On the occa­sion of the recent fifth birth­day of infosthetics.com blog, your pre­mier source for fresh projects from visu­al­iza­tion and infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics, I made a cus­tom adap­ta­tion of the elas­tic lists prin­ci­ple for the – up to now – 1950 posts of the site. Try it out, and read more about it here.

Happy birth­day infosthetics!

Finally, the videos from our “Liv­ing with infor­ma­tion” work­shop are up. Find below my two favorites: Andrew Vande Moere for the best sto­ries and Paolo Ciuc­carelli for the most beau­ti­ful slides ever. Enjoy!

Andrew Vande Moere from FHP Inter­face Design on Vimeo.

Paolo Ciuc­carelli from FHP Inter­face Design on Vimeo.

Find the whole album here.

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!

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.

This month’s WIRED UK mag­a­zine fea­tures a remix of one of the well-formed.eigenfactor visu­al­iza­tions in their info­porn section.

Together with my col­leagues in Seat­tle and Umea, I mod­i­fied the “change over time” visu­al­iza­tion to tell a spe­cific story: The for­ma­tion of neu­ro­science as a field of its own right over the last decade. Orig­i­nally scat­tered across related dis­ci­plines (such as med­i­cine, mol­e­c­u­lar and cell biol­ogy or neu­rol­ogy), the neu­ro­sci­en­tific jour­nals start to define a niche of their own, reflected in the dense clus­ter emerg­ing in 2005.

Down­load a larger ver­sion with full explana­tory text here: png (1MB) pdf (4MB)

And here is some more in depth info: (more…)

Here’s a new project of mine:

X by Y visu­al­izes all sub­mis­sions to the prix ars elec­tron­ica, from the early begin­nings in 1987 up to 2009. The goal is to char­ac­ter­ize the “ars world” in quan­ti­ta­tive terms. A series of dia­grams groups and jux­ta­poses the sub­mis­sions by years, cat­e­gories, prizes and coun­tries. The graph­ics are com­posed of lit­tle dots (each rep­re­sent­ing a sin­gle sub­mis­sion) to pro­vide a visual scale for the sta­tis­ti­cal state­ments and the­ma­tize the rela­tion of the total­ity and the individual.

Their place­ment is com­puted with a Fibonacci series, imi­tat­ing the arrange­ment of sun­flower seeds – a very effi­cient and visu­ally mes­mer­iz­ing way of pack­ing small ele­ments into a large cir­cle. Color dis­tin­guishes the sub­mis­sion cat­e­gories, and a dia­mond shape marks sub­mis­sion that have been awarded a prize. The num­bers in the cen­ter of the dia­gram ele­ments are con­structed by skip­ping points in the pat­tern – estab­lish­ing a tight con­nec­tion between the num­ber and the indi­vid­u­als, but also demon­strat­ing the dual­ity of the two concepts.

The project is cur­rently at dis­play at the his­tory lounge of ars elec­tron­ica 09.

The project was done in coop­er­a­tion with the Lud­wig Boltz­mann Insti­tute for media.art.research. Find all dia­grams and some more info here: X by Y. Also, don’t miss the other works on the poster over at vis.mediaartresearch.at.

SIGGRAPH 2009 is over. Tra­di­tion­ally renowned as a graph­ics geek fest, with a focus on 3D and ani­ma­tion, I was not sur­prised to hear “GPU” in every sec­ond over­heard sen­tence. But there is also the other side of SIGGRAPH: the art exhi­bi­tions, the emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies exhi­bi­tion and the freshly intro­duced infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics pro­gram with talks, a panel and an exhi­bi­tion. I was present there with the well-formed.eigenfactor project and also had the chance to give a lit­tle talk.

(more…)

At the moment, I am dig­ging through a cou­ple of data­bases for an upcom­ing project. I did not really find a tool to quickly get an overview over a large set of cat­e­gor­i­cal data. So I decided to roll my own and write a lit­tle node­box script that walks over a CSV file, deter­mines all the unique value attrib­utes, counts how often they occur and plots the out­put as an area chart. The tool is good for get­ting a quick overview of cat­e­gor­i­cal data, esp. miss­ing val­ues and the data diversity.

Down­load the dbcounter script includ­ing a sam­ple data set of the Titanic pas­sen­gers. (needs node­box — OS X only)

Sam­ple pdf output

On a related note, you can also use the freshly released Par­al­lel Sets appli­ca­tion by Robert Kosara to deter­mine rela­tion­ships between the attrib­utes. But that’s step 2 :)

On another related note, I can­not stress enough how awe­some python is.

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!

Just came across an inter­est­ing diploma the­sis by Daniel A. Becker, super­vised by Prof. Johannes Bergerhausen:

RANDOM WALK

WHAT DOES RANDOMNESS LOOK LIKE? RANDOM WALK asks this ques­tion and presents exper­i­ments in math­e­mat­ics and physics, show­ing the mys­te­ri­ous inter­ac­tion of chaos and order in ran­dom­ness. The project RANDOM WALK sim­u­lates ran­dom­ness in visu­al­iza­tions, which are easy to under­stand. In this way, it deliv­ers insight into a phe­nom­e­non, which has so far remained unexplained.