16 January, 2009
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR YOU
DIGITAL ROAM
Napkin Dad’s Book of Absorbent Ideas JAN 16, 2009 06:05P.M. David Horton from the University of Oklahoma alerted me to this inspiring back-of-the-napkin story from the Tulsa World.
That was ten years ago. He never expected his daughters to keep the napkins, but to his surprise they did. Now his collection is available for all to see and enjoy on Marty’s Flickr stream.
Many years ago, then unemployed art director Marty Coleman started to draw simple pictures on the napkins that he included in his daughters’ school lunch bags. He found that these disposable miniature artworks not only made his daughters happy with a daily surprise, creating them also helped him get through the hard times.
It’s a great story, and the napkins are magnificent!
INFOGRAPHICS NEWS
A plane, a river and many graphics JAN 16, 2009 05:12P.M. A plane ‘landed’ yesterday on the Hudson river. Yesterday, at 23.30 more or less (spanish time, 17.30 NY time) I knew about the crash. It was my free day and I was disconnected from reality. When I went to bed, 30 minutes later, I didn’t see any locator or graphic explaining the facts (I did no big research, anyway). The nearest I found from graphic was a post by Charles Blow, without graphic, but some different data.
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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR YOU
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I did a research this morning, 10 AM spanish time, 4 AM US east coast time. NYTIMES.COM A simple but almost perfect graphic. Just with the information I wanted to know in a very clear way. I could be not very espectacular, but it says exactly what they want to say. They had to be the best because they are the reference and it happened in their city. Clic on images to access the graphic (notice that graphics may have change since I wrote that, that’s the good thing of online graphics, they’re on a constant update)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE Another Google Maps with reference points (maybe not on the exact places, because it could be difficult to to turn 90 degrees a plane after crashing with the birds) and includes a tool to calculate the distance you are from the crash place. It’s a curiosity, but maybe not very useful if you don’t live in NY.
They also include little static locators in the news page. CNN Animation with Google Earth to explain the accident. Something useful for both web and tv channel. Embedded video from CNN Video LOS ANGELES TIMES Google Maps with reference points and time. Maybe too little for such big web and with the whole day to react.
BOSTON GLOBE Online graphic that I didn’t found on my first research, but very complete, simiar style of the NY Times, and without the same resources, which is very important.
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top 100, Wired for 9 and Gawker for 9. I’d be interested in looking at the sister linking between sites in these networks. Another part of this signal is to do with comment spam. The more popular the blog, the more important it is that the authors have control over spam.
INFORMATION DESIGN WATCH
Gerrymander Away JAN 16, 2009 03:39P.M. Computers have arguably made the gerrymandering of U.S. Congressional Districts easier and more egregious. They should be able to make the problem go away. That is, if anyone can figure out an algorithm:
And it’s not the first breaking news they have to cover these last days.
…it is surprisingly hard to define, or at least reduce to a set of rules, what a “gerrymandered district” is. Writing a formula for drawing districts requires us to define how funny-looking is too funny looking. And what is funny, anyway?
DATA MINING: TEXT MINING, VISUALIZATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Where’s the US Airways Hudson Crash Video?
“The idea is that circles are the best shape for districts,” said George Washington University’s Daniel Ullman, talking about one school of thought. “Unfortunately, they don’t tessellate well.” This was apparently a joke, because the room burst out laughing. For the rest of the afternoon, the word tessellate never failed to produce giggles. (Tessellate means to tile together, as in an M.C. Escher drawing.)
JAN 16, 2009 04:34P.M. With all the talk about how social media, twitter, etc. is going to revolutionize reporting - or rather, the collection of potentially newsworthy information - where is the video of the US Airways crash on the Hudson? I don’t mean the video of it sitting in the river, or videos of other water crash landings. Huff seems to be collecting plenty of content, but as yet the video-most-likely-to-get-viewers-to-your-screen has not surfaced. Of course, that hasn’t stopped SEO types and spammers from trying to make you think that they have it.
Mathematicians and lawyers are focused the importance of improving the reapportioning process coming up in just under two years. Another use of their analysis is simpler – to find the worst offenders and shame the politicians that put them in place. Is this too funny looking?
It’s also an interesting challenge for search. I don’t want a video on a page about the crash, or a video of some other crash, ...
DATA MINING: TEXT MINING, VISUALIZATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Blog Hosting Statistics JAN 16, 2009 04:23P.M. Pingdom has published some interesting statistics regarding the use of different blogging platforms and technologies within the Technorati top 100. There are interesting not just due to the basic distributional data (Wordpress accounts for 27 of the top 100, MT for 8, Typepad for 16, Blogger for 3) but also in what the report reveals about how Technorati computes the top 100. For example, Weblogs, Inc. accounts for 14 of the
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16 January, 2009
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Hudson River Landing
Experience Design for Interactive Products
JAN 16, 2009 01:55P.M.
JAN 16, 2009 01:18P.M.
Twitter Venn gives us an interesting perspective on what people are saying about the recent plane crash landing on the Hudson River. The first diagram clearly shows that people think the pilot was a hero. The second shows that despite this, the event is most often discussed in terms of being a ‘miracle’ rather than a result of pilot ‘skill’.
Designing Technology Augmented Urban Playgrounds for Girls - “Recent technological developments have made it possible to apply experience design also in the field of highly interactive product design, an area where involvement of non-trivial technology traditionally made it impossible to implement quick design cycles. With the availability of modular sensor and actuator kits, designers are able to quickly build interactive prototypes and realize more design cycles. In this paper we present a design process that includes experience design for the design of interactive products. The design process was developed for a master level course in product design. In addition, we discuss several cases from this course, applying the process to designing engaging interactive urban
NEOFORMIX
You can click on either image to load the application and try out other combinations.
playgrounds.” (Aadjan van der Helm et al.)
COOL INFOGRAPHICS
Long Weekends Calendar JAN 16, 2009 12:59P.M.
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THE VISUAL LINGUIST The Long Weekends Calendar was created by thenonhacker (Alwyn Balingit) and posted on DeviantArt.com. By plotting the holidays in both the U.S. and the Philippines, he has mapped out all the long weekends that need to be considered when creating project timelines involving people in both countries.
“Visual literacy” JAN 16, 2009 06:30A.M. The phrase “visual literacy” is one that is often bandied about these days, and has begun to grate on my nerves a bit — if only because it is a bit vague and vacuous in meaning. The phrase at this point is basically being used to mean a familiarity with anything that is an image and (usually) not text. However, what kind of “literacy” is this exactly? The range of
It’s also good to plan vacation time... Great job Alwyn!
things covered by this term
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN EAGEREYES.ORG
I am no longer an IAI Board member
A Better Vis Web Community JAN 16, 2009 05:01A.M.
JAN 16, 2009 12:18P.M. “The official IAI announcement will say Because of personal and professional reasons, our fellow board member Peter Boersma has decided to resign his position on the IAI board. Here’s some explanation around that phrase.” (Peter Boersma - BEEP)
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Game Mechanics for Interaction Design JAN 16, 2009 11:45A.M.
When I look around my little corner of the Internet, I see a few other people doing related stuff, but I also see a lot of unrealized potential. Why are there so few people in the visualization community who run a website? Why are the most popular visualization-related sites almost entirely about pointing at colorful pictures done by others, rather than doing their own? And how can we get more original, quality visualization content on the web?
An Interview with Amy Jo Kim - “Game mechanics are a collection of tools and systems that an interactive designer can use to make an experience more fun and compelling. Used well, game mechanics make a Web design more engaging, sticky and viral by incentivizing certain behaviors. However, game mechanics are not a panacea: to be effective, the mechanics need to be integral to the experience.” (Joshua Porter Bokardo)
I recently came across two postings by Merlin Mann, the guy who runs the productivity website 43 Folders (and about a dozen others). They both really hit home with me and made me think a lot about why I do what I do and how I can make things more valuable. I recommend you read both of these postings before continuing, they are outstanding: Real Advice Hurts and Better. Quoting short sections of these postings or paraphrasing them would be exactly the opposite of what they say. They’re as long as they have to be, and they say what needs to be said. When I look around, I see a lot of visualization porn. The pretty, flashy mash-ups of something or other, depicting somebody’s life, citing information graphics in a commercial, or growing flowers from twitter feeds. Is that visualization? Is that what we want visualization to be? Is there no way to do things better?
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There are good examples. There’s Enrico Bertini’s thoughtful Visuale. There’s Stephen Few’s scathing and enjoyable Visual Business Intelligence. There’s Jorge Camoes’ Charts and Kaiser Fung’s Junk Charts. I’m also liking Jon Peltier’s PTS Blog more and more.
boiling, something set aside to cool for awhile, something in the deep freeze, and something being served. In fact I am still working on this list. If you see something with no explanation it’s because I haven’t finished writing the description yet :)
What all of these have in common (with the exception of Peltier) is that they only post occasionally, when they have something to say (yeah, I don’t care about the Excel technique posts on PTS, but that’s just me). Bertini posts every six months or so. His articles are long and well written. He doesn’t just point at what others are doing.
XBLOG: THE VISUAL THINKING WEBLOG
Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Standards Advisor
One problem we have is that most of the people in a position to contribute but don’t are academics. And for some reason, academics haven’t quite figured out this blogging thing yet. They’re afraid of telling others what they are thinking about. They’re scared that when they apply for their next job, somebody will find their website and use it against them. They feel that they can’t spare the time while they’re slogging away on their tenure case. As a consequence, there is very little thinking between all the pictures.
JAN 15, 2009 07:19P.M. “…Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Standards Advisor is a $49.99 extension for Adobe Dreamweaver. It includes two major interface 1. The Web Validator validates your HTML and CSS and verifies the proper use of microformats, including hCard and hCalendar, for single pages or entire websites.
I got interested in functional programming recently, and I’ve been following a few websites. In particular, there is Planet Haskell and Planet Scala (Planet is an open source feed aggregation script). Both have a lot of original, quality content. There is the occasional off-topic posting, but even those are usually well argued and interesting. I considered starting a Planet Visualization, but thinking of which sites to include made me abandon that project. While there is plenty of material, there just isn’t the quality.
2. The Web Standards Advisor checks for subtleties of standards compliance in nine different areas—everything from structural use of headings to proper ID, class, and 2. element use. Nonstandard practices are flagged and reported in the Dreamweaver Results panel for quick code correction. A full report with more details and suggested fixes is also generated.”
What I get out of running this website is satisfaction. There are two parts to that: reach and quality. I enjoy having lots of visitors to the site and subscribers to the feed. But I won’t sacrifice the quality of the material – or its mission. And the mission has to be more than finding the lowest-
XBLOG: THE VISUAL THINKING WEBLOG
All the ephemera that’s fit to print *
hanging fruit that can be sold as visualization. It needs to be better.
JAN 15, 2009 07:16P.M. XBLOG: THE VISUAL THINKING WEBLOG “Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 is a publication that’s been dropping through letter boxes over the last few days.
Dave Gray » Projects JAN 15, 2009 07:25P.M. Dave is the founder and president of XPLANE:
Russell and I thought it would be interesting to take some stuff from the internet and print it in a newspaper format. Words as well as pictures. Like a Daily Me, but slower. When we discovered that most newspaper printers will let you do a short run on their press (this was exactly the
I’m a project guy. As an artist, entrepreneur, educator and amateur philosopher, I always have a number of projects going, both personal and professional. Sometimes they go somewhere, sometimes I get bored and abandon them. One of the beauties of the internet is that even abandoned projects continue to exist and can be picked up or reenergized at any moment. Here’s the definitive list of projects that I am working on or have worked on in the past (A work in progress). The list is alphabetical because I don’t work on these projects in any kind of linear way. They are like a busy kitchen: there is always something simmering, something
same spec as the News Of The World) we decided to have some fun.”
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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR YOU
16 January, 2009
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
XBLOG: THE VISUAL THINKING WEBLOG
Three Questions to the Service Design World
Feltron Eight
JAN 15, 2009 01:35P.M.
The 2008 Feltron Annual Report is out!
JAN 14, 2009 02:36P.M.
“(1) How do we change our understanding of the design process in Service Innovation?; (2) What are the designer’s new roles while working with multiple stakeholders?; (3) How would design’s value be recognised and accepted by other disciplines in Service Knowledge?” (Qin - Design
VISUALE
Book Review: The Numerati
Generalist)
JAN 14, 2009 11:29A.M.
DELICIOUS/INFOSTHETICS
Instaviz: Graph Sketching for your iPhone JAN 15, 2009 05:41A.M. iPhone + visualization
DELICIOUS/INFOSTHETICS
Tropicana Fresh-Squeezed Tweets!
The Numerati are all the statisticians, computer scientists and analysts around the world who are analyzing tons of data to understand “us”. This is the main topic of this wonderful book written by Stephen Baker, a Business Week journalist.
JAN 15, 2009 05:36A.M. How did I miss this? (Or how did my readers miss this?)
The book is an easy read, written with a simple style that makes it accessible to everybody, and yet incredibly intriguing and informative for the knowledgeable reader.
THE CENTER FOR GRAPHIC FACILITATION
Stephen interviewed tens of researchers and entrepreneurs around the US and put into focus one of the major trends of our days: not only an incredible amount of data has been and is collected everyday around the world but we are also finally starting to “use” these data to let us understand relevant aspect of the human being. Health, Finance, Marketing, Policy, are only few examples of areas where data is collected and deeply analyzed everyday.
Facilitator U.: The Process is Always the Same JAN 14, 2009 05:49P.M. Sometimes the objective of a given session doesn’t go as planned. Things can be going just fine when suddenly, the unexpected happens and threatens your entire process. In my humble experience as a facilitator, I’ve learned to look forward to things “going wrong!” Why? Because, if they are handled well, they can present some of the richest learning or barrier-removing opportunities available. In fact, I’ve come to see these occurrences as gifts, offering my groups the chance to explore in ways I
Content The book is organized around 7 chapters: Worker, Shopper, Voter, Blogger, Terrorist, Patient, Lover, in which people is modeled under the lens of a specific stereotype.
could never have planned.
In Worker we are modeled according to our skills and the way we work. We meet people like Samer Takriti at IBM who is modeling about 300.000 IBM workers to understand the relationship between their
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16 January, 2009
skills and their performance and how to better allocate these skills in the company the same way we used to do with any other physical company asset.
The first issue the book raises is obviously privacy. I really liked the approach of Stephen Baker, equally distant from the excitement for the new opportunities brought by innovation and the potential for a supercontrolled society where drawing a full profile of ourselves is becoming worryingly easy. Any other technological shift in history came however with the promise of new advancement in human being together with novel problems (think about cars and pollution). Stephen asks the right questions to some of the researchers he met. The most interesting in terms of privacy is the one with Jeff Jonas who is “vehemently opposed to the use of statistical data mining to predict the next terrorist attack” because of the high risk of intrusion and false alarms. And yet he believes that this technology can both protect our freedom and our privacy at the same time. I think this is one of the biggest challenges of our time, to find the right balance between the opportunities for increased freedom and security and the risks of intrusion, control, and faulty conclusions in the analysis of our own data.
In Shopper we are modeled according to the things we buy. Researchers are analyzing the millions of transactions we make everyday in stores to understand what “type” of buyers we are. Raiyd Ghani, for instance, analyzes with his group at Accenture Technology Labs grocery store transactions to provide personalized suggestions to shoppers through the use of carts equipped with personal assistants. In Voter we are modeled according to ... to what? This is an impressive chapter because it demonstrates that we can be modeled in a given domain indirectly, using data that apparently has no connection with the subject matter. This is what Josh Gotbaum with his political firm Spotlight Analysis does. They provide detailed indications on swing voters based on data taken from large data companies like ChoicePoint and and Acxiom, who collect an incledible amount of data about us on almost every aspect of our life (scary?! :-)).
From a more scientific and technological point of view what strikes me is the relevance prediction has in all the application areas described in the book. In traditional data analysis, especially for those with a visualization background, the focus is on “understanding” what is in the data to build a mental model out of it and in “discovering” some special gems out of chaos. Yet, however, real world applications are more concerned with elaborating actionable solutions to run and test, and I have the impression that “prediction” lends itself better to this goal. Think about it, through the book’s examples, in workers the company wants to predict performance to put people in the right place, in shoppers the grocery store wants to predict what product can be sold to one specific customer to provide timely suggestions, in voter a political party wants to predict which population segment should be addresses with a targeted message to increase the chances they hit a group of swing voters, and so on. How do we, visual information designers and analysts, cope with this fact? Are we able to provide with our tools the same level of actionable knowledge or are we condemned to just describe things and hope that this information will be useful in some way?
In Blogger we are modeled according to our opinion. Yes, our opinion. There are companies like Umbria Communications which analyzes the blogosphere to understand the opinion trends of millions of bloggers on whatever interests a given company. If I want to track how people react to a new product put on the market Umbria can tell. In Terrorist we are modeled as potential terrorists or thieves. Here we meet people like Jeff Jonas, now at IBM, who helped casinos in Las Vegas sift through millions of internal records to single out suspect customers. And the same technology is used by In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA which invested in this technology, to cope with national security and counter terrorism. In Patient we are modeled according to our body signals and medical records. This is the chapter I most loved, not only for its humanitarian applications, but also for the cleverness of some solutions. Eric Dishman launched the home health division at Intel where they design smart sensors like the “magic carpet” that monitors weight an movements to monitor the health of patients and where they try to predict the onset of diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s by detecting suspect variations in the stream of data.
Implications for Visualization What is the role of visualization in the world of the Numerati. I think it is huge!!!
Finally, in Lover we are modeled according to our profile to find matches among us as potential lovers. We meet Helen Fisher, a Rutger’s University anthropologist, who devised an innovative method to find matches between people which is the basis of the Chemistry.com dating website. Her method goes well beyond simple matching of demographic data, it is based on her theory that we can be split in four groups where a specific hormone is predominant and that the best matches comes from complementary hormones.
First of all all the technologies used by the Numerati are to some extent prone to errors and they are always the results of continued refinement of the underlying model. Visualization can play a significant role in helping the modelers understand and test their models and explore their implication as they are applied to new data. Without such a level of interaction the risk is to build monstrous black-boxes that spit oracles we all have to follow without really knowing why. Another area where I see a large role of visualization is when mining is used in monitoring environments, where the timely detection and comprehension of the situation (more technically known
Reflections
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16 January, 2009
as the situational awareness problem) is important. We have a long and respected tradition of research for knowing what works best in terms of visual representation when visual saliency, detection and contextual information are at stake. Well designed visualizations that permit to get the most out of a screen in a matter of seconds are of paramount importance here, from the need to analyze terrorist attacks to the doctor monitoring a patient. A third potential I see for visualization is the need for personal data visualization. As these technologies develops, and the results of data analysis become more pervasive, I expect to see and increase in the need of managing personal data and the results of these analyzes by endusers. And how are we going to provide this information to the average person? Visualization can play a big role here and and again it would need to reinvent itself a bit. In this domain extremely simple and useful visualizations will be needed and some of them will be provided on nonstandard devices like TVs, cell phones, public displays. We need flexible and simple solutions to provide to the large public. So, in summary, the explosion of data analysis is good news for us! We have plenty of novel challenges to address. A somewhat silent mind shift is already going on underway ... I expect to see in the future an ever tighter integration of automatic mining technologies and visualization, as the recent Visual Analytics trend demonstrates after all.
INFOGRAPHICS NEWS
Best of 2008: Óscar Corvera picks JAN 14, 2009 09:27A.M. Óscar Corvera (La Prensa Gráfica, El Salvador) has been named on this blog already, and more than once. Now, he’s back to pick the bests graphics of the last year. “There are many impressing works by the way the graphic designers made them. An example are thee three graphics that fascintnated me when I saw them, because they show something different and encourage me being different.” 2. Beijing 2008 medals analysis (Público, Spain) Chiqui Esteban
1. Magallanes Penguin (Clarín)
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years. We compared the amount of votes obtained by the main political parties.”
3. 50 years of spacial exploration. (5W, National Geographic) 3. LPG presses “The aniversary of La Prensa Gráfica was the perfect excuse to make a complete infographic with the presses.”
And the best graphics made by OScar and the rest of the team (Jorge Contreras, René Rivas and Douglas Jarquín). 1. Oil crisis “The oil crisis punished all sectors during 2008. The graphic shows the chain of impacts on citizens and how the rise of oil affects his economy and stability.”
2. Electoral power “Some months before the elections at El Salvador, the journal wanted to show a statistical summary with the presidential results over the last 20
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DATA MINING: TEXT MINING, VISUALIZATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA
FOREST AND THE TREES
XML Attributes to Object Properties
Sleeper SlumDog JAN 14, 2009 05:14A.M.
JAN 13, 2009 11:41P.M. We heard about this movie from our good friend Todd a couple of weeks ago. I think he sniffed out a sleeper.
Now I can copy and paste this code instead of having to remember a.name().toString(); Anyway - this takes var x : XML = <node name=’Doug’ hadAGoodTimeSleddingOnSunday = ‘true’/> to o.name = “Doug”; o.hadAGoodTimeSleddingOnSunday = “true” //yup you’d want to type that as a Boolean. var o : Object = {}; var atts : XMLList = x.attributes(); for each (var a : XML in atts) { var propName : String = a.name().toString(); o[propName] = a.toXMLString(); }
Here’s an older post on another most excellent sleeper, The Illusionist.
INFORMATION DESIGN WATCH THE VISUAL LINGUIST
Bad Usability Calendar 2009
Anyone speak Croatian?
JAN 13, 2009 06:21P.M.
JAN 14, 2009 04:01A.M. For anyone out there that speaks Croatian or just wants to check it out for the sake of novelty, my article “Un-Defining ‘Comics’: Separating the Cultural from the Structural in ‘Comics’” (which was published in the IJOCA and the first chapter of my book Early Writings...”) has just been translated in the Croatian magazine Zarez. You can find it scanned and posted here (Scroll down to the second
XBLOG: THE VISUAL THINKING WEBLOG
Pretty Loaded JAN 14, 2009 01:34A.M. “Pretty Loaded is an archive of preloaders that preload other preloaders…which in turn reveal yet more preloaders. Copy that? It’s a tribute to a vanishing art form amid a constantly changing digital landscape. Created and curated by Big Spaceship.” Another January, another chance to grab the latest Bad Usability Calendar.
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INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
ALPHACHIMP STUDIO, INC.
Wireframes Magazine
Calma
JAN 13, 2009 02:43P.M.
JAN 13, 2009 03:18A.M.
“Oh come on don’t be shy. Do you have something to show off while documenting rich interaction, dynamic content, user flows, and web 2.0 wireframes? Please send me a sample and I will put it up. Also tell me who to credit and if you would like an optional link back.” (Jakub Linowski)
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Jesse James Garrett - The Lost IDEA 2008 Interview
My new favorite artist: Stephan Doitschinoff of Brazil!
JAN 13, 2009 10:51A.M.
See a video of the young artists as he composes spectacular murals and applies his extraordinary talent to emblazon houses, churches and walls in rural cities in his South American homeland. You can see his process, involving stencils, religious iconography, and styles referencing folk art, wood cuts, computer-generated gradients and comics.
“I think IA does have a future as a practice - the future of IA may not look like the present or past of IA, but if IA is the practice of the structuring of information for human understanding, well that’s never going to go away.” (Russ Unger - UserGlue)
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Subaquita has a great interview with the artist on his childhood in San Paulo, anchored on one side by a strict religious upbringing and on the other by the skater punk underground comic scene.
Pattern Browser JAN 13, 2009 09:29A.M. “This browser was produced by the Interface Design Team of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.” - courtesy of latebytes
TEMPORAL : The Art of Stephan Doitschinoff (aka Calma) from Jonathan LeVine Gallery on Vimeo.
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Bad Usability Calendar 2009
From Gestalten Press:
JAN 13, 2009 09:19A.M.
Stephan Doitschinoff’s street alias is Calma. This book with the same name documents the emblematic and spiritual paintings and murals that the Brazilian painter has emblazoned on houses, churches and walls in rural villages in his South American homeland.
“Here it is again! The (in)famous Bad Usability Calendar has featured 48 classic design mistakes in 13 different languages since 2005. Get it while it’s hot!” (NetLife Research) - courtesy of usabilitynews
Calma introduces the visual language of Brazilian painter and illustrator Stephan Doitschinoff, who finds his creative cadence in the realm between authentic urban art and rural spirituality. The title Calma is not only Stephan Doitschinoff‘s alias as a graffiti writer, but also the abbreviation of “con alma”
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(c’alma) in Latin, meaning “with soul”. His emblematic metaphoric imagery feeds off Afro-Brazilian folklore, pagan and alchemistic symbolism and contemporary pop culture.
world is a little village of 100 people. How many gays would be? And how many children will go to school? How many people would die per year? The web has very good things and some not-so-good (some data is told but not drawn, there’s no a general example on how the village would be with the 100 people,, some examples play with percentages instead of keeping the metaphor...), but anyway it keeps being a great way of funny pedagogy
FOREST AND THE TREES
Todd Anderson at Design Patterns (Flash and Beer)
Seen on infosthetics
JAN 13, 2009 01:21A.M. Todd Anderson will be speaking about Inversion of Control this week at the Design Patterns Group (or the Flash and Beer group). Todd spoke at MAX this year and co-wrote Air: Create, Modify, Reuse and The Flash 3 Cookbook. He is a Senior Software Engineer at Infrared5.
VIZTHINK BLOG
Amazing Facilitators and Content Lined Up for VizThink ‘09
This month’s meeting is a week late due to weather (safety first!!). Wednesday January 14, 7pm at Brightcove top floor.
JAN 12, 2009 03:46P.M.
Map here. This month’s beers: Dogfish Head, Spaten, La Chouffe, and whatever looks good at the store on my way to the meeting.
INFOGRAPHICS NEWS
A village of 100 people JAN 12, 2009 10:29P.M.
We have a great slate of facilitators and content lined up for VizThink ‘09. We’ve brought back some of your favorites like Nancy Duarte, Karl Gude, and Dan Roam with all new content. We’ve got industry leaders and gurus like Dave Gray, Bob Horn, and Lance Dublin back again to share their expertise. Plus, all new amazing facilitators such as Sunni Brown, Eileen Clegg, Brian Friedlander, Jessica Hagy, Jerry Michalski, and Colin Ware. In total, we have over 40 people who volunteered their time and their expertise to make this the most amazing visual thinking conference ever. Here are just some of the topics you can expect to see in San Jose: 3D Visualization Assistive Technology Using Visualization Visualization and Autism Strategy Visualization Graphic Recording Geospatial Mapping Avatars Mind Mapping Visual Facilitation Online Information Design
I’m a big fan of graphics that try to convert macrostatistics in something more affordable. And a good example of that is the web A Village of 100 people, which takes world statistics and shrink them to the hypothesis that the whole
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Visual Storytelling Data Visualization and much, much more… For more details on the sessions and the schedule, check out our conference wiki. It’s updated almost daily with new content. We have 41 days left until the event in San Jose. Be sure to register now so you’ll be sure to reserve your space and not miss this exciting conference.
INFORMATION DESIGN WATCH
Ahead of Our Time? JAN 12, 2009 03:24P.M. A while back Bungie.net, the makers of the Halo series of games, started tracking data on their servers about how their different online multiplayer maps are preforming. They converted the data on kills and deaths in the multiplayer games into heatmaps, and then started publishing the maps online for everyone to see.
I came across this video recently titled “Did You Know” that was created by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and XPLANE. It reminded me of a project dD created almost 8 years prior called “Global Village”. I dug around in our archive and after some careful cross converting and video capturing (the first generation ActionScript didn’t want to play nice), I was able to resurrect the presentation. Some of the sound effects were lost due to the age of the file but it’s enough to show the similarities between the two. It’s not as fancy as the 2007 “Did You Know” but the way the visual statistics are represented has much more of an impact. Have a look…
The advantages to players are that you can see places to avoid (areas with the highest deaths), and the locations from where the most kills come from. The map above shows the total data for the map called The Pit. But you can narrow down the information based on the type of weapon used. For example the map below shows the locations of the kills made with the sniper rifle. Meaning that shooting from these locations have been the most successful. (Also helpful if you keep getting killed by snipers and can’t find them)
“Global Village” 1999-2000 “Did You Know” 2007
COOL INFOGRAPHICS
Halo 3 HeatMaps JAN 12, 2009 12:28P.M.
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The last of my criteria is that the infographic has to be innovative. Although if the infographic doesn’t fit the criteria above, innovation alone is not enough.” And here they are: 1. USA and Iraq. The New York Times
“Heatmaps are the Doppler Radar System of Death in Halo 3. We’re tracking encounters, weapons used and their results in a given game, collecting that data and sharing it with players visually. The key here is ‘the darker the red, the more frequent the deaths (or kills, depending on the parameters)’,” Bungie explains in its weekly update. Kabitis says: “Using only two flags in three rows the graphic manages to tell the story of a war” INFOGRAPHICS NEWS
I must say that in my opinion this is an illustration and not an infographic, but if someones consider it a graphic, it enters in the show.
Best of 2008: Kabitis Dimitris picks
2. The first walk on the Moon . NASA
JAN 12, 2009 12:20P.M. Kabitis studies Communication and Mass Media in the University of Athens (Greece). But also works at the Eleftheros Tipos’ infographics department since 2007. These are criteria he followed in his own words: “First of all, the information that is the main subject of the infographic has to be interesting and exciting. So as you can tell, my fisrt criteria is subjective. Then, I think is basic the information to be visualized in a clear way for the readers to understand it or not. Also I would like to point out that usually this means that I prefer infographics that are of minimal aesthetic and not heavy.
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There’s also another version on an baseball diamond
3. Costanera Center . El Mercurio (Chile) Juan Pablo Bravo
2.Taipei 101 Made with Kali Labrou “The triumph of man on nature. Tower’s mechanics enable it to stand in an environment with typhoons and many earthquakes. (I like mega structures)”
And also, his three own best graphics of the year. 1.Four ways to deal with the overwarming of Earth made with Kali Labrou and Achilleas Galatsidas “This infographic includes four futuristic ways proposed by novelists against climate change. This project was an idea of our infographics department, all the information was gathered by our team.” 3.Kovalainen’s accident and new measures of security Made with Spiros Kanakaris
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INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
‘Misconceptions about user experience design’ by K. Instone JAN 12, 2009 09:17A.M. Whitney Hess writes: “I especially enjoyed the recap — I think you hit the nail on the head.” (Keith Instone - Experienceologist)
THE VISUAL LINGUIST
! JAN 12, 2009 06:38A.M. INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Lots of stuff going on round here... First off, thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes yesterday, especially The Comics Reporter. This week marks the first week of school, and I’m greatly looking forward to my first lecture on Wednesday of my Visual Linguistics of Comics course. It seems I’m once again a little bit of a rabble-rouser, since the university
Representing Artefacts as Media JAN 12, 2009 09:52A.M. Modelling the Relationship Between Designer Intent and Consumer Experience - “The design literature contains many diagrammatic models that represent the relationship between how designers intend artefacts to be experienced and how they are subsequently experienced by consumers, users and other stakeholders. Despite the prevalence of such models, they remain largely disconnected from each other, both within and across design disciplines, and also disconnected from the models of communication whose basic structure they share. The existing models are therefore difficult to locate and useful conceptual developments are often overlooked. The consequences of this are that unnecessary effort is expended in developing representations that duplicate those that already exist or new models are developed from inappropriate foundations. To address such issues, this article reviews many of the existing models that can be found in the different disciplines that comprise the fields of communication and design. The most pertinent features of these models are extracted and synthesised into a generic communication-based model of design. This acts as both a guide to what the existing models emphasise and an integrated foundation from which future models might be developed.” (Nathan Crilly, Anja Maier, P John Clarkson - Int’l
has never done a course accessible
Journal of Design Dec.2008)
Monitoring and Visualizing Last.fm
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates JAN 11, 2009 08:51P.M. “The look back by this forward-thinking man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point both forward and backward.” (John Markoff - NYT)
VISUALCOMPLEXITY.COM
JAN 11, 2009 01:42P.M.
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each bar at the edge of the circle represents a poem. Poems progress in a clock-wise direction. Each ray represents a line in the poem. The coloring of the bar represents the theme of that poem. The thickness of the bars represents the word count for that poem. As Alex Riccomini explains: “the most obvious piece of information to extract from this visualization is that as the sections progress, the poems within them are at first fairly varied (with a focus on societal, economic, and political commentary; then, the second section begins to translate to these concepts interspersed with love/sex; and, the final section is devoted almost entirely to love/sex.) The overt change in focus happens to be at the exact numerical center of the collection. For a poet whose attention to the positioning, length, structure, and numerical/lyrical structure of his work is nothing if not acute and meticulous, it is hardly unrealistic to infer that this was a purposeful move on his part”.
Which artists are a “one-hit wonder” and which artists have a constant fan-community? Are Radiohead supporters more receptive to different music trends than hip-hop artist Nelly’s fans? Where do certain music genres cumulate and where is a recently launched album heard first?
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
A definition of user experience
In order to answer these and other questions, Christopher Adjei and Nils Holland-Cunz have observed and analyzed the growing music social network service Last.fm over a period of four months. The results from their observations were presented in a set of striking visualizations made in Processing, and divided in four parts: Comparing fan-groups, Fluctuation of fans, Album-Release, and Cumulation of genres.
JAN 11, 2009 09:24A.M. “User experience (UX) represents the perception left in someone’s mind following a series of interactions between people, devices, and events – or any combination thereof. (...) A good user-experience designer needs to be able to see both the forest and the trees. That means user experience has implications that go far beyond usability, visual design,
The first image shows the fluctuation of fans of Icelandic singer Bjork, while the second represents the cumulation of the “Metal” genre across Europe.
and physical affordances.” (Eric Reiss - FatDUX)
VISUALCOMPLEXITY.COM
ALPHACHIMP STUDIO, INC.
Visualizing the work of E. E. Cummings
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
JAN 11, 2009 01:42P.M.
JAN 11, 2009 04:13A.M.
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard It is shiny. And made by Apple. I must have it.
Brother and sister, Chris and Alex Riccomini, have build a visualization exploring the progression and cadence of American poet E. E. Cummings’ 1944 collection, “I X I,”. Starting at the 12 o’clock position,
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INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design JAN 10, 2009 02:24P.M. “The term ‘user experience’ or UX has been getting a lot of play, but many businesses are confused about what it actually is and how crucial it is to their success. I asked some of the most influential and widely respected practitioners in UX what they consider to be the biggest misperceptions of what we do. The result is a top 10 list to debunk the myths. Read it, learn it, live it.” (Whitney Hess - Mashable)
INFOGRAPHICS NEWS
Best of 2008: Max Gadney picks JAN 10, 2009 11:00A.M. Max Gadney is a classic of the BBC online graphics department, althought he’s now working on the TV area. Although he offers a larger explanation on his blog, these are his picks as the best grahics of the last year:
Click on image to access MySociety.
1. TV US elections (BBC)
3. Spanish 2008 budget (Público, Spain)
Click on the image to watch the video 2. Stamen data visualization
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3. Kamikaze
It was published in 2007, but we have done exceptions before, and being one graphic published on the newspapers where I work... I can do another. And these are his own favourites, all of them published at Historynet.com:
THE CENTER FOR GRAPHIC FACILITATION
1. Nordern Bombsight
Crayon Cartoons that Conform to Complex Physics JAN 10, 2009 03:38A.M. Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.How many Saturday afternoons did I spend with a huge sheet of paper, a box of crayons, and visions of spaceships careening, cowboys shooting, cannonballs arching across the page?”It’s a game where your crayon drawings come to life,” 25-year-old independent games designer from Finland named Petri Purho. “You draw stuff and your drawings behave physically correctly.LOOK: The game trailerLISTEN: Interview with NPR’s Melissa BlockGET: Buy the game ($19.95) from http://www.crayonphysics.com/
2. Fighter Planes
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DATA MINING: TEXT MINING, VISUALIZATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Bush: It’s all downhill from here JAN 09, 2009 10:06P.M. The Beeb has a nice little interactive time series showing multiple poll results for Bush’s approval rating.
Computer-scientist-turned-Japanese-designer Asao Tokolo has developed Tokolo Pattern Magnets, which allow you to interlock the tiles to create a non-repeating pattern that still manages to match the edges of a single tile to its adjoining one. The magnet’s pattern is based on the karakusa, or the Japanese version of the arabesque, which made its way to Japan twelve hundred years ago via the Spice Route. According to the New York Times: Scholarly papers have been dedicated to the ingenious ways these patterns can be generated and made to interlock and repeat — the fractal geometries of form. What interested Tokolo, though, was the way each tile could have a completely unique shape, and yet be made to link harmoniously to all the others — an unexpected harmony, perhaps, between Western individualism and Eastern collectivism.
THE CENTER FOR GRAPHIC FACILITATION DATA MINING: TEXT MINING, VISUALIZATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA
As Seen in the Guardian
‘Minority Report’ Interface Controlled by Hand Gestures
JAN 09, 2009 09:57P.M.
JAN 09, 2009 07:33P.M.
Briefly, one of my blogosphere visualizations appeared in the Guardian
At CES 2009, Toshiba showed off a conceptual computer interface that uses hand gestures for control. With simple motion sensing technology and a software interface, Toshiba hopes to open up applications for video
on Thursday 8th January 2009.
games and other interactive media. INFORMATION DESIGN WATCH
A Pattern That Always Fits But Never Repeats
INFORMATION DESIGN WATCH
History of visual communication
JAN 09, 2009 09:13P.M.
JAN 09, 2009 03:34P.M.
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VIZTHINK BLOG
How to be an Insanely Great Conference Attendee JAN 09, 2009 02:56P.M. Work and personal time is busier than ever. The economy is the worst it’s been in decades. Taking 2 or 3 days to go to a conference is a big investment, both in time and money. For a few people, conferences are a boondoggle, but for most of us we want to make the most out of our investment. Yesterday, we had the chance to sit down with frequent conference attendee, speaker and organizer Tony Karrer to talk about how he maximizes his conference experience. During this almost 12 minute podcast, we talk about: How to prepare for a conference before you get there How to network with other people (even when you’re shy) How to design your own conference experience
Hint: Use the Full Screen Button
to see this video in greater detail.
You may also download the audio here… MP3 Audio File Additional Resources: Tony’s Original Blog Post titled Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee Conference Survival Guide for the Web Worker Begin your planning for VizThink ‘09 now by checking out our wiki, new session content is being added daily. In addition, members can take advantage of our social network all year round. Free access for conference attendees lasts for 3 months after the event. Be sure to register now to be able to take advantage of all of the resources as you prepare for the conference.
Elif Ayiter, a doctoral student at the University of Plymouth, has pubished an illustrated history of visual communication on the web, covering everything from cave paintings to graphical user interfaces. I was particularly struck by the transition from illuminated manuscripts to printed books and how much uglier the mass-produced books were by comparison.
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INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
VISUAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Tap is the New Click (The Video)
Software Support for Bullet Graphs—An Increasingly Popular Means of Display
JAN 09, 2009 11:31A.M. Video registration - “Even though the technology has been around for decades, only now are we starting to see mass production and adoption of touchscreen and gestural devices for the public. Jeff Han’s influential 2006 TED demonstration of his multitouch system, followed by the launches of Nintendo’s Wii, Apple’s iPhone, and Microsoft Surface, have announced a new era of interaction design, one where gestures in space and touches on a screen will be as prominent as pointing and clicking. But how do you create products for this new paradigm? While most of us know how to design desktop and web applications, what do you need to know to design for interactive gestures? This introduction to designing gestural interfaces will cover the basics: usability and ergonomics; a brief history of the technology; some elemental patterns of use; prototyping and documenting; and how to communicate that a gestural interface is
JAN 08, 2009 11:54P.M. This blog entry was written by Bryan Pierce of Perceptual Edge. In January 2006, when Steve first introduced bullet graphs as a more effective alternative to circular gauges in his book, Information Dashboard Design, they were no more than a design concept that he created using Adobe Illustrator. There were no functional bullet graphs being used in the real world and any application of them would have required custom programming. They were a useful design that hadn’t been implemented.
present to users.” (Dan Saffer)
The full bullet graph design specification is available here.
INFOGRAPHICS NEWS
Malofiej 17 is here
Now, as we start 2009, it’s been three years since bullet graphs were first introduced. Over that time, they’ve become popular as an alternative to circular gauges as people have noticed their ability to provide more information in a smaller space, which is especially useful for dashboards. Ambitious designers have found tricks to implement bullet graphs in a variety of products, and some software vendors now include bullet graphs in the graph libraries that they provide. As of today, bullet graphs are available or can be created in the following products:
JAN 09, 2009 08:45A.M.
Products that support bullet graphs right out of the box: MicroCharts (Excel add-in) by Bonavista Systems CenterView by Corda The Spanish Chapter of the SND has uploaded the rules for this edition, you can take a look here.
Visual:Acuity by Visual Engineering DExperience by Developer Express
The deadline for entries is 14th of february (not 12, as a said on the other post)
Although not provided as a standard graph type, bullet graphs can also be constructed with: SAS/Graph QlikView by QlikTech MicroStrategy CURL
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Flex by Adobe
RYAN COLEMAN: VISUAL THINKER, EVANGELIST, ENTREPRENEUR, PHOTOGRAPHER & DAD
R
Some recent Videos...
HTML/CSS courtesy of Matt Grams
JAN 08, 2009 07:15P.M.
Google Charts courtesy of Dealer Diagnostics
I got the urge to start mucking about with videos again over the holidays... embedded below are a couple of short videos I put together with some of my pics from last year:
SVG courtesy of Chris Gerrard This list has grown significantly in just the last year and I expect it to continue to grow as more people discover the merits of bullet graphs. If you currently use a product that can’t create bullet graphs, be sure to tell the vendor how useful they would be, and if you know of a product that I haven’t mentioned here, please share it by posting a comment.
1. Monster Jam
Shot at the Monster Truck show last year in Toronto at the Rogers Centre...
-Bryan Pierce 2. Wiarton Hockey
INFORMATION DESIGN WATCH
Rounded Corners and Other Hooks
Erin’s younger cousin’s hockey team were playing in a tournament near us so we went to watch the game. The game ended up being their first win of the season so it was a fun one to watch.
JAN 08, 2009 07:56P.M.
I plan on doing a few more just to keep the creative juices flowing, and considering I took over 10,000 pictures last year there’s more than enough material to work with!
The upcoming CSS3 Specification looks to codify some of today’s favorite interface design tricks, including rounded corners, drop shadows, alpha transparency, and custom fonts. Many of these features can be accessed already using the probable CSS3 style or a browsertargeted version of the same. For example, rounded corners has three test declarations:
Check out my Photoblog If you haven’t recently, be sure to swing by my Photo blog at http://photography.ryancoleman.ca it’s updated daily and, if I may say so myself, is on a pretty good roll right now images wise...
-moz-border-radius (for Mozilla-based browsers such as Firefox) -webkit-border-radius (for Webkit-based browsers such as Safari) border-radius (the probable CSS style) Here is a semi-transparent white box with rounded corners and a drop shadow. Two circles are overlayed to show transparency effects.
NEOFORMIX
None of these effects show on the current version of MSIE 7 — so let that be your control. Some may not show on Firefox until the release of
JAN 08, 2009 07:05P.M.
Firefox 3.1, but all work on Safari using the Webkit syntax.
Yesterday it was Macworld, today it’s the Consumer and Electronics Show (CES) going on in Las Vegas.
CES Clustered Word Cloud
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2. Melting ice
INFOGRAPHICS NEWS
Internet history with icons JAN 08, 2009 05:15P.M.
History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo. Via Microsiervos
INFOGRAPHICS NEWS
Best of 2008: Johan Romero picks JAN 08, 2009 04:06P.M. Johan Romero, infographics journalist at El Heraldo de Barranquilla picks the three best graphics published on his newspaper in the last year. 1. Wright Brothers plane
3. Popularity of south american presidents
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Mr Macy (played by Harry Antrim) rather than being angered by the innovation, responds to the positive feedback and declares that this should be the policy for all stores. This policy – please the customer first, keep the customer second – is a key decision for web properties. Do you point the user at a page off your site if that is the best page for the user, even if you have an inferior version of the content on your own property?
WELL-FORMED DATA
xtopia video online JAN 08, 2009 02:10P.M.
Happy new year everyone! The video from my (german) xtopia talk is online. You need either the silverlight browser plugin to play it back, or you can download a high res version directly (144MB). And here are the slides. Update: Here it is on vimeo as well. More web-friendly. I speak about my work for the MACE project, and other ongoing work as well as some of the US election visualizations. The talk was fun and also received quite well; in the audience evaluation, I scored 7.88 (out of 9) for presentation style, 8.33 for competence, 7.85 for content of the presentation and 6.82 for business relevance.
DATA MINING: TEXT MINING, VISUALIZATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA
The Web Portal on 34th Street JAN 08, 2009 03:50P.M.
In other news, things are a bit cumbersome at the moment, because I broke my leg and this will take a while to heal… But, it gives me the time to work on my portfolio page, which should be online soon.
[I’m sure this is a very old observation, but it’s new to me!] I recently saw, for the first time, the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street. The basic story is: a little girl is being brought up with an emphasis on the ‘real’ world, being taught to disbelieve any fantasy, including Santa Claus. She then meets the real Santa Claus and the grown-ups in the story have to deal with this realization. A key part of the story is that Santa takes a job at Macy’s (a still popular US department store of the old school) as the Santa. His job is to shill Macy’s toys, but he decides to make the kids happy. Thus, when a child asks for something Macy’s doesn’t have, or which Macy’s stocks an inferior version of, Santa recommends an alternative store for the parent to pick up the desired gift.
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THE CENTER FOR GRAPHIC FACILITATION
INFOGRAPHICS NEWS
World’s Best Napkin Dad
Malofiej dates
JAN 08, 2009 02:00P.M.
JAN 08, 2009 09:03A.M.
Many years ago, then unemployed art director Marty Coleman started to draw simple pictures on the napkins that he included in his daughters’
Xan Sabarís, from Diario de Pontevedra, tells me that he had received the letter with the Malofiej Sumit dates. They are not still published on the web of the spanish chapter of the SND but they’re official.
school lunch bags.
The Summit will take place in March 25, 26 and 27th. COOL INFOGRAPHICS
The deadline for entries is February 12.
Infographic Video: The Histoy of the Internet
Good luck to everybody and hope to see you there. UPDATE When I arrived Publico I also had the letter from Malofiej. Some new things: much more categories than the previous year, some as Science or Travel and transportation are back, as the Continued-Use formats also (Weather, Stock Market...). On the online graphics category,
JAN 08, 2009 12:29P.M.
History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.
there are some new criteria, as the speed or the preload screen. Cool video created by Melih Bilgil “History of the internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to file-sharing, from arpanet to internet. The history is told with help of the PICOL icons, which are also a part of my diploma. The icons are soon available for free on picol.org
INFOGRAPHICS NEWS
Best of 2008: Juan Miguel Tomalá picks JAN 08, 2009 08:54A.M.
Found on Information Aesthetics, and thanks to Ethel for the Tweet.
Juan Miguel Tomalá, from the ecuatorian daily El Telégrafo picks the best graphics of 2008, as before did his colleague of department Freddy Fiallos Calderón. They agree on their first pick:
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Three Mobile User Experience Trends to Watch in 2009
1. Noah’s Arc of the 21st century. elmundo.es Emilio Amade
JAN 08, 2009 09:16A.M. “2008 was truly a milestone year for mobile. In an industry that has long felt downtrodden by a multitude of technical and business constraints, wild and exciting inflection points burst like fireworks across the mobile landscape, bringing visibility to our industry and renewing our hopes.”
Access the online graphic
(Rachel Hinman - Adaptive Path blog)
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2. South of here Chapel Hill students Access the online graphic
3. Magallanes penguin (Clarín)
And his favorites among his own works... 1. Cyborg 2.0
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DELICIOUS/INFOSTHETICS
The New Examined Life (WSJ.com) JAN 08, 2009 04:55A.M. By JAMIN BROPHY-WARREN In the first week of January, New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton will boil down everything he did in 2008 into charts, graphs, maps and lists. 2. Anatomy of the new buses
The 2007 edition of his yearly retrospective notes that he received 13 postcards, lost six games of pool and read 4,736 book pages. He tracked every New York street he walked and sorted the 632 beers he consumed by country of origin. View Full Image
3. Guayaquil Municipal Museum Access the online graphic
Nicholas Felton An excerpt from New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton’s annual report on his personal activities.
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from a focus on blog ramblings to the ubiquitous micro-movements of posters’ daily lives. Microblogging sites like Twitter have become commonplace. President-elect Barack Obama, for example, had his own Twitter account and used it to keep his supporters up to date on his campaign’s daily comings and goings. (It’s been silent since the election.) Facebook’s News Feed feature initially drew criticism from members because it offered a running log of users’ minute postings and updates, but has since became a core part of the Web site’s community. Some sites collect data automatically for their users. Last.fm keeps a record of all of the songs users have listened to, and Netflix keeps track of members’ movie-watching habits. “It’s a natural progression from people sharing things like movies, photos and videos,” says Dennis Crowley, founder of Dodgeball, an early social-networking service for mobile phones which was sold to Google in 2005. “What’s left to share? Basic data.”
More
View Full Image
• The 2007 Feltron Annual Report Part experimentation, part self-help, such “personal informatics” projects, as they are known, are gathering steam thanks to people like Mr. Felton who find meaning in the mundane. At their disposal are a host of virtual tools to help them become their own forensic accountants, including Web sites such as Dopplr, which allows people to manage and share travel itineraries, and Mon.thly.Info, for tracking menstrual cycles. Parents can document infant feeding schedules with Trixie Tracker. And couples can go from between the sheets to spreadsheets with Bedpost, which helps users keep track of their amorous activities. The objective for Mr. Felton and others is to seize data back from the statisticians and the scientists and incorporate it into our daily lives. Everyone creates data — every smile, conversation and car ride is a potential datapoint. These quotidan aggregators believe that the compilation of our daily activities can reveal the secret patterns that govern the way we live. For students of personal informatics, the practice is liberating because it shows that our lives aren’t random, and are more orderly than some might expect.
Nathaniel Welch for The Wall Street Journal Nicholas Felton with pages from his ‘Feltron Annual Report,’ in which he charts his activities, like beer consumption and the streets he’s walked.
Mr. Felton calls his compilation the Feltron Annual Report; the slight alteration of his name connotes the mechanical nature of his autobiographical cataloging effort, now entering its fourth year. He plans to continue his project over the next decade in what he hopes will result in a modern-day spin on James Boswell’s famously detailed biography of Samuel Johnson. “I want to create connections where I didn’t know that they existed,” Mr. Felton says. “I’m a natural annotator.” The elegantly graphical reports, as much design projects as they are data compilations, are posted online by Mr. Felton. He also creates hard-copy limited editions, available free of charge. They have become so popular that he recently launched a Web site with his friend Ryan Case called Daytum, which helps fellow chroniclers track the details of their own experiences. The culture of sharing information online has shifted in recent years,
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Yannick Assogba, a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, created a site called Mycrocosm to help users compile and share the “minutiae of daily life” in the form of multicolored bar charts and pie charts. Mr. Assogba, for example, tracks his ping-pong winning streaks and what days he spends the most money. Created in August, Mycrocosm now has 1,300 registered users. “We’re living in an era of data,” Mr. Assogba says.
Timothy Archibald for The Wall Street Journal
Today’s info-chroniclers are just the latest in a long history of diarists and scientists who kept notes by hand. Nineteenth-century English inventor and statistician Francis Galton, who introduced statistical concepts such as regression to the mean, was an obsessive counter who created the first weather map and carried a homemade object called a “registrator” to, among other things, measure people’s yawns and fidgets during his talks. (Mr. Galton’s preoccupation with data, specifically with human hereditary traits, also yielded an unsavory by-product — eugenics.)
A look at sites that track everyday activities online.
Alexandra Carmichael, founder of the health-research Web site CureTogether, tracks her eating habits online. Keeping Tabs
BEDPOST (http://www.bedposted.com) For those wanting to quantify their bedroom life, Bedpost offers categorization and visualization tools for all of one’s amorous activities. The site tracks frequency over time and allows users to describe what they do as well as create charts and tables about their favorite sexual acts and partners.
In 1937, a social research organization called Mass Observation in London used about 2,000 volunteers to develop an “anthropology of ourselves.” For more than a decade, participants recorded such things as their neighbor’s bathroom habits and what end of their cigarettes they tapped before lighting up. Personal tracking also showed up in “Cheaper by the Dozen,” a 1948 book about efficiency experts Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth and their attempts to track and optimize the daily routines of their 12 children (including when they brushed their teeth and made their beds).
DOPPLR (http://www.dopplr.com) Helsinki-based business consultant Lisa Sounio and four of her friends had trouble coordinating times to meet during their travels, so they created Dopplr, a social network for jet-setters like themselves. In addition to cataloguing meetings with colleagues, it also allows you to calculate your carbon footprint and organize your itineraries.
Several technological shifts in the last decade have helped turn personal informatics into a mainstream pursuit. The iPhone, for example, has several applications such as Loopt that use the product’s internal global positioning system to record a user’s location and then share it with others. Low-cost products such as Wattson, an energy monitor that tracks real-time power consumption, make it easy to record otherwise nebulous data.
MON.THLY.INFO (http://mon.thly.info) To help women prepare for their period or try to get pregnant, Chicago Web designer Heather Rivers created Mon.thly.Info, a site that sends alerts and tracks users’ menstrual cycles. Ms. Rivers says her interest was purely practical; it’s the only data about herself that the University of Chicago student records. “I’m not interested in biorhythms for the sake
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of being interested. It’s just helpful in terms of throwing tampons in your backpack. This is one of the details I’d rather not worry about,” Ms. Rivers says. “It’s not so I can go back and fondly reminisce about my past periods.”
Still, he adds, “Life and its goals are like a lab. Why not use it like a scientist? Then you’ll really know what you want to. There’s so much info that it’d be a shame not to track it.” Write to Jamin Brophy-Warren at Jamin.Brophy-Warren@wsj.com
Some of the new data collectors hope to make better decisions about their activities and improve their quality of life. For the last four months, Alexandra Carmichael, the founder of a health research Web site called CureTogether in San Francisco, has been tracking more than 40 different categories of information about her health and personal habits. In addition to her daily caloric intake, her morning weight and the type and duration of exercise she performs, she also tracks her daily mood, noting descriptions such as “happiness” and “feeling fat.”
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W1
THE VISUAL LINGUIST
Elements of Page Layouts JAN 07, 2009 08:07P.M.
From her initial readings, she concluded that her mood went up when she exercised and went down when she ate too much. “I realized my relationship with food is a distorted, unhealthy one,” Ms Carmichael says. She has concluded that she may have an eating disorder and has decided to seek counseling.
Belgian graphic design student Chris Vosters sends along this 7-page pdf graphic essay that expands on my paper, Navigating Comics, on how people move through page layouts. Chris does a great job of categorizing both explicit and implicit ways in which an author can direct the flow of movement across a page layout without relying on the rule system my
Andy Stanford-Clark, an inventor for IBM, began tracking the power usage of his 16th-century thatched cottage on the Isle of Wight in an unusual way. Everything in his house, from his phone to his doorbell, is hooked up to automated sensors. Each time water is used, or a light goes on or off, it’s catalogued publicly on Twitter for all to see, along with the total household water and electricity consumption. Mr. Stanford-Clark says he now tries harder to conserve power. “I just couldn’t believe how much money that was wasting,” he says.
paper describes. I highly recommend
RYAN COLEMAN: VISUAL THINKER, EVANGELIST, ENTREPRENEUR, PHOTOGRAPHER & DAD
Why Go to VizThink 2009? JAN 07, 2009 06:05P.M.
Keeping track of personal data online can yield unexpected consequences. “Initially, it sounds like a great idea, such as the social aspects,” says Christopher Soghoian, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. But “for most users, the costs outweigh the benefits,” he says. Specifically, Mr. Soghoian points to the legal concept called the “third-party doctrine” which eliminates the right to privacy for users who voluntarily place their information on Web sites. “If you’re cataloging every movement, that might come up if you get divorced,” he say.
VizThink 2009 is quickly approaching (46 days to be exact) and things are really starting to heat up - we’re nailing down the final sessions & facilitators and just yesterday we announced the pre-conference workshop with Karl Gude, former graphics editor for Newsweek & the Associated Press. Just for kicks I threw together a little “Why go to VizThink” video to hopefully convince a few of the fence sitters out there to come and join us in San Jose!
Private investigators and the federal government could also use such information in some circumstances. In the application for jobs with Mr. Obama’s administration, applicants are asked to list all of the social networks that they are involved in and to supply any potentially problematic blog posts from their online past. “All this stuff is creating a huge digital paper trail that could come back and haunt you,” says Mr. Soghoian.
Of course I can be accused of being biased but the VizThink conferences are truly unique experiences and an absolute blast. The variety of people & backgrounds makes for some really interesting conversations and the content is always engaging and useful - One of the biggest complaints from last year was that people had difficulty choosing between all the sessions! I’m glad to say that the “problem” will probably be even worse this year - but we’ve got some ideas to help give people the opportunity to see more...
Personal data collection can get in the way of living, some people admit. “It becomes an obsession,” says Toli Galanis, an aspiring filmmaker in New York who tracks everything from his mercury levels to his vitamin D consumption. He says that he’s had to forgo outings with friends when he’s trying a new diet that requires scheduled mealtimes, and elicits strange looks from his parents when he measures his dinner food to the ounce.
So come on down and join us in San Jose, Feb 22-25, 2009 - go to http://vizthink.com/vizthink2009 for more details and to register. As an added bonus: If you register before Jan 15th use the code
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DCRC01 and you’ll get $100 off the regular attendee rate as well!
INFODESIGN: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
FoodUX: Gastronomic Inspiration for UX Designers JAN 07, 2009 04:40P.M. “FoodUX is a collection of inspirational web gems for user experience designers from the gastronomic and culinary arts.” (Composing Cook)
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