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.

I am excited to announce the fol­low­ing sym­po­sium at FH Potsdam:

The sym­po­sium »Liv­ing with Infor­ma­tion: Archi­tec­ture and Visu­al­iza­tion« (Octo­ber 16 , 2009 at FH Pots­dam) will jux­ta­pose expe­ri­ences and results from the MACE project with thoughts and design approaches from prac­ti­tion­ers in the fields of design, archi­tec­ture and tech­nol­ogy. Guided by five cen­tral ques­tions, we will explore future trends in infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion, the rela­tion­ship of visu­al­iza­tion tools and cre­ativ­ity plus issues like infor­ma­tion over– and underload.

I am really look­ing for­ward to the unique speaker com­bi­na­tion we put together:

• Miguel Car­doso from bes­tiario,
• Paolo Ciuc­carelli from Politec­nico Milano /den­sity design,
• Georgi Kobi­larov from FU Berlin / dbpe­dia,
• Nor­bert Palz (CV + info) and
• Andrew Vande Moere from infosthetics.com!

In addi­tion, Prof. Boris Müller and I will pro­vide a rear-mirror view and out­look of our activ­i­ties related to the MACE project… A wide spec­trum, but hope­fully all held together by the cen­tral issue of the work­shop and the five ques­tions we pre­pared for the speakers.

Hope to see you there – reg­is­ter soon — space is limited!

On a related note, the Potsdam–based W3C office opens on the day before, which should be quite inter­est­ing, too.

I just came back from the great work­shop “The Scent of Infor­ma­tion” orga­nized by the visu­al­iza­tion gang from LBI Linz. (pro­gram + live-blog) Here are the slides from my talk. Basi­cally, I was pre­sent­ing Andrew vande Moere’s and Andrea Lau’s tri­an­gle model of infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics, and showed mostly well-formed.eigenfactor and briefly some of my the­sis work.

I will have a ses­sion at Viz­Think ’08 about visual tools for the socio-semantic web.

You can find a pod­cast inter­view with me about the ses­sion and ongo­ing work here.

The (pre­lim­i­nary) ses­sion abstract reads

In this break-out ses­sion at Viz­Think 08, Moritz Ste­faner will present visual strate­gies to under­stand and dis­cuss emer­gent infor­ma­tion archi­tec­tures in the web. Phe­nom­ena like the main­stream acknowl­edge­ment of the web as a social plat­form, and the first steps towards a seman­tic web (as envi­sioned by Tim Berners-Lee a decade ago) demand for new approaches to infor­ma­tion han­dling. Fol­low­ing the research agenda for web sci­ence, visu­al­iza­tion can not only help to under­stand these emrg­ing struc­tures, but also to shape and steer inter­face design. We will dis­cuss and crit­i­cize exist­ing and cutting-edge approaches to search and brows­ing of resources and the visu­al­iza­tion of con­cep­tual structures.

So, I planned to show some of my the­sis work, and on-going work like the MACE project, and make some gen­eral posi­tions state­ments about where things should head in this area. But the rest is pretty open – for those attend­ing – what are you inter­ested in? Happy about short comments!

Btw: If you plan to reg­is­ter, use the dis­count code DCFF23 to get 50 € discount!