Monthly Archives: June 2009

Exploring large amount of data

Posted on by
5

Through times, data visualization has worked as a great tool to reveal stories in sets of data. The recipe has been to find a story in the data, attach visual cues to establish a base of familiarity and expectation and boil the data down to the most significant message. When done well, data becomes more accessible and more meaningful.

Today with the web, the conditions have changed. We have technologies that enable new ways to store, collect and share large amount of data as well as the social web that generate tons of real time data, which implies a great mass of dynamic data to deal with. This means we don’t have the same control of the outcome as we had before when we worked with a limit static set of data.

With these new conditions it seems like the designer has shifted role from proving a point to create tools that makes it easy for people to discover and find their own stories. The tools are more about letting them navigate through and understand rich and varied flows of information, using their behavior as navigation. Instead of being a passive observer the user can participate in the exploration.

Here are some intriguing data visualization tools that put the user in the driver’s seat:

Stamen design, a small design and technology studio in San Francisco, work a lot with real time data and infographics. They created Trulia Snapshot that helps you localize homes for sale, and explore different variables like if it’s cheap, expensive, newest on the market, and longest on the market.

Trulia Snapshot

 

They also created Oakland Crimespotting, an interactive map of crimes in Oakland that helps people to sort and understand crime in cities. With this tool you can navigate hour by hour and over time.

Oakland Crimespotting Screenshot

 

Together with Small Batch Inc.  Jeffrey Veen has a few data visualization projects going on, one of them is Wikirank, a tool for exploring new trends on Wikipedia, discovering comparisons between topics and sharing them with the world. He also gave an inspiring talk on the subject at Web 2.0 Expo.

Wikirank Screenshot

 

The New York Times creates some really interesting data visualizations; I especially like Casualties of war where you can investigate casualties during war in Iraq through times. The New York Times also let the mass audience participate in their Visualization lab , creating information graphs of all sorts.

Casualties of War Screenshot

 

Getty images got a whole stack of discovery tools to explore photos. One of the latest is moodstream that enable the possibility to sort pictures by mood.

Moodstream Screenshot

 

This one is not new but I really like the visualization of Lee Byron’s histogram What have I been listening to? that shows music listening history with data aggregated from Last.fm. With inspiration from his work Andrew Godwin created a graph generator where you can generate your music from Last.fm, and compare with friends.

Byron Visualization Screenshot

 

For more inspiration check out Visual complexity, a gallery with a variety of different visualization methods.

This approach, where designers let people use their own minds to draw their own conclusions isn’t new. But with these new conditions it becomes more essential to control the flood of information that people meet every day by putting them in the driver’s seat manipulating data in their own way, telling their own stories.

About the article’s writer: Johanna Olander works as an interaction designer and visual designer at the National Library of Sweden/LIBRIS division. She mostly works with LIBRIS the Swedish Union Catalogue, but also with other library related applications.

 

DMY review: the conferences

Posted on by
Reply

This is the second part of my review of the DMY international design festival 2009 in Berlin. The first part took care of the expositions.

All conferences were planned on a symposium day and the whole event lasted about eight hours. The quality and background of the speakers was as motley as it gets. It started with two so called "institutional presentations" by the Taiwan design Center and the "Metropolitan Design Center of Buenos Aires". Promotional videos of both places, a lot of charts and never ending text on the projector. No real talk about design there, even though they repeated the word until it lost its meaning. I suppose they paid to be there…

Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki at the Symposium

Within the "Alternative strategies" block Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki talked about their "Cybernetic love: future sex project". These people analyze the Japanese society habits from all angles to get to the conclusion that sex practice is integrating elements such as virtual lives and places, electronic pleasure gadgets, robots, etc. till an extent, that a human partner is no longer the preferred alternative. This project is financed by Tenga, a company that develops high quality adult toys. I must say they have a point, check out their promotional video;  if this is not user experience design, I don’t what is!

Ronen Kadushin presented "Open Design" and his way for design to evolve if we really want good design to surround us. We all have seen how open source software gives the best results, now here is a way to do basically the same but with product design.

Ronen Kadushin at the Symposium

Interesting lectures of the block "Sustainability": Ralf Ketelhut from Stoffstromdesign let us know what really happens when products are waste and made us aware how harmful coatings and pigments are in our product. We also saw an example of a very nice nearly 100% environmentally friendly wallpaper. Key to success they said, is to go to the manufacturer, talk to him and find a different way of doing things.

from left to right: the wallpaper designer from eccellence goods, the roll of wallpaper, Ralf Ketelhut

Probably the best example of good innovative design was given by 2012 Architecten. They presented some realized projects in which they rather than recycling they reused material that was considered waste. They identify a source of large quantities of waste material in good conditions and they find a way to use it.

Jan Jongert from 2012 Architecten ans a shot of their Villa Welpeloo

One of their requirements when reusing materials is to take them as they are and add no processing to them when possible, this way it is economically and environmentally worthwhile reusing. Some of these projects are an espresso bar made with used PVC windows and the duchi shoe shop, where car windows make the shelves.

Jurgen Bey gave a nice lecture about how we approach design problems and what could be the role of design in the future. A pity that I didn’t record it… there is a good summary of it in design.nl

DMY review: the expositions

Posted on by
Reply

 This will be the first part of my review of the DMY intenational design festival 2009 in Berlin. The second part will take care of the conferences.

I must say I was in general rather dissapointed with the expositions. It is sad to find out that desing and styling are still so often confused even within the so called design comunity.

A lot of hand made furniture, loads of lamps, but very little of nice really creative design proposals. Since we all have enough expamples of boring/usesless design, I am going to focus on the things I liked.

Shelves:

Wooden shelf and Piegato metal shelf

A metal one from the Matthias Ries design office. When you order this shelf you receive it already precut and lacked, and you fold it yourself. I liked the fact that the more you load this shelf, the more stable it gets.

A wooden one from the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg. To fix the books on this shelf you’d just pull up the loose plank and the tension created held the books. The system got unstable when the weigh of the books was too high, but it is a quite new approach.

Waschhaus presented their concept Colo, a dishwasher reduced to its very basics.

All you need to have in your kitchen is a second tap (for the water supply), a connection for the water waste and a power supply . The dishwasher itself consists of a transparent cover with the conventional washing mechanism inside. It fits into the sink and seals so that the water doesn’t come out. once the washing is finished the cover is pulled and it hangs somewhere up where it doesn’t disturb. It could be a good product now that apartments get smaller an kitchens even more. I particularly like the multisize-fitting tray.

 

dishwasher Colo

The Hochschule für Kunst und Design Halle had set up probably the nicest stand in the exposition and it had mostly very creative furniture in it. The best pieces were probably form the collection "7 für die ecke". Since I have no good fotos from it have al look at the designer’s website.

Last but not least a new lemon juicer form the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. It is always interesting to see how we find new solutions to hte verey basic design problems. This is a very aesthetical attempt that also plays with the gravity force. We didn’have the chance to see it working, though.

 Lemontile