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 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?

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.

(PDF version here, more info here)

Based on citation patterns, they calculated an information flow model of how scientific disciplines are influencing each other. While I cannot follow all the technical details, I really appreciate the well-designed diagrams. Quite interesting to see an “a posteriori” order of scientific disciplines based on the actual flow of information!

An explanation of the diagrams from the eigenfactor.org:

Orange circles represent fields, with larger, darker circles indicating larger field size as measured by eigenfactor. Blue arrows represent citation flow between fields. An arrow from field A to field B indicates citation traffic from A to B, with larger, darker arrows indicating higher citation volume.

The map was creating using our information flow method for mapping large networks. Using data from Thomson Scientific’s 2004 Journal Citation Reports (JCR), we partitioned 6128 journals connected by 6,434,916 citations into 88 modules. For visual simplcity, we show only the most important links, namely those that a random surfer traverses at least once in 5000 steps, and the modules that are connected by these links.

There is also an interactive version online based on my good old Relation Browser. But honestly, I think the diagrams work much better.

Overall a great example of interdisciplinary research, where presentation and information design play together nicely with interesting+relevant analysis – exemplary!

For this purpose, I started to map all institutions and people that could be candidates or helpful or interesting to meet on Google maps.

I am not 100% clear about both the mode and the scope of the thesis. But I think it is safe to say I would love to advance design research in visualization of the social web.

If you - prosumer you are - have any additional ideas of who I could get in touch with, or could even imagine supervising my thesis, I would be very happy about additional spots on the map or a little comment here. Thanks!

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 :)

Congratulations to Christian for another yummy Master’s thesis from FH Potsdam: The Form of Facts and Figures. He collected, organized and commented on a variety of information design and visualization patterns.

I do hope he will put a pdf online!

More visualization videos! The See#3 conference organized by Scholz&Volkmer took place in Wiesbaden this weekend, and luckily the streams are online. The speaker list includes Dr. Fritz Reusswig, Frank van Ham, Ben Fry, Julien de Smedt, Zachary Lieberman + Bruce Sterling.

For the EU project MACE, I have been experimenting with hierarchical visualizations.
Just the quick link for now, I hope I find the time to share some of the background and findings later…

On a related note: 9 days left to hand in your papers and take part in a great conference this autumn!

Here are the slides (german). Most of the external references are linked (click on the pictures).

Thanks to Mario Röhrle and Dietmar Offenhuber for the invitation!