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 :)

With the US pres­i­den­tial elec­tions com­ing up tomor­row (excit­ing!), here is a lit­tle roundup of related visu­al­iza­tions and infor­ma­tion graph­ics I enjoyed: (more…)

See­ing Chris Jor­dan’s TED talk (embed­ded below) just made me remem­ber his great work in visu­al­iz­ing large num­bers of things going wrong.

About his lat­est project, Run­ning the num­bers, he writes:

Run­ning the Num­bers looks at con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cul­ture through the aus­tere lens of sta­tis­tics. Each image por­trays a spe­cific quan­tity of some­thing: fif­teen mil­lion sheets of office paper (five min­utes of paper use); 106,000 alu­minum cans (thirty sec­onds of can con­sump­tion) and so on. My hope is that images rep­re­sent­ing these quan­ti­ties might have a dif­fer­ent effect than the raw num­bers alone, such as we find daily in arti­cles and books. Sta­tis­tics can feel abstract and anes­thetiz­ing, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to con­nect with and make mean­ing of 3.6 mil­lion SUV sales in one year, for exam­ple, or 2.3 mil­lion Amer­i­cans in prison, or 32,000 breast aug­men­ta­tion surg­eries in the U.S. every month. This project visu­ally exam­ines these vast and bizarre mea­sures of our soci­ety, in large intri­cately detailed prints assem­bled from thou­sands of smaller pho­tographs. Employ­ing themes such as the near ver­sus the far, and the one ver­sus the many, I hope to raise some ques­tions about the role of the indi­vid­ual in a soci­ety that is increas­ingly enor­mous, incom­pre­hen­si­ble, and overwhelming.

David Huynh has recently joined the free­base team, after hav­ing worked on Exhibit and other SIMILE tools at MIT. His new project Par­al­lax is obvi­ously based on Exhibit (which fol­lowed mostly a faceted fil­ter­ing par­a­digm) but demon­strates a really inter­est­ing “side­wards brows­ing tech­nique” for nav­i­gat­ing related sets of dif­fer­ent types of entities.

As an exam­ple, you could start with a set of archi­tects, then fil­ter down to all mod­ern archi­tects, plot them on a map, a time­line etc. – quite nice already, but tra­di­tional facet brows­ing in prin­ci­ple. The catch how­ever, is that you can explore related col­lec­tions, like the <a href=“http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/browse.html?state=!((d:(t:/architecture/architect),s:(f:!((p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/architectural_style)),s:!(/en/modern_architecture))),v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)),(d:(l:” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘mqlx.com/~david/parallax/browse.html?state=!((d:(t:/architecture/architect),s:(f:!((p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/architectural_style)),s:!(/en/modern_architecture))),v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)),(d:(l:’]);“Structures%20Designed’,p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/structures_designed))),s:(v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)))”>buildings they designed, their birth places etc. in the same manner. Very interesting principle and nicely executed, yet a bit hard to explain.

In this screencast, David explains it himself:
Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

As a side remark: academically, I think the Humboldt paper by Georgi Kobilarov first presented this principle (but they also refer to an earlier prototype of David's work). Unfortunately it was introduced under the name of pivot brows­ing, which is sort of reserved already for the quite related, but not iden­ti­cal prin­ci­ple intro­duced in dogear.

Any ideas for a good name? Side­wards brows­ing? Entity shift? Or just stick with parallax?

Automaten–Andreas cre­ated a beau­ti­ful new project together with Ben­jamin Maus:
Reflec­tion.

Essen­tially, the wave­forms of a musi­cal piece by Frans de Waard were ren­dered as a sculp­ture with a CNC Milling Machine.

This project sort of fol­lows a week in the life, another phys­i­cal visu­al­iza­tion, where a week of loca­tion data of the author is mapped in a wooden car­togram.

I just fin­ished read­ing Bill Bux­ton’s Sketch­ing User Expe­ri­ences and it had quite an impres­sion on me. It starts with a gen­eral, broad argu­ment on the role of design think­ing in busi­ness and prod­uct devel­op­ment, illus­trat­ing how design, design think­ing and design arti­facts are not yet well enough inte­grated and under­stood in tech­nol­ogy busi­ness. A great intro­duc­tion also for non-designers, includ­ing a fan­tas­tic dis­cus­sion of the iPod design and busi­ness story. For design prac­ti­tion­ers, the main part of the book is con­cerned with the activ­i­ties of sketch­ing and pro­to­typ­ing. His main argu­ment is that these two con­cepts are often used inter­change­ably, how­ever serve two very dif­fer­ent pur­poses: Sketches are for get­ting the right design , devel­op­ing the basic idea, the punch­line of the design project. Sketches are quick, dis­pos­able, diverg­ing, and abun­dant. Pro­to­types (as well as usabil­ity test­ing, mock-ups, etc.) are for get­ting the design right — nar­row­ing down the pos­si­bil­i­ties, mak­ing deci­sions, just doing what it takes to get from an idea to a really well designed thing. To expe­ri­enced design­ers, this might sound quite obvi­ous, but I have to admit myself I did not reflect prop­erly on how I use these words, and how I use these design tools. Bux­ton did a great job of intro­duc­ing sub­tle dis­tinc­tions in this area, and gives you lots of dif­fer­ent angles and exam­ples to get it. Great stuff. Oblig­a­tory read­ing for design­ers, and highly rec­om­mended for any­one who has design­ers around them – I promise you will under­stand them much bet­ter afterwards :)

… visu­al­iz­ing your tags :)

The “Tag­ging” book by Gene Smith is out. I am still await­ing a paper copy, but had a chance to look at the online ver­sion already. It looks really com­pre­hen­sive, con­cise and cov­er­ing all impor­tant tag­ging con­cepts. Which is not easy for such a mov­ing tar­get topic.

Besides, my elas­tic tag maps visu­al­iza­tion is fea­tured on p.102f. Nice!

A real wow-project has gone into ver­sion 2: Exhibit. It is part of SIMILE, focussing on “Seman­tic Inter­op­er­abil­ity of Meta­data and Infor­ma­tion in unLike Envi­ron­ments”, which pro­vides a whole tool­box of prag­matic seman­tic web applications.

(more…)

Finally, a decent Flash frame­work for Infor­ma­tion Visu­al­iza­tion is avail­able: Flare is an off­spring of the Java-based prefuse toolkit, writ­ten in Action­Script 3. Espe­cially notable is the good sup­port for ani­mated tran­si­tions, an impor­tant topic in inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tion. Flare is open source soft­ware licensed under the terms of the BSD license, and can be freely used for both com­mer­cial and non-commercial purposes.

Thanks to Till for the tip!

Another week, another conference :)

This time, it was the EC-TEL07 (Euro­pean Con­fer­ence on Tech­nol­ogy Enhanced Learn­ing) in Crete. Elisa Dalla Vec­chia and I pre­sented the MACE project (slides, video 1, video 2) and besides, met a lot of nice people.

The con­fer­ence itself was really well orga­nized. The keynotes (Her­mann Mau­rer and Bruce Ster­ling) were excel­lent and big pic­ture, cov­er­ing a wide range of dig­i­tal lifestyle top­ics and wild ideas. Dig­i­tal quacks & char­la­tans, why Google is not so non-evil after all, telepa­thy is triv­ial, fly­ing cars. No kid­ding. Many of the ses­sion talks, on the other hand, were not that excit­ing at all. I have the feel­ing many peo­ple in this area first build a “frame­work for…” before actu­ally try­ing out some ideas on real learners.

More info on the con­fer­ence blog, wiki and the flickr stream.

Greet­ings to Mar­tin Mem­mel from DFKI, who I met to talk about the ALOE project and Chris­t­ian Glahn, who pre­sented nice work on Smart Indi­ca­tors for learner feed­back, and Joris Klerkx, who is quite into infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion. I am look­ing for­ward to future devel­op­ments, guys!

And just for the record, here are my favorite insider nerd joke con­fer­ence memes:

• Magic doesn’t scale.
• Minigolf? Ouzome!
• “Every­thing is a plat­form” — freaky!
• Telepa­thy is trivial.
• “Any­ways — back to me”