Tag: design/Archives

PechaKucha

What do Stockholm, Amsterdam, Phoenix, and Bozeman have in common? Well, they’re all having PechaKucha Nights on Wednesday October 19.

PechaKucha logo: 20x20PechaKucha is “an event for designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. The presentation format is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds.” Six minutes and forty seconds of slideshow to introduce an audience to your concept, artwork or endeavor.

In Japanese “pecha kucha” means “chit chat.” Here’s an oh-so-cute pronunciation (by Forvo user: Akiko / mp3):

PechaKucha Bozeman has its first night October 19 at the Story Mansion. Doors open at 6:30p.m. with the first PK promptly at 7:20p.m. (Admission: $5 | Facebook | PDF flyer). Presenters— Presentations include: More…

Soundlines Project

A nice blend of map-based selectable sounds/images at “The Soundlines Project.” It’s a project-in-progress done by Andrea Hammer’s Cornell students about the town of Endicott NY.
Soundlines Project screenshot

J Data Age

Network image of USA, detail of video screenshotA global tour of J-based data-viz, from IBM Many Eyes to Brazil’s Infografio 2.0, Journalism in the Age of Data: “A video report on data visualization as a storytelling medium.”

The annotated Flash chapters are best, but there’s also a 50min Vimeo video, a podcast series (.m4v), and an accessible set of YouTube vids. (Produced by Geoff McGhee during a Knight Journalism Fellowship.)

via FlowingData (“Basically, all the repeat offenders here on FlowingData are in this video talking about what they do best…”).

Mosiac County

A friend, database/web designer Jon Nehring, is configuring some colored county-level data visualizations (aka, choropleth map) for a client. During dev, a “happenstance created this image in SQL Server”:
County-level colored map data

Dubai: Reach for the Sky

Dubai- tallest building[Jake’s out of Iraq, and back in Dubai…]

I visited the world’s newest tallest building today — Humanity’s latest height.

The whole experience smelled of new paint.

From the 124th observation floor I could still see starving people all over the world.

I could almost see Mesopotamia where I had been in Iraq, where the tower of Babel once stood and where people still fight.

Many tourists, many languages, we all took photos, that’s what we do.

I could not see the desert though we stand on it and are surrounded by it.

There’s no where to sit, to contemplate. The gift kiosk sold stylish tissue box covers, there was only one urinal in the men’s room and it didn’t have auto-flush.

I could see the past but the building promoted only the future.

Dubai- tallest building, top floor

Tufte iPhone GUI

Edward Tufte’s praise and crit of iPhone rez, w/ phrases like: “computer administrative debris”, “chartoon”, “content/information is interface”, “in a land of cluncky cellphone interfaces”. Had to transcribe this GUI gem:

“To clarify, add detail. Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information; instead, fix the design.”

iPhone Resolution by Edward Tufte

His improved weather visualizations at end of vid are exceptional; see discussion at The 404 Blog Getting Tough on Tufte. More E.T. at: iPhone interface design.

Edward Tufte: site | tube | sparklines | wavefields

Tufte Wavefields

Multi-D infographics potential from the Edward Tufte (statistician, sculptor, designer) podcast

Edward Tufte: Wavefields

Ask E.T. “Wavefields: intense animated data graphics”:

“Wavefields” are data graphics that draw on and completely fill the entire display surface, using every pixel on the data plane to show high-resolution, complex, multiple, animated statistical data-flows. Wavefields extend my work on sparklines.…

As the metaphor for sparklines is the resolution of typography, the metaphor for wavefields is the HD video, which records approximately 1 gigabyte per minute, a data throughput that might finally make our statistical graphics worthy of the powers of the human eye-brain system.

[Note that E.T. leaves out “ear” from the “human eye-brain system” — his audio reflects his sonic neglect.]

More on Infographics:
Cool Infographics blog
Flickr Info Graphics Pool
Smashing Magazine Data Visualization and Infographics
Edward Tufte: site | tube

Great Failure

Coudal Partners logo“People always ask, ‘What is your greatest failure?’ I always have the same answer: ‘We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!'”
—Product designer Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners), interviewed by Design Glut.

via Tin Bonham’s twits.

Water and Air

From the Science Photo Library:

Global water and air volume: Earth with spheres represeting the amount of air and water on planet

Global water and air volume: Conceptual computer artwork of the total volume of water on Earth (left) and of air in the Earth’s atmosphere (right) shown as spheres (blue and pink). The spheres show how finite water and air supplies are. The water sphere measures 1390 kilometres across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometres. This includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as ground water, and that in the atmosphere. The air sphere measures 1999 kilometres across and weighs 5140 trillion tonnes. As the atmosphere extends from Earth it becomes less dense. Half of the air lies within the first 5 kilometres of the atmosphere. Image by Dr Adam Nieman.

via TED Talk by Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action.

Wieden+Kennedy

Ad agency Wieden+Kennedy has, what I consider, a rarity: a well-implemented Flash site. Their front-page timeline works very well, and tho it could have been done in AJAX, is probably better in Flash.

via Ben- Comma Q.

I Seem to Be a Verb

We at HV are now twits, but with a twist. Most tweets are rapid and vapid. We’re experimenting with another approach: slow and substantive: twitticisms. Every morn we add enter another line from R. Buckminster Fuller’s I Seem to Be a Verb, delivering discrete daily doses of philosophically  dense data.

Running along the footer of that book’s pages is a continuing line of text. The book’s out-of-print so we’re resurrecting these Bucky bits in 140-character chucks. Follow us @hearvox or read the whole below.

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.
–R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)

New Yorker: “Dymaxion Man” | “Weird Science” (slides)
“Starting with the Universe:” Whitney (NYC) | MCA (Chicago)
Whole Earth: “God is a Verb” | “2025, If…” | “Thoughts
Films: “Thinking Out Loud” | Everything I Know
Bucky Fuller: Institute | Wikiquotes | Dome | Challenge
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

This text is the footer of Bucky Fuller’s I Seem to Be a Verb:

Society neither hears nor sees the great changes going on.

Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side.

Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.

Half-century of subconsciously developing world revolution is crossing threshold into human consciousness and ultimate popular support.

Today’s students, reared by television, “the third parent,” think world.

They think and demand justice for all humanity with no exceptions.

Theirs will be the most powerful constructive revolution in history. Earth is a very small spaceship. We are all astronauts.

Each human is a whole universe. We have 28,000 pounds of explosives for each human being on earth.

Weaponry has always been accorded priority over livingry. Only two alternatives — Utopia or Oblivion.

All the fundamental problems are world problems. Man knows so much does so little.

Greatest fact of century: We can make life on earth general success for all people.

World’s prime vital problem: How to triple swiftly safely satisfyingly overall performance realizations per pounds kilowatts manhours of world’s comprehensive resources, rendering those resources capable of supporting one hundred per cent of humanity’s increasing population at ever higher standards of living than any human minority single individual has known or dreamed of.

War over population hunger disease would cease to exist if “haves” devoted larger share of their industrial budget to world livingry.

Malthus is wrong. There is enough to go around.

Basic you-or-me-not-enough-for-both-ergo-someone-must-die tenets of class warfaring are extinct.

Real wealth — indestructible, without practical limits — is combination of physical energy and human intellect.

Every time we use real wealth it increases. Intellect must increase wealth to eliminate poverty.

Design science, invention revolution could elevate poverty to haveness.

(If you can produce it, you can afford it. If you can’t produce it, you can’t afford it.)

Intelligence should be recognized as a global resource. Brain stores retrieves special case experiences.

Mind discovery generalized patterns apparently governing all special case experiences.

Thinking is the consciously disciplined separation of relevant feedback from irrelevant feedback.

Greatest single revolution in human affairs has been ascendancy of intellect’s intuitive mastery over the physical but all the important critical events realizing that revolution just happens.

Only the impossible happens. Probability unreliable. To each of us environment is everything that isn’t “me.”

New, physically uncompromised metaphysical initiative of unbiased integrity could unify world.

It could and probably will be provided by the utterly impersonal problem solutions of man’s antibody, the computer.

Only to their computer’s superhuman range of calculative capabilities can and may all political scientific religious leaders face-savingly acquiesce.

Evolution is apparently intent that man fulfill a much greater destiny than that of being simple muscle and reflex machine, a slave automaton.

(By 1975 China may be most impressively modern nation, highly automated.)

Automation can produce wealth beyond all our needs and dreams.

(We’ve always had automation. What’s happening to your lunch?)

Automation has made man obsolete as physical production and control specialist — just in time.

Specialization is only a fancy form of slavery wherein the “expert” is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially culturally preferred, ergo, highly-secure, life-long position.

Nature always does things in simplest most efficient way. All nature is based on triangles.

Nature doesn’t have separate departments of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics.

World society is operating almost exclusively in inaudible nonvisible area of physical universe.

We are living in a world where change is normal.

Because prime evolutionary transformations are invisible, it is approximately impossible for world society to comprehend that changes in next 30 years will be far greater than in last 100 years. It is approximately impossible for world society to comprehend that.

Artists are now being recognized as extraordinarily important to human society.

Scientist are utterly irresponsible regarding pro-vs.-anti social disposition of “eggs” they lay in the laboratories.

Every child is born a genius: Ninety-nine percent are degeniused by early post-natal circumstances.

Human being has great potentiality, but many wires get disconnected.

Ages 0 to 4 are biggest “school” opportunity. Child is trim tab of the future.

Least favorable environment for study is schoolroom and closely-packed desk prisons.

Real schoolhouse is in the home and outdoors.

Within 10 years anything reasonably think-upable by science fiction will probably have been realized.

Possession is becoming progressively burdensome, wasteful, and therefore obsolete, total man may be going through a total wave of transformation into an entirely new relationship with the universe.

Man freed of special case superstition by intellect has had survival potentials multiplied millionsfold.

Humans can now whisper in one another’s ear from anywhere around the world. (Be sure to entertain all your emotions.)

Intellectual integrity will win tomorrow’s battles with accelerating inexorability.

Political commercial sham false premise institutions will vanish with startling rapidity.

Man, as designed, is obviously intended to be a success. Success: not a bad thing to have “hanging over your head.”

Experiment is always valuable. You can’t learn less. You can always get nearer to the truth.

(Language can be a block to reality.) Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and Universe is ahead for all of us.

(Man was designed with legs — not roots.) Man can do anything he wants.

—R. Buckminster Fuller

NYT Viz Labs

NYT data sets and multimedia design team up with IBM “Many Eyes” technology to bring you the Visualization Lab, where you can create your own “visual representations of data and information,” such as:

Scraper Bike

Scraper Bikes, the videos, the photos, the song, the space, and the radio report, by Jacob Fenston with the “Scraper Bike King” (Tyrone Stevenson Jr.) — broadcast on California Report, then NPR:

SCRAPER BIKE – Trunk Boiz (Final Version):