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.

The well-formed.eigenfactor project will be at dis­play at the Infor­ma­tion Aes­thet­ics Show­case, curated by Vic­to­ria Szabo, at SIGGRAPH 2009, August 3–7 in New Orleans. I will also give a lit­tle Mon­day morn­ing talk on the project and am really excited to be part of this first intru­sion of the infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics scene into the con­fer­ence on com­puter graphics!

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!

Hey, I didn’t notice: The Inno­va­tions­fo­rum Inter­ak­tions­de­sign videos are online. Great talks from one year ago – find my old com­ments here.

The ECTEL 08 web­page is online. I take credit for the clean design and the ani­mal theme – maybe a bit unex­pected for a tech­nol­ogy enhanced learn­ing con­fer­ence, but I found it fit the motto quite well.

Thanks to Marco Kalz and Mar­cus Specht for the great coop­er­a­tion, and espe­cially for rec­om­mend­ing dru­pal.

Call for papers (April 1st)

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”

Although fin­ished already over a week ago, some words on the Inno­va­tions­fo­rum Inter­ak­tions­de­sign orga­nized by the Inter­face Design Pro­gram at FH Pots­dam (where I hap­pen to study). To put it short: It was a blast!

Espe­cially remarkable:

• The design con­cept of the con­fer­ence itself: excel­lently con­ceived and exe­cuted with love to detail. See monomo for some pic­tures. Props and respect to for­m­dusche

• The line-up was really impres­sive — find com­plete cov­er­age of the talks at wmmna. Lots of pic­tures also on flickr, espe­cially James King’s scrib­bled cov­er­age of some of the talks — here’s the one of the 10 minute talk I gave together with Fabian at the student’s panel:

• Bruce Sterling’s talk was, as expected, “some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent” and he really hit the nail on the head a cou­ple of times:

Never think­ing about it again is the ideal rela­tion­ship of a nor­mal human being and an object. That is the oppo­site of how design­ers think. I real­ized this when I was teach­ing at Art Cen­ter Col­lege of Design. My stu­dents were doing media design, some of them, and very com­monly they would come out with some gizmo on a neck pen­dant. “See, the user wears this large device dan­gling around his neck, and…“ “No,” I would tell them, “your design project is not hung around the user’s neck. The user has other uses for his neck. This project is hung around YOUR neck. You’re the designer, you’re the one who has to obsess about the device, not them.” You obsess MORE. Let them obsess LESS.

Read Shap­ing Things if you haven’t yet.

Other than that, Anthony Dunne, Bernard Kerr and Tim Edler really impressed me.

An inspir­ing event, I wish we could have that every year!