over Carsten Nico­lai to Stamen’s Eric Roden­beck, Ben Fry, Zachary Lieber­man and many more.

Last week, I gave a lit­tle pre­sen­ta­tion at the col­lo­quium of the media infor­mat­ics fac­ulty at TU Dres­den. Find the slides here. I would also like to use the chance to make you aware of the OUTPUT event on April 23, where stu­dent and research works are pre­sented and some inter­est­ing talks are planned. For read­ers of this blog, prob­a­bly the Tech­nis­che Visu­al­is­tik track will be most inter­est­ing, with talks about multi-touch, blended inter­ac­tion, touch­less inter­ac­tion etc.

Every­body com­plains that art, design and research in infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion should be talk­ing more to each other.

Here is a unique oppor­tu­nity: Andrew Vande Moere and I will be host­ing a sym­po­sium at IV10: DAVis, the 5th Inter­na­tional Sym­po­sium on Design and Aes­thet­ics in Visu­al­i­sa­tion.

From the call:

“This sym­po­sium aims to bring together researchers and prac­ti­tion­ers of design, art and related dis­ci­plines. The goal is to share their sto­ries and expe­ri­ences on how the needs and goals of both users and busi­nesses are met through infor­ma­tion visu­al­i­sa­tion.

It sup­ports the pub­li­ca­tion of research in two gen­eral domains: Design and Aes­thet­ics. Design refers to the devel­op­ment of visu­al­i­sa­tion as a cre­ative design process. Aes­thet­ics refers to the role of user expe­ri­ence in visu­al­i­sa­tion, as under­stood in three dis­tinct com­po­nents: aes­thetic expe­ri­ence, expe­ri­ence of mean­ing, and emo­tional expe­ri­ence.

This sym­po­sium presents an oppor­tu­nity to explore these issues and their con­se­quences for the field of infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, we encour­age the sub­mis­sion of design cri­tiques; case stud­ies, pos­si­bly with accom­pa­ny­ing eval­u­a­tion stud­ies or crit­i­cal reflec­tions; posi­tion papers; or reports on the impact that visu­al­iza­tion research or visu­al­iza­tion use has had on the work and life of peo­ple. In this con­text, the story of fail­ures or aban­doned approaches can be as infor­ma­tive as descrip­tions of suc­cess. The fields of appli­ca­tion are open, and can reach from tra­di­tional screen-based graphs, over inno­v­a­tive multi-touch inter­faces, to dynamic media archi­tec­ture displays.”

So — design­ers, coders, artists, visu­al­iz­ers — go forth and write!

Update: make sure to check out the sub­mis­sion require­ments and pro­ce­dure up at the IV main page.

Beware: the dead­line is tight: March 1. March 21 But hon­estly, you would not have started ear­lier, any­ways — right? Feel free to get in touch if you have any ques­tions, and we are really look­ing for­ward to your submissions.

Gen­er­a­tive Gestal­tung is a unique new book on gen­er­a­tive design (and related dis­ci­plines like visu­al­iza­tion). It is quite example–driven, with loads of typ­i­cal tech­niques explored in short pro­cess­ing sketches. At the moment it is only avail­able in Ger­man, but I hear an Eng­lish ver­sion is in the works. The web­site fea­tures all code exam­ples and some com­mu­nity func­tions. Very nice con­cept and exe­cu­tion over­all, and it really makes me eager on learn­ing pro­cess­ing better :)

In Novem­ber 2009, I did a mini-project together with Boris Müller and the boys from rau­reif. My task was to cre­ate a visu­al­iza­tion of the sur­vey results of an event. The par­tic­i­pants were asked to rate the events with respect to 9 ques­tions on a scale from 1–10. As we did not have much time (nor bud­get), we went for the first good-looking idea avail­able. What could that be? Right, a radial visu­al­iza­tion (be damned, cir­cles for non-circular data!). Any­ways, I pro­duced a quick funky mockup with ran­dom data: Each cir­cle sec­tor stands for one person’s rat­ings, and these are ordered by their aver­age rat­ing. For each sin­gle rat­ing, I draw a semi-transparent wedge, with dis­tance from cen­ter as well as color indi­cat­ing the rating’s value. Spe­cial treat­ment is pro­vided for the over­all event rat­ing (a more opaque, smaller wedge). For visual spice, a black spline con­nects all the aver­age val­ues of the ratings.

So, we agreed on it and shipped it. See­ing it with the real data, how­ever, made me won­der if I should have looked into typ­i­cal rat­ing sta­tis­tics a bit more :)

Well. Les­son learnt. It is a nice lit­tle visu­al­iza­tion nevertheless.

Which reminds me of an excel­lent arti­cle about how to pre­vent to uni­form votes already in the interface.

As a bonus, here is a lit­tle remake using pro­to­vis with again, ridicu­lously few lines of code: (more…)