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 :)

Just a quick pointer to three inter­est­ing papers about the trends in and mod­els of infor­ma­tion visualization:

Andrea Lau and Andrew Vande Moere

Towards a Model of Infor­ma­tion Aes­thet­ics in Infor­ma­tion Visualization

This paper pro­poses a model of infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics in the con­text of infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion. It addresses the need to acknowl­edge a recently emerg­ing num­ber of visu­al­iza­tion projects that com­bine infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques with prin­ci­ples of cre­ative design. The pro­posed model con­tributes to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics as a poten­tially inde­pen­dent research field within visu­al­iza­tion that specif­i­cally focuses on the expe­ri­ence of aes­thet­ics, dataset inter­pre­ta­tion and inter­ac­tion. The pro­posed model is based on analysing exist­ing visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques by their inter­pre­ta­tive intent and data map­ping inspi­ra­tion. It reveals infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics as the con­cep­tual link between infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion and visu­al­iza­tion art, and includes the fields of social and ambi­ent visu­al­iza­tion. This model is unique in its focus on aes­thet­ics as the artis­tic influ­ence on the tech­ni­cal imple­men­ta­tion and intended pur­pose of a visu­al­iza­tion tech­nique, rather than sub­jec­tive aes­thetic judg­ments of the visu­al­iza­tion out­come. This research pro­vides a frame­work for under­stand­ing aes­thet­ics in visu­al­iza­tion, and allows for new design guide­lines and review­ing criteria.

While I find the tri­an­gle model based on Data, Inter­ac­tion and Aes­thet­ics quite enlight­en­ing and use­ful, I am not so con­vinced of the data focus and map­ping focus clas­si­fi­ca­tion. Any­ways a great paper.

Robert Kosara

Visu­al­iza­tion Crit­i­cism – The Miss­ing Link Between Infor­ma­tion Visu­al­iza­tion and Art

Inter­est­ing points, espe­cially the claim that we need to think about frame­works to crit­i­cize infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion exam­ples and tech­niques from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. The pre­sented model, how­ever, is quite sim­plis­tic, focussing on read­abil­ity and rec­og­niz­abil­ity, and based on that, a one–dimensional and —from my perspective—too shal­low dis­tinc­tion of prag­matic vs. artis­tic approaches.

Fer­nanda B. Vié­gas and Mar­tin Wattenberg

Artis­tic Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Beyond Visual Analytics

A nice overview of not strictly ana­lytic approaches to infor­ma­tion visualization.

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!

I have been sub­scribed to the indexed blog for a cou­ple of weeks now and really, it never ceases to amaze me. Hands down, this is one of the most funny, orig­i­nal and yet deep­est blogs I have seen.

The con­cept is sim­ple: lit­tle sto­ries or facts about life are told with info­graph­ics drawn on index cards (which I love any­ways). Its amaz­ing how much laughs or “true, true“s you can get out of lit­tle Venn or axis diagrams:

Reminds me also of the won­der­ful Facts of life by Pippo Lionni.

I am cur­rently orga­niz­ing my lit­er­a­ture on tag­ging. When I started with research on that topic about a year ago, you could count the num­ber of sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions on one hand. Over the cur­rent year, how­ever, the num­ber of papers on this topic has sky-rocketed, which makes the whole area hard to over­see at the moment.

I will start with an overview of my sub­jec­tive must-reads for now (all linked to citeulike):

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