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.

I contributed to the user interface design chapter in the recent Springer book “Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search – Theory, Practice, and Experience” (online version) edited by Giovanni Maria Sacco and Yannis Tzitzikas. Based on a definition of core principles and challenges, the chapter presents a taxonomy of navigation modes observed in existing applications. On that basis, design patterns for enabling these navigation modes in user interfaces as well as extensions and related approaches are discussed. The chapter closes with a section on personalizing faceted search.

The book itself covers a wide range of topics and current research questions related to Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search from an academic point of view.

You can find a pre-print version of the User Interface Design chapter here. Thanks also to my co–authors Sébastian Ferré, Saverio Perugini, Jonathan Koren and Yi Zhang!

I am excited to announce the following symposium at FH Potsdam:

The symposium »Living with Information: Architecture and Visualization« (October 16 , 2009 at FH Potsdam) will juxtapose experiences and results from the MACE project with thoughts and design approaches from practitioners in the fields of design, architecture and technology. Guided by five central questions, we will explore future trends in information visualization, the relationship of visualization tools and creativity plus issues like information over- and underload.

I am really looking forward to the unique speaker combination we put together:

• Miguel Cardoso from bestiario,
• Paolo Ciuccarelli from Politecnico Milano /density design,
• Georgi Kobilarov from FU Berlin / dbpedia,
• Norbert Palz (CV + info) and
• Andrew Vande Moere from infosthetics.com!

In addition, Prof. Boris Müller and I will provide a rear-mirror view and outlook of our activities related to the MACE project… A wide spectrum, but hopefully all held together by the central issue of the workshop and the five questions we prepared for the speakers.

Hope to see you there – register soon – space is limited!

On a related note, the Potsdam–based W3C office opens on the day before, which should be quite interesting, too.

For those from the Stuttgart area: I will give a public (german) talk on Monday, April 20, 6:30pm at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd on information aesthetics and my work.

Update: lecture slides here. Thanks to Eric Rodenbeck and the other see#4 speakers for some last minute inspirations!

We recently launched a whole new version of the MACE portal. MACE (Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe) is a pan-european initiative to interconnect and disseminate digital information about architecture. The idea is to connect and enrich various databases containing eLearning material for architectural contents and to connect and make them accessible in novel ways. The project is co-funded by the European commission. If you are more interested in the background of the project, you can also view our info page here. Personally, I am working half of my time on this project here at FH Potsdam.

So, let me give you a little overview of the portal: (more…)

I put up a new portfolio site at moritz.stefaner.eu. Not really finished, but good enough. You might be especially interested in the Content Landscape documentation, as I have not written about this project before.

After lots of experiments with drupal, indexhibit and wordpress, I finally settled for the simple and elegant frog cms. Highly recommended, if you want to fill a custom layout with dynamic content in a very flexible manner.

Finally, the results of a cooperation with the guys from eigenfactor are online!

For the impatient: here’s the direct link: http://well-formed.eigenfactor.org

The site features 4 different visualizations, trying different approaches to mapping information flow and citation structure in the sciences.

(more…)

Short notice: I will re-play my xtopia talk from yesterday today at BTK Berlin at 5pm. Partly presenting my own work, plus a discussion of visualizations around the US presidential elections.

Update: Slides are online. Will upload the missing videos (blank slides) soonish on vimeo. Please excuse the funky template, that was part of the xtopia requirements…

After much blood, sweat and cable guy issues, we could finally present the interactive installation mæve for the EveryVille student competition at the La Biennale in Venice.

In short, the installation works like this: visitors can pick up little cards representing the exhibits. Putting them on the table will draw an associative, organic network of tags, media and related projects around them. If you put multiple cards on the table, the visualization will form “bridges”, looking for direct or indirect connections between the projects.

The installation has been designed and developed by the MACE project team of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and made possible by many others (credits).

You can find more info and media on the mæve project website.

Technically, the installation is built with Processing, using the Gestalt framework.
For the card tracking, the Reactivision 1.4 software was used. The interactive table was built by Werk5.

By the way, if you blog about this, make sure to link to the original project page – not this blog post – thanks!

Some of my upcoming events:

FIND08 workshop Sept. 03, Torino I am just preparing a presentation on the Content Landscape application I designed for SVA BizSphere based on my elastic lists. It is quite a massive Flex application for browsing and analysing thousands of resources. Details to come.

Biennale Sept. 09, Venice Watch out, we’ll show something beautiful. Details to come.

MACE conference Sept. 20-21, Venice The MACE project project goes in its final year – time to get connected!

VizThink 08 Oct. 13-14, Berlin I am proud to be one of the facilitators (~workshop leaders) at the VizThink Conference. I haven’t decided on a topic yet, but it might well be related to visualization(oho!) and the semantic web. I am really looking forward to this event, sounds like a great format and the facilitator list is quite impressive already.

Xtopia Nov. 17,18, Berlin I will give an introductory talk about visualization and information design at Microsoft’s Xtopia Conference for “Business, Web Technology, Design & UX”.

Busy times huh – let me know if you attend one of these events and want to meet up!