Hasta La Creative!

I’ve always been a fan of Onitsuka Tigers, and most of the advertising and marketing over the past few years, like the Hero Breath cans, has certainly piqued my interest, but this newest campaign might just surpass all the others.

I’d heard the “Made of Japan” tag in the past and knew of the “Electric Tiger Land” concept but the end result thus far is more impressive than I’d anticipated. I could go on about the branding and messaging behind this round of Tiger marketing, but what strikes me most is the actual physical execution.

The fact that Strawberryfrog Amsterdam and R&D/product design firm Freedom of Creation teamed up to execute something fairly monumental is both impressive and refreshing. Today, there are many people (many of my good friends included) who would jump at the chance to entirely digitally create a world like that of the shoe above. It could be done fairly easily. But the fact that it wasn’t is beautiful.

The fact that Freedom of Creation actually went as far as to design the meter-long shoe and other branding accessories like a mini-led-shoe-USB stick is just perfect. And it speaks to the heritage and design sense that Asics is trying to keep alive with the Onitsuka line. The branding and message they’re communicating is great, but the fact that their methods speak directly to their means is superb. Check out the “making of” video below, and if you want more details, photos, etc, check out the Tiger page on FOC’s site here.

Technorati Tags: advertising, shoes, asics, tiger, onitsuka, beyond madison avenue

At Falmouth University College all graduates are participating in a project named “Advice to Sink in Slowly“, which consists of giving advice through a poster to all newcomers about how to handle college life.
 
The idea behind this is that every student gets a free poster when they enter the University.
 
Awesome. Specially by the fact that the institution itself stands behind the idea.
 
And to top everything off, you can see the posters at this flickr or buy one to have at your own home for only 5 british pounds (plus shipping costs).
 
Via: Core77.

Perttu Murto just changed from his overmode.net to perttumurto.com; plus hitting us with a new website and new graphics.
 
Excellent quality, as always.

Tactile – High Touch Visuals, edited by R. Klanten, S. Ehmann and M. Huebner. (Amazon USA and UK.)

Publisher Die Gestalten says: Tactile shows how graphic design is moving into three-dimensional objects and products. The innovative examples documented in the book demonstrate how designers are developing and implementing their ideas spatially from the very outset of a project. Tactile proves that spatial innovation in graphic design is not limited to personal work or artistic endeavours, but is being sought out more and more often by commercial clients, for example, in store design.

When i’m in Berlin, i spend ages in bookshops, i’d leaf through a book, wondering whether i should buy it or not. If it’s a book about contemporary design or art, i feel like the old bat who’ve seen most of what’s inside the book at a biennale or fair. Sometimes i discover the work of an artist i like in the book, i’ll then take my notepad and pen (sorry to disappoint anyone who thinks i’m cool enough to have blackberry or i-phone) and write down the name of the artist, and once i’m back home i google the name. But sometimes there is a book that makes me say “Gosh! i’m still such an ignorant, am i not?” I turn page after page and discover creators i’d never heard about. Go! I collect my bonus, and go straight to the cash machine.

Tactile is one of those book. It demonstrates in a very visual way (there’s very very little text inside) how digital technology has freed designers from their screens and sheets of paper and allowed them to explore 3D with collages, sculptures, installations and objects. I like the way most of the works presented in Tactile are still very close to their 2D origins, there’s no cheating, no ambition to be a product designer (though sometimes they should), it’s pure 2D made and cut to inspire our 3D ordinary existence.

A selection of goodies from each chapter:

Chapter 1.
Type & Poster, in which graphic design dresses in foam, wool, ice, meat (!!) or bricks and ventures in the great outdoors.

Thundercut for Global Inheritance

Chapter 2
Objects, Scenes & Paperworks is an orgy of origami, cardboard landscapes, heroes and characters going literally for a walk out of the pages. There’s Michael Salter‘s robots made of styrofoam, Simon Elvins‘ fabulous Paper Record Player

Paper Gun Factory by Martin Postler (images courtesy of Noam Toran)

After having investigated the history and the aesthetics of the AK-47, also called the Kalashnikov after its inventor, designer Martin Postler (whose project Life/Machine – Scenes from a Roboted Life you might remember) freed the AK-47 from its lethal substance by deconstructing it into a paper model construction set and putting the emphasis purely on the weapon aesthetics. What remains of the gun itself when void of purpose: Is it still a gun? Is it still a beautiful object if its lethal function is eliminated?

I also like Etienne Cliquet‘s ordigami internet statistics (also available in keyboards, computer fan, audiospeakers, etc.)

Chapter 3
Dressed Up is probably the chapter which brings you the most surreal examples of the trends. Graphic design is wrapped around the body, stuck onto faces and twisted in the hair.

Love at first sight for the work of IJM.

IJM, Chinese Spring

The ueber-talented team from Uchu Country created a Relax Magical Hair Tour extravaganza for Relax magazine

Bryony Birkbeck designed the costumes for the On Board video of Friendly Fires.

Christa Donner: Alternative Anatomies, Mouthful, documentation of collaborative public intervention, with Kristine Seeley

Chapter 4
Products & Sculptures is an entertaining mix of hand-made (where the un-perfection becomes valuable) and high-tech (think rapid prototyping, new materials, etc.)

Sandrine Pelletier, Battlefield III

FromKeetra‘s THE GREAT SLUMBER a.k.a.Blood Puddle Pillows

Chapter 5
Indoor Installations shows how some graphic designers take a scene you’d expect to see flat and quiet on a piece of paper or a computer screen and import it into a building, making visitors think that they are living in a comic strip or a “drawing installation.”

Jonas Liverod, Drawing installation at Kabusa Konsthall, Sweden.

Fulguro, Label Suisse (Music Festival)

Chapter 6
Outdoor Installations: see previous chapter, except that this time, it’s the great outdoor for everyone, sharing some methods and sometimes a certain penchant for subversion with street art.

Teleklettergarten

For ars electronica 2003, Bitnik and FOK, transformed the facade of the Linz’Art University in to a gigantic keyboard, inviting members of the audience to used it as a climbing wall. They get a crash course in climbing and software development. After that climbers and programmers collaboratively inputed code into an oversized programming environment. During one week, they programmed codes, scripts and tools and demonstrated various software functions. Not only did the Teleklettergarten turned programming into a physical experience, it also use this public and collaborative programming interface to collectively demonstrate against the arbitrary awarding of software patents for core functions which are the basis of day-to-day work with computers. By ensuring that the illegal action (the execution of patented code) is performed by an anonymous collective, no single person can be made responsible whilst being able to publicly demonstrate the restriction these patents mean for programmers and for the whole user community.

Image appearing on the home page: Agata Bogacka, Glass, edition, 2004.

Related book reviews: Super Holland Design, Hand Job: A Catalog of Type, JPG 2: Japan Graphics, Hidden Track: How Visual Culture Is Going Places.

The guys over at the great Artzmania in collaboration with Catalizado have just released the latinamerican issue of this amazing magazine.
 
This special release has even more flavor to it at least for me because I’m in it. Some time ago I sent in a sample of my works fand luckily I got selected to be on the magazine.
 
A great honor to be in such a huge magazine and along side great names such as Adhemas Batista or Claudio Limón.
 
You can download the issue here.

Last November, i spent a few days in Madrid to get a sneak peak at the Visualizar workshop at Medialab Prado. The projects that came out of the workshop are quite interesting and i’m currently interviewing some of the project leaders to get more insight on their own work, so stay tuned!

Medialab Prado is currently launching a new call for the Inclusiva-net. The workshop will explore the relationship between digital networks and physical space in the context of the increasingly widespread use of portable technology and Web applications in connection with the production and management of geographic information. Given the quality of Medialab Prado’s events, my advice would be “go ahead! answer the call!” The teachers will be Lalya Gaye (whom i interviewed over a year ago), Julian Oliver of the Selectparks fame, and Juan Mart??n Prada.

We Feel Fine

But let’s get back to the Visualizar workshop. As you might guess by its name, Visualizar explored the fascinating world of data visualization. In his introductory text , Jose Luis de Vicente, the curator of the workshop, described data visualization as a cross-discipline which uses the vast communicative power of images to offer a comprehensible explanation of the relationship among meaning, cause, and dependence that can be found among large abstract masses of information generated by scientific and social processes. Arising from the field of science two decades ago, InfoVis and DataVis combined strategies and techniques from statistics, graphic design and interaction and computer analysis to create a new communication model more suitable for clarification in the emerging Age of Complexity.

Jose Luis gave such a great talk about the subject last year that i’ve spent some time translating bits of it in english for you. The video is available online in spanish.

Visualising: tracing an aesthetics of data.

JL started by going back one century and a half ago. At the beginning of the end of the most powerful man of the time: Napoleon. The beginning of the end was the Russian campaign.

In 1812 by Illarion Prianishnikov (1840-1894)

On June 24, 1812, Napoleon’s Grande Arm??e of 691,501 men, the largest army assembled up to that point in European history, headed towards Moscow. Once they arrived in the capital, they found an empty city. It had been evacuated and stripped of all supplies. There was no official surrender and Napoleon felt that the situation robbed him of a traditional victory over the Russians.

The army had to retreat. Supplying the army on its way back was nearly impossible, mainly because of the harsh weather. The lack of grass weakened the army’s horses, almost all of which died or were eaten by starving soldiers. With no horses the French cavalry became footmen, cannons and wagons had to be abandoned, depriving the army of artillery and support convoys. As starvation and disease took their toll the desertion rate soared. Elements of the Grande Armee were defeated by the Russians at Vyazma, Krasnoi, and Polotsk. The crossing of the river Berezina was the final French catastrophe of the war, as two separate Russian armies inflicted horrendous casualties on the remnants of the Grande.

On December 14 1812 the Grande Arm??e was expelled from Russian territory. Only about 22,000 of Napoleon’s men survived the Russian campaign.

Minard’s map shows the advance of Napoleon’s Grande Arm??e into Russia in 1812. (full resolution)

What is one of the most epic moment in History has been turned by Charles Joseph Minard into a pioneering example of infoviz. In 1861 the French engineer published a Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Arm??e Fran??aise dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813, an information graph published in 1861 on the subject of Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. The graph displays several variables in a 2D image:
– The thickness of the line indicates the strength of the army, with numbers indicating strength at critical points. From left to right : the thickest line on top is the army crossing the river with 422,000 men, advancing into Russian territory and stopping in Moscow with just 100,000 men. From right to left, returning west, and crossing back on river Niemen with 10,000. The numbers may go down or up, as the army joins with reserves (e.g. before river Berezina).
– The lower portion of the graph is to be read from right to left. It shows the temperature on the army’s return from Russia, in degrees below freezing on the w:en:R??aumur scale. (Multiply R??aumur temperatures by 1?? to get w:en:Celsius, e.g. ???30??R = ???37.5 ??C)]] Starting at ) degree in Moscow to minus 30 towards the end of the disastrous adventure.

This sole drawings translates in a very visual way the magnitude of the event and the way the campaign went from bad to worse over the course of a few months. The map embodies perfectly the power of dataviz, the communicative power of the image: using various factors, the map manages to translates in a sole image the importance of the fiasco that was the Russian campaign and how the disaster took place. One of the strength of information design and later of data visualization is that it can reduce the time necesssary for understanding a given event while at the same time it augments the capacity to grasp concrete phenomena of the past.

The other story JL mentioned takes place in London around the same period and Steven Johnson wrote about it in his book The Ghost Map.

The most devastating disease striking big European cities in the 19th century was cholera. Lacking garbage removal, clean water, sewers infrastructure, London was the perfect breeding ground for a disease no one knew how to cure. The consensus was that cholera was carried through the air, you could catch it by breathing “foul air” or coming into contact with someone suffering from cholera.

Physician and self-trained scientist John Snow was quite skeptical about that view and he set himself the task to prove it by investigating what could be the cause(s) of the lethal disease.

By talking to local residents (with the help of Reverend Henry Whitehead), he identified the source of the outbreak as the public water pump on Broad Street (now Broadwick Street). His studies of the pattern of the disease were convincing enough to persuade the local council to disable the well pump.

Original map by Dr. John Snow showing the clusters of cholera cases in the London epidemic of 1854

Snow used a spot map (back dots represents cases of cholera and crosses indicate a well) to study and illustrate how cases of cholera were centred around the pump. He also made a solid use of statistics to illustrate the connection between the quality of the source of water and cholera cases. He showed that companies taking water from sewage-polluted sections of the Thames delivered water to homes with an increased incidence of cholera.

Those two stories illustrate how an image is able to have meaningful patterns emerge from a mass of data.

Digital artist Ben Fry sees information design as the capacity of “thinking with the eyes”. An image can help us see things which we would otherwise no be able to fully understand, it externalizes our cognitive skills. The capacity of making meanings emerge through the power of vision is very high. Simple example: you’d take a piece of paper and a pen in order to break down the complexity of a mathematical problem. Similarly, the communicative qualities of a graphic design enables us to externalize a problem.

The communicative capacity of graphic design and the capacity to externalize the problems are united in this new forms of codifying information from an abstract mass of data to a spatial composition which are visually expressed.

So what is the state of the art today?
What happens when graphic designer, information designers, etc. start to use these tools in a social context?

A first example concerning the crisis between Lebanon and the US in the Summer of 2006 when Britain, Israel and the US were left exposed for refusing to comply with UN’s demand to end to hostilities. The news appeared in most newspapers around the world. Yet one of them came up with a visually striking representation of the issue:

Middle East Crisis: Who backs an immediate ceasefire? (see cover of the newspaper here and here)

The impact of the news is much different if we put it into words or if it is translated in a visual code. Newspapers are making an increasing use of data visualization.

Of course, there are many other examples to be found in the artistic and scientific sphere.

Examples:
Inequality, created by Josh On using Processing, demonstrates in a crystal clear way that while in 1960 US CEOs were paid 41 times more than the average worker, in 2001 their pay was 411 times higher than the average worker.

If you were to put the same data on a traditional statistical graphic, you’d get the same information. Minus the immediate appeal and the interactivity.

(artificial.dk has a great interview with the artist btw and there’s a video of one of his talk at one of The Influencers conferences).

Information design has its limits: the dataset is quite static, the assembly of data has a certain level of simplicity and there is no interaction. That’s where enters a new discipline which will influence cartography, graphic design and other transversal disciplines.

Starting in the ’90s a new class of visualization practitioners, half way between the analysis of digital information and strategies of representation, emerge and propose examples where data visualization is not only applied to analyze abstract data but where it also proposes other levels of interpretation and readings.

Example. Ben Fry wanted to find an answer to a simple question: “How exactly are zip codes assigned across the U.S.?” His answer is zipdecode which is as simple as the postal code system might appear to be complex.

TextArc, by Bradford Paley who used to be the designer responsible for the visualization system at Wall Street, shows quite well how the infoviz genre is hybrid and multi-disciplinary. TextArc is a fascinating visual representation of a text –in this case Alice in Wonderland and Hamlet— on a single page. Paley dismounted the novel and turned it into a spatial structure where the position of the elements indicate their importance and the lines which circulate around them trace the connections that link the words.

Other example, Color Code an interactive treemap displaying about over 33,000 English nouns, each of them is represented by a rectangle, which has been assigned a color based on the average of the colors found via an image search for that noun. in addition, the words are clustered so that similar words are near each other.

JL then showed one of my favourite infoviz projects ever: Marcos Weskamp‘s Newsmap.
The application visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. dividing information into easily recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
The aesthetical choices have a semantic translation, they correspond to different levels of meaning to organize the information in a certain way.

10×10, by Jonathan Harris, is an interactive and ever-changing snapshot of the words and pictures that define the time. The system monitors leading international news sources and every hour, it collects the 100 words and pictures that are deemed most important on a global scale, and presents them as a single image. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a patchwork of human life.

JL pointed out that the representation of a data set is always arbitrary. There are obviously many other ways to represent a set of data and the relationship that emerge between them.

Besides, data visualization is the visual embodiment, the translation to another language of a series of process which some call data mining, the science of extracting useful information from large amounts of data or from a database. Data mining is being used as a technique for investigation which slowly moves from the scientific sphere to a more social and cultural oriented level.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, a book available at any airport and published in 2005 by economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. In the book Levitt uses techniques of statistical analysis to give answers to a series of (sometimes quite surprising) questions. The book has raised debate, especially regarding the chapter which explains how criminality in New York fell sharply in the ’90s. In his view, the main factor which justifies the drop of violence is the legalization of abortion in the ’70s.

Other example: with the Enron Explorer, Trampoline engineers offered access to the 200,000 Enron internal emails released during the fraud investigation. The system generates a visualisation of each employee’s social network and allows users to explore the way those social networks were somehow responsible for factors which led to the fall of the American energy company.

the case of Enron marks a transition in the journalistic techniques from an era where the focus was on telling facts to an era focused on filtrating data. The Watergate scandal emerged because a hidden information was discovered. The case of Enron was different, it was a journalist who used public data, started analyzing them and realized at some point that the relationships between the data didn’t match the activities that Enron was supposed to carry out.

Another very simple example shows how to tell a story by using a set of data. Corruption is believed to be a major factor impeding economic development, but the importance of legal enforcement versus cultural norms in controlling corruption is poorly understood. To disentangle these two factors, two researchers went through the stationing of thousands of diplomats from around the world in New York City. Diplomatic immunity means there were not fine for parking violations, the researchers were therefore left to examine the role of cultural norms alone (at least that’s what they believe). The result of their investigation appears on the image on the left.

To give even more strength to the usual cultural stereotypes, the diplomats who receive the smallest number of fines come from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc.

Another case is the one of a journalist from Wired who thought that there might be some relationship appearing between pedophile (data on convicted sex offenders are public in the United States) and users of MySpace. He thus wrote a script that ferreted out registered sex-offenders on the social platform. Some of the offenders he found were just hanging out with their friends and families, but 3 of them were actively soliciting sex from children — his work led to the arrest of one such, Andrew Lubrano. The code has been made available.

A famous fashion to manage data is the tag cloud. Example, the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud which gives an overview of the words that US presidents used most frequently in their speeches, showing which issues they deemed important over time.

Another area where infoviz can do wonder is when it plays the role of sociograms, unveiling the relationship between people and the kind of structures that emerge from these relationships.

Artist Mark Lombardi was fascinated both by complex social structures and conspirations and he merged both passion in his famous Conspiracy Maps which analyzed affairs such as The Watergate, the collapse of the Vatican bank and the Iran-Contra scandal.

Which brings to our mind one of the most famous piece of media art of the past 15 years: They Rule by Josh On. The application reveals some of the relationships of the US ruling class, how the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies share many of the same directors, how some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies.

The strength of a work like They Rule is not that it “gives you the solution” or tells you whether the people sitting at the boards hate each other or are friends but it artistically shows levels of complexities of our reality which would otherwise be difficult to comprehend.

World Processor by Ingo G??nther projects on physical world globes the geographical distribution of various social, environmental and political world parameters: international migrations, countries debts, wealth distribution, countries with biggest emission of CO2, etc.

Chicago Crime database projects on Google Maps data about criminality in the country as discovered by the police.

The Database of Intentions (as coined by John Battellle). An important change in the creation, classification and dissemination of data is that it is no longer a result of scientific, economical or statistical processes. Instead it has become a social reality. Each of us has become a generator of data. We can thanks web 2.0 for that and also search engines. Each time we look for a word on a search engine we obtain information at the same time as that search engine gets information from us: what we want, what we look for, what interests us, what scares us, what worries us, etc.

A sad example is how AOL released massive amounts of data concerning the queries made by its users. They later apologized but it was way too late.

Listening Post by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin poetically give a face to the flow of data. The installation culls text fragments in real time from chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read by a voice synthesizer, and displayed across a suspended grid of more than 200 electronic screens.

Digg Labs, developed by Stamen, translates visually and in real time the activity of the social community.

But how do you classify the quality of a social activity?

Golan Levin showed in the brilliant The Dumpster how to visualize the romantic breakups of teenagers.

A somewhat similar and more ambitious project We Feel Fine, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, investigates human emotions by harvesting data about web user’ moods and feelings from weblogs. A script searches newly posted blog entries for occurrences of “I feel” & “I am feeling”, records the full sentence & identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).

JL ended by an anecdote about They Rule. Apparently two kind of people check out TR. The web users who is curious about the project but also the very people who are part of TR, the board members who use it see how they could reach another person, who in their entourage is connected to someone who is connected to that person.

However, the main danger of the fascinating images generated by these data designers is to believe that reality can be defined and limited by an image. That they suffice to grasp and interpret reality.

Related entries: A series of posts about one Medialab Prado’s latest workshop, Interactivos?, Interview with Jose Luis de Vicente.

At the great Iso50’s blog, with whom I share a healthy obsession for mathematical patterns, I came across the amazing image you see above that, as he himself explains, comes from what is known as a Pythagoras Tree, which as you’ll see at en Wikipedia are pretty simple in its basic composition but can come to create amazingly complex patterns.
 
Any graphics that involve mathematical perfection, amazing color palettes and is modular… is definitelly A+ in my book.

TED’s Talks are truly amazing. I’ve been watching them for some time now but only recently I’vwe come to realize their true amazingness.
 
If you don’t know, TED is a worldwide event where the brightest mind on the planet speak. From design to biology, society, filosophy, technology, etc.
 
The thing is that on TED’s website you can find the talks updated weekly and in great quality. By far one of the best resources on the internet today.
 
This time I’m showing you an exposition by Philippe Starck, who speaks in a very funny and gesticular yet profound way about why we design and why we must know when not to.
 
Link: TED Talks.

Today I noticed that my website had climbed a few spots more than ussual in the Blogalaxia rank, which then led me to check my stats to find out that my web had been featured at the always awesome DesignYouTrust, a blog dedicated to showcase graphic design at its best around the world.
 
An absolute and total honor that leaves me more than happy with renewed energy to keep working.

I got to this website through a post in ComputerLove about cell phones design and the importance of millimeters. A really good video, but then I noticed on the side there was this video about skateboards design, and after I saw that one, I saw another one about bicycle design, and then another about guitars design, and I’ve been hopping from video to video throughout all morning.
 
An excelent website with videos on science applied to non-traditional matters under the m.o. “Connecting learning to the real world”.
 
Link: The Futures Channel.