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

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.

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…