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).

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“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 :)

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.

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…)

On the occa­sion of the recent fifth birth­day of infosthetics.com blog, your pre­mier source for fresh projects from visu­al­iza­tion and infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics, I made a cus­tom adap­ta­tion of the elas­tic lists prin­ci­ple for the – up to now – 1950 posts of the site. Try it out, and read more about it here.

Happy birth­day infosthetics!

Finally, the videos from our “Liv­ing with infor­ma­tion” work­shop are up. Find below my two favorites: Andrew Vande Moere for the best sto­ries and Paolo Ciuc­carelli for the most beau­ti­ful slides ever. Enjoy!

Andrew Vande Moere from FHP Inter­face Design on Vimeo.

Paolo Ciuc­carelli from FHP Inter­face Design on Vimeo.

Find the whole album here.

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!

This month’s WIRED UK mag­a­zine fea­tures a remix of one of the well-formed.eigenfactor visu­al­iza­tions in their info­porn section.

Together with my col­leagues in Seat­tle and Umea, I mod­i­fied the “change over time” visu­al­iza­tion to tell a spe­cific story: The for­ma­tion of neu­ro­science as a field of its own right over the last decade. Orig­i­nally scat­tered across related dis­ci­plines (such as med­i­cine, mol­e­c­u­lar and cell biol­ogy or neu­rol­ogy), the neu­ro­sci­en­tific jour­nals start to define a niche of their own, reflected in the dense clus­ter emerg­ing in 2005.

Down­load a larger ver­sion with full explana­tory text here: png (1MB) pdf (4MB)

And here is some more in depth info: (more…)