Hasta La Creative!

Photo by Magdalen Green

As i receive so many emails from young people who would like to graduate in media art, interaction design and other “cool stuff you write about on the blog”, i thought i should discuss more often with the teachers and researchers who run these courses in Europe, the US and in Asia. I’ve interviewed several of them before (Tom Igoe from itp in New York, Tony Dunne from RCA, Stephen Wilson from the San Francisco State University, Alejandro Tamayo from the Javiera University, etc.), today the victim of my curiosity is Graham Pullin.

Graham Pullin joined Interactive Media Design at Dundee after nine years as a senior interaction designer and studio head at IDEO where he most notably created together with Crispin Jones the Social Mobiles series. He has been involved in the design of mobile phones, hearing aids, furniture for children with disabilities and remote-controlled submarines. Previous to entering the design industry he gained an MDes from the Royal College of Art, this after a number of years as a medical engineer, having studied engineering at Oxford University.

The Home Viewing Chair (Boston, 1956) by Dave Reid and Craig Mitchell

Dundee is a small city situated on the east coast of Scotland. I must confess that i had never heard of it until one or two years ago when the pieces developed by the students of Interactive Media Design (IMD) at Dundee University and shown at the Museum of Lost Interactions started to make a glorious tour of all the design and gadget blogs.

The BSc in Interactive Media Design brings together Computing modules, Design Studies modules and Interactive Media Design modules, in a range of hand-on projects that prepare students for a career in interaction design.

Your bio on the School of design website says that you are “passionate about work that blurs the boundaries between interaction design and industrial design”. Could you explain us what this involves? Any concrete example of this blurring of the boundaries?

Muji’s CD Player, designed by Naoto Fukasawa, has always been a favourite. The industrial design is the interaction design, suggesting a ventilation fan and inviting you to pull the cord, in the designer’s own words “Without Thought”… which is about so much more than ease of use – there is such a lightness of touch, such delight.

Forgotten Chairs, website designed by Jamie Shek and Ryan McLeod

Perhaps I feel more at home at these intersections – or in the gaps between – because of a twenty-five year journey from computer programming, via engineering and industrial design to (back to? I’m not sure) interaction design. I’m a little envious of my Interactive Media Design students for getting transgress these boundaries right from the start.

The Gentleman’s Chair (Edinburgh, 1898) by Ryan McLeod, Jamie Shek and Ian Shiels

For them, Forgotten Chairs is an introduction to designing interactions in the round rather than on screen. Recreating historical artefacts allowed them to find objects abandoned in charity shops and recycling yards, rather than build from scratch. Whether their exhibit is credible is a real test of whether they mastered the relationships between the three-dimensional and graphic design languages for their chosen period and the qualities of different media and technologies. The Gentleman’s Chair has a coherence and attention to detail that I hope Ian Shiels, Ryan McLeod and Jamie Shek will apply to everything they do next.

Why focus on “lost interactions”?

The theme of lost interactions connects young interaction designers to a heritage that is older and broader than the history of the personal computer. At the same time, it can provoke reflections on the pursuit of technical innovation for its own sake. PESTER by Euan McGhee and John Drummond is a 1970s mobile phone with built-in camera, music player and games.

PESTER (1970) by John Drummond and Euan McGhee

Designing within a historical period can also help the students to be more conscious of the possible social impact of technology, issues easier to gloss over when looking optimistically into the future. The Case Communicator by Alison Thomson and Shaun McWhinnie promises liberating mobility to the modern businessman, but condemns his 1930s secretary to even longer working hours, tethered to her telephone exchange.

The Case Communicator (1936) by Shaun McWhinnie and Alison Thomson

… and do you feel that in general some kinds of interactions get lost over the years? Can an interaction became obsolete and how?

The radio dial is a loss: a magical interaction, a bit like safe-cracking (I’m told), to navigate a frequency band by half-second snatches of sound, occasionally stumbling across surprises. Instead, we now select a station name from a list – but isn’t this just because a little display has been added for the text streamed with Digital Audio Broadcasting and then adopted for the interface as well? If we browse images through thumbnails rather than filenames, why shouldn’t we continue to browse radio by its content?

Rather than lose this interaction, we could reinterpret it. True, there are inherent time delays in the way a digital radio tunes to a station and buffers sound, but this is a limitation of imagination more than technology – perhaps a secondary tuner might harvest recent content across all stations in the background? Making the technology work harder towards a richer, ultimately even simpler experience excites me more than adding features.

To be honest with you, i’m in a phase when i’ve seen so much interactive anything that i’ve started to be tempted to change room when someone invites me to “interact” with their screen/coat/clock/lamp, etc. I mean it is funny for a few minutes then my attention drifts away. Am i the problem in this scenario? Do you think that i need to see a doctor? What are the characteristics that makes an interactive work engaging and challenging beyond those first few minutes?

Can you make a double appointment for both of us? I am just reading The Poetic Museum by Julian Spalding which argues that the profundity and richness of original artefacts are being overlooked in the indiscriminate move to interactive exhibits. And MoLI certainly isn’t about where to draw this line…

But what it is, is a first opportunity for our students to jump in and learn that the success of an interaction depends on its realisation as much as its conception. And this is the reason it’s difficult to answer your question – you have to experience the experience for yourself to know if it’s working.

The Amazing Musical Chair (New York, 1937) by Graham Hancock and Raymo Holloway (photo: Chris Phillips)

The Amazing Musical Chair lets its occupant create a complex mix of 1930s instrumental sounds. This might have been a cacophony, but the whole exceeds the sum of the parts because Raymo Holloway and Graham Hancock crafted each loop and went to the trouble of recording musicians playing real instruments. Whereas the Barrow Rocker is just a mechanical music box that plays a note for each rock back and forth and owes its delight to Kirsty Woodend and Rebecca Rumble keeping it this simple.

The Barrow Rocker (Dundee, c.1870) by Rebecca Rumble and Kirsty Woodend (photo: Chris Phillips)

There is a high focus on documenting the students projects using videos. Is it important to the whole creative process? Or is it just the icing on the cake for the video-hungry web visitors?

On the Forgotten Chairs website, video is used to tell the story of each exhibit and place it in context (there’s some nice archive footage) but also to convey the interactivity to those who couldn’t make it up to Dundee and experience the chairs for themselves. I think that’s something I got wrong on the original MoLI site – most web visitors didn’t realise that the models actually worked.

But in general, video is an important and versatile tool for our students – to sketch ideas, even as they are building them, and also to make documentaries and advertisements to disseminate their designs. And some may pursue careers in which video is their primary medium, whether as design ethnographers, researchers or artists.

I had a look at the Degree Show projects from 2006 and was quite intrigued by Andrew Cook – Tactophonics. Could you give us some details about it, how it works, what inspired the project and what in this project embodies the IMD department way of thinking and teaching?

Andrew Cook is also a computer musician (under the name of Samoyed) and his project was inspired by how unengaging performances of computer music can be – how difficult it is to understand what sounds are pre-stored and which are being manipulated or created live. The difficulty in setting up any kind of rapport between the audience and the performer is unrewarding for both.

Tactophonics was about making interaction with computer music more physical by letting a performer choose any object – for their own reasons – and turn it into an instrument. It worked by attaching a series of contact microphones to the object, not using these sounds directly, but shaping other sounds generated in MaxMSP. At his degree show, Andrew exhibited a tree branch that had been wired up: shaking the whole bough, bending the branches, scratching the bark, even snapping off the twigs, each produced different sounds. The relationships between action and sound was at once abstract and intuitive, engaging to play, and also a compelling spectacle for other visitors.

Tactophonics by Andrew Cook (photograph: Paul Gault)

I suppose this embodies our approach to thinking by making and playing. Andrew crafted a beautiful kit of parts and instructions, but this was just the starting point for each musician to create their own instrument and performances. It was about understanding this distinction, but also that design has a role within this creative whole.

By coincidence – well, not really coincidence – Cook is now working with me as a PhD student. We are trying to make synthetized speech more expressive – in particular for some people with impaired speech who use communication aids based on Text-To-Speech technology. Current devices offer little or no control of tone of voice, which can give a false impression that the person using them is also emotionally impaired. We are going to start off by building six speaking chairs.

Six Speaking Chairs by Graham Pullin and Andrew Cook

This research is the real reason I left IDEO and came up to Dundee. My exploration of new interactions with speech started with Social Mobiles, a project that Crispin Jones and I led. The Speaking Mobile asked how much could be communicated with only the words “yes” and “no”, if their intonation could be controlled. Once bitten, I decided I had to devote more time to this intriguing and under-explored area.

Social Mobiles by IDEO and Crispin Jones (photo: Maura Shea)

The Speaking Mobile (photo: Maura Shea)

The Speaking Mobile (photo: Maura Shea)

Have you ever come across projects from interactive art which you found relevant and interesting for an interaction designer?

One of the most relevant and inspiring to my own work was Listening Post by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, an installation that sampled text from internet chat sites and played it back as hundreds of synthesised voices. Its aesthetic qualities came from these voices being deliberately monotonic and tuned to a scale. The whole effect was reminiscent of Gregorian Chant, eerie but quite beautiful. In a field dominated by the quest for so-called ‘natural’ speech, Listening Post is one of the few examples I have come across of synthetic speech being treated as a design medium.

Listening Post, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Next Wave Festival, 2001

Could you name us one or more interactive media designer(s) whose work you find particularly inspiring?

Oh dear, I think I know how this is going to sound Régine, but please bear with me…

Wofgang von Kempelen, better known for the Mechanical Turk, built the first speech synthesiser in 1791 (here’s a sketch I made of it in the Deutsche Museum in München). Obviously, in those days, his Sprachmaschine was a mechanical analogue of the vocal organs and so speech sounds were derived from actions, not written language. But the design is also rather theatrical: the operator placed their hands through holes in a wooden box, so that no-one could see what they were doing, heightening the magic.

The Speaking Machine (1791) by Wolfgang von Kempelen

I realise this may sound nostalgic, especially following the Museum, but there is nothing nostalgic about the research that I am engaged with. I am quite serious about gaining inspiration from Kempelen and applying it to computerised Text-To-Speech. It’s the interaction that counts, not the technology.

The IMD website mentions that “Interactive media is one of the fastest growing sectors in the international economy”. I noticed when visiting design student shows that other departments, such as for example product design and industrial design, are getting more and more engaged in interactive projects. What is the specificity of IMD in Dundee?

I suppose I’m more interested in blurring again: interaction design and interactive media are part of so many sectors. In my 9 years at IDEO, leading projects and running a studio, that was increasingly the point: that interaction design had a role within a wide range of businesses and organisations, not just those focused on interactive media or interactive products.

Compared to product design courses, IMD is coming from the opposite direction, if you like. My current role is to introduce this shared territory to students who are already immersed in media and coding and narrative and interaction design – my colleagues Catriona Macaulay, Ali Napier, Shaleph O’Neill and Morna Simpson have backgrounds in design ethnography, sound recording, semiotics and content design.

On the other hand, we are a design course, which distinguishes us from a number of Computer Science or Human Computer Interaction courses that have rebranded themselves ‘interaction design’ or ‘interactive media design’. It is important that our studios are at the heart of an art college, sharing ideas as well as workshops with product design and textiles and illustration and fine art… as well as computing.

Why Dundee? Apart from IMD, what should make us put Dundee on a map?

It’s no coincidence that IMD is in Dundee, as it’s a collaboration between the School of Computing here and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. The School of Computing has always focused on what it calls ‘applied computing’ rather than computer science and Duncan of Jordanstone has a great reputation in Scotland.

This year we are launching a Master’s course in design ethnography, aimed at students and professionals from human factors or design backgrounds. And there is lots of research going on across these traditional discipline boundaries.
http://www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/mde/

IMD has a sister course called IPD, which (a bit confusingly) stands for Innovative Product Design – where IMD is a blend of design and computing, IPD is a blend of design and engineering. IPD too has a strong point of view on “lighter and smarter” interactive products. Course director Polly Duplock has built a team with strong links with the RCA, Goldsmiths and industry, which now includes Jon Rogers, Andy Law and Pete Thomas. Second Year students on our two courses are currently working together on an invited brief for Microsoft’s 2008 Design Expo. We’re getting them to look at their relationships with their grandparents and consider where simple networked objects might play a role.
I will send a link for IPD next week – their new sit will be going live then

Any upcoming project, either personal or school related, that you could share with us?

I have just written a book, ‘Designing Braille for the sighted (and other meetings between disability and design)’ which is being published by The MIT Press and should be out in the autumn.

Designing Braille for the sighted to be published by The MIT Press

Twenty years ago, I spent three years as a medical engineer in a hospital designing products for disabled people. Then I went back to the Royal College and spent the next twelve years in design consultancy, designing all kinds of things for all kinds of people. The starting point is how distant these two cultures still are from each other – but how much each could inspire the other (sorry, it’s about boundaries blurring again…)

It starts with seven tensions between conflicting values and priorities. Is it more important for a wheelchair or a hearing aid or a prosthetic hand to be discreet or fashionable? Universal or simple? Sensitive or provocative? Is it more important to solve known problems or to explore new possibilities? Striking the right balance – and a different balance for different disabled people – requires the skills and sensibilities of both design cultures, not either one working alone.

It ends with conversations with some designers I like – including Tomoko Azumi, Vexed, Crispin Jones, Michael Marriott and Graphic Thought Facility. We discuss design briefs related to disability in some way – wheelchairs and wheelchair clothing, prosthetic legs, watches for visually impaired people and Braille. Their first trains of thought are diverse and inspiring.

Sketching thoughts about step stools, by Tomoko Azumi

Collecting bicycles and chairs to inspire wheelchairs, by Michael Marriott

Sketching a Braille wall for visually impaired and sighted people, by Graphic Thought Facility

Despite the subject matter, this is anything but a textbook (there are several of these already!) It’s to be an affordable – and I hope beautiful – little book to carry in your pocket and read on a train journey.

…and some dates for your diary:

24 February – 12 May 2008: Social Mobiles exhibited as part of Design and the Elastic Mind, MoMA, New York

16 – 24 May 2008: IMD degree show at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. This year’s IMD graduates were responsible for the first Museum of Lost Interactions

27 – 29 July 2008: Microsoft Design Expo 2008, that will feature the work of Dundee IMD and IPD students

Autumn 2008: The MIT Press due to publish ‘Designing Braille for the sighted’

December 2008: the opening of the next gallery of MoLI (sorry, the theme is a secret!)

Thanks Graham!

Just back from London where i visited the Work in Progress show at the Royal College of Art (you’ve got until Thursday 7 February to visit it). I’ll come back with more details later but here’s an appetizer from the department of Design Interactions.

Revital Cohen got interested in Life support machines and the way the technologies involved in keeping patients alive in intensive care enter and merge with the body. By doing so they redefine its material and functional properties. As the human anatomy gains technological capabilities, where does the body end and the machine begin?

The Telepresence Frame is a domestic object which utilizes the fact that one’s bodily functions are digitalized in order to create a new form of telepresence. Your family would have the frame at home as a presence that keeps them constantly aware of your physical state while you’re being kept alive at the hospital.

The Human Black Box records and stores this information, keeping a record of your very last moments. Once you die, the frame plays your life data back. In loop.

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.