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 :)

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!

… 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!