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Gary Flake + Pivot: Surfing the Web as a Web

2010-03-05T22:09:26Z

Gary Flake of Microsoft gave a great demo of Pivot at TED last month that very quickly exposes how powerful navigating through data can be. I've been struggling for hours to think of something poignant to say about this, but the video does a better job than I ever could, so I'll let it speak for itself.

Sarkissian Mason Redesign

2010-02-23T22:51:24Z

New York agency Sarkissian Mason just relaunched their website with a combination worship/slam of data gathering and analysis.

The firm wired up their office with a bunch of sensors, tied them together using Arduino, and are publishing the real-time results of their data gathering on their homepage, providing a peek at various metrics about life at the firm. It would seem that by doing so, they are implying that the gathering and analysis of data is relevant to creativity. Not so, however. If you watch their "behind the scenes" video, they clearly state that gathering numbers doesn't lead to better ideas. I strongly disagree. While it isn't enough to just gather data and look at it in order to come up with better ideas, data gathering and visualization can certainly give people the insights needed to make better decisions as well as provide inspiration for great ideas.

Either way, the site totally works.

Food Environment Atlas

2010-02-22T17:00:31Z

The USDA just released a new tool called Your Food Environment Atlas which is essentially a giant interactive mapping data visualization about food in the US. It is a county-by-county mapping tool that draws data from USDA's Economic Research Service and mixes 90 different sets of data about Food Choices, Health and Well-Being and Community Characteristics (such as demographic, income and amenities data).

Users of the service can look at the data in a few ways: they can create maps showing the data across all counties, they can view all of the county-level data for any individual county, or they can create maps of counties sharing the same degree of multiple-indicators, potentially revealing hidden relationships between various data values. For example, the map

shown is a plot of counties with high obesity rates and a relatively high occurrence of convenience stores with gas, which as you can see has almost no correlation.

I really love how transparent our current government is becoming and look forward to seeing how people integrate this data with other sets currently available. Now, if they can just get a designer in there to make this thing more pretty, it would be even better.

Four Ways of Looking at Twitter via HBR

2010-02-22T13:57:43Z

More than just transforming data into practical information, Jeff Clark has made data visualization "cool" with his twitter-based interactive infographics. Highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review online article, Clark is a computer programmer whose brilliance is manifested through his discerning research and ability to translate the results graphically.

Featured in the article are four of Clark's Twitter infographics--TwitterVenn, Twitter Spectrum, TwitterArcs and StreamGraph (shown below).

While the graphs are both beautiful and accurate, one of the major concerns is using java as this language is particularly slow.

Regardless, Clark is paving the way for how we use and view information, especially relating to business and social activity. Read more about his data visualizations and see more stunning examples from his website.

Noteput: Blending Digital and Physical to Teach Music Notation

2010-02-16T19:48:59Z

German Jonas Heuer has prototyped a rather simple, yet compelling, example of a physical/digital interactive machine to teach people about music. The Noteput allows users to physically place giant notes on a screen showing a musical scale and then plays the music accordingly.

As he describes it, the Noteput was designed to combine as many of the senses as possible -- touch, sight and sound in this case. As someone who has forgotten how to read music, I could certainly see playing with this for hours on end.

NYC BigApps Winners Announced

2010-02-05T07:00:42Z

NYC BigApps is a contest to drive innovation in software that can help the city of New York become more sustainable through transparency, accessibility and accountability. The requirements were simple: write an web-based app that utilizes data from the NYC.gov "Data Mine" -- a catalog of sets of public data produced by local agencies.

The content awards $20K in cash prizes to 13 winners announced tonight. I know a lot of the judges and I think they did a great job acknowledging some really good entries. Personally, I think Trees Near You and WayFinder are the best of the best. Core77 has some in-depth reporting on these and other winners.

Imogen Heap and Her Interactive Dress

2010-02-04T20:08:02Z

Last weekend, at the Grammy's, Imogen Heap wore was was called a "Twitdress", a dress with an attached monitor that supposedly displayed tweets in real-time. The screen was so small and hidden during the broadcast that it was difficult, if not impossible, to tell if it was working but it sure looked interesting. While this wasn't the best example of how to infuse an outfit with technology, given the size of the viewing audience, might be the most exposed example of interactive fashion in the world. The parasol-as-wifi-antenna was a particularly inspired touch.

She wore the dress as she accepted the (appropriate) award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Not only does she have 1.3 million followers, she's embraced the digital age by inviting her fans and followers to provide feedback, remixes and lyrics ideas.

David Young on Muriel Cooper

2010-02-02T19:10:37Z

David Young and I both got graduate degrees from the MIT Media Lab. We studied at the Visible Language Workshop under the extremely influential Muriel Cooper. Today David blogged about his feelings about Muriel and they are so in line with my own, I just had to link to it. My time at the Lab set me on the path I am on today and I, like David, miss Muriel too. He's also motivated me to dig up my old tapes from those years and get them online soon. In the mean time, watch this:

Maison Hermes by Tokujin Yoshioka

2010-01-27T18:05:38Z

Thanks to designboom and pixelsumo, I got to see this amazing video by Tokujin Yoshioka for Maison Hermes. The combination of digital video and fans make an incredible illusion that blends wit, grace, digital and physical. File under "I wish I had made this."

New Zealand Night Lights - Yes Yes No? Yes!

2010-01-27T17:52:58Z

Night Lights is an interactive installation that uses the body, hands and a phone for a massive and colorful game of charades. Staged at Aukland's Ferry Building, the project is the upshot of a joint effort among four creative agencies and the public audience.

Using software created in openFrameworks by YesYesNo, the team projected a sequence of six scenes every hour onto the building's facade over the course of five days. Created for the rebranding of Telecom New Zeland, the project transformed the city's main transportation hub into an exciting display of lights.

The software created for the project is currently being prepared for Open Source release. Living in NY, with so many large buildings, makes me now see every facade as a canvas...

The 2009 Feltron Annual Report

2010-01-25T21:44:54Z

Clearly a person who loves data visualization and thoroughly understands the power of illustrating personal tracking, infographic designer Nicholas Felton released his fifth annual report, the culmination of yet another year's worth of data accretion and (according to his Facebook status) well over 200 hours of labor. With The 2009 Feltron Annual Report, Felton stepped up his game a sizable notch by creating his first ever crowd-sourced report, enlisting the help of relatives, friends, colleagues and even his dentist.

Calling daily on the people he met who he felt "had discerned enough of my personality and activities" to submit a record of the encounter through an online survey, the designer tracked responses and used his own subjective analysis to come up with the data set. While Felton acknowledges the variations in accuracy his methods produce, he explains that he "strives to sort and collate the data in a clinical and repeatable manner that could be reproduced by someone looking for the same stories I have selected. "

Felton also notes that the volume of data was so unwieldy it could have easily spiraled into several more reports. To manage all of the information (and keep his sanity), he enlisted the help of such tools as Processing and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The final product once again makes an intriguingly elegant representation of an individual's activities over the course of a year--this time recorded under the surveillance of his peers.

La Vitrine by Moment Factory and Photonic Dreams

2010-01-25T21:41:47Z

Created in August of 2009 in Montreal, this reactive video wall was designed and produced by Moment Factory, known in the industry for designing incredible productions for clients as diverse as Cirque de Soleil, the United Nations and Nine Inch Nails. Called North America's first large-scale permanent outdoor reactive wall, the project was originally supposed to be a temporary installation but was so popular, it has become a permanent fixture. I say that's a good move.

Tweeting Tasti D-Lite Earns Rewards

2010-01-25T19:36:07Z

Image via Wikipedia

They won't tell you what it's made of, but Tasti D-Lite recently started a new program to reward customers who update their social networks with the brand name. The frozen dessert chain just launched which ties customers' current TastiRewards loyalty cards to Twitter and Foursquare by registering at new site MyTasti.com.

Each time a purchase activity is shared, the customer earns points. It takes between 10 and 50 updates to earn a free cup or cone. 10 of the company's 47 stores across the nation are using the program, with more to come as the weather turns warmer.

I Love My Fitbit

2010-01-19T03:02:18Z

After about 7 months of patient waiting, my Fitbit finally showed up late last week. I've finally figured out how it works best for me and I couldn't be happier. It is tiny and elegant, just like the marketing copy on the website promised. As I use it, I'll start to convey my experiences. Now I just need to get a Philips Digital Life, Withings scale and Samsung MyFit and I'll be all set with my bioinformatics for 2010...

Below is my calorie-burning chart for today:

Ben Fry Hiring

2010-01-17T16:11:33Z

Ben Fry, visualization superstar and co-creator of Processing started a new company a few weeks ago and is looking to hire people. His recent project, the award-winning "On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces," should give you an example of the types of things that his new company will be doing. He's looking for designers, programmers and more, so if you or someone you know is interested, get them in touch with Ben.