I’ll be teaching another workshop on creative coding at the end of the month! Join us, and learn to use Processing to create your own interactive, digital art. Details at gaffta.org.
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Posted: February 10th, 2010, 6:08pm PST by Scott
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Posted: February 10th, 2010, 5:27pm PST by Scott
Practice, my MFA thesis project, will be set up for you to explore this Friday in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Practice is both a work of interactive video art and a design research project.
Unlike most other works of this medium, it does not reward bodily motion and exaggerated gestures, but encourages patience and self-reflection. In so doing, it explores the tension between emotional engagement and the uncomfortable ambiguity of not knowing what will happen next.
Friday, February 12
About 9:00 – 11:00pm
16th St. and Guerrero St., NE corner (Map)
In the event of rain, the piece will be installed the next night, Saturday, 2/13.
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Posted: January 27th, 2010, 1:32am PST by Scott
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Posted: January 25th, 2010, 1:13pm PST by Scott
While working on deep ocean graphics for a client, I inadvertently created something more cloud-like.
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Posted: January 21st, 2010, 5:54pm PST by Scott
It’s up! Check out the home page, now re-envisioned as an interactive portfolio of recent projects. Let me know what you think via the new “contact” link.
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Posted: November 17th, 2009, 12:32pm PST by Scott
LAIKA is a new, dynamic typeface, designed and constructed by Nicolas Kunz and Michael Flückiger. The genius here is that visual elements of the face (such as weight, serif prominence, and italic degree) are reframed as parameters, into which can be fed values from any source — either your own keyboard, or something more interesting like weight or distance sensors, so the visual typographic form can respond to physical factors in an installation environment. Try it out!
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Posted: November 4th, 2009, 10:50am PST by Scott
Remember when AOL leaked 650,000 of its users’ search queries? For the first time, we got to see what real people search for on the web.
Now, thanks to Search Suggestion technology by Google, Yahoo, and others, you don’t have to wait for a corporate screw-up to expose search queries — you can do it yourself! Just type a few letters, and watch the most popular searches appear on top.
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Posted: October 9th, 2009, 5:45pm PDT by Scott
Camille Utterback gave a talk at UC Berkeley on Monday. A digital artist, pioneer of interactive video art, and one of last month’s awardees of a 2009 MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. “genius grant”), Camille got her start in digital art at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. There, with Romy Achituv, she created her first interactive video installation, “Text Rain,” in 1999.
Utterback’s talk was titled “Luscious Complexity: Transcending the Doohickey.” I want to share some of her thoughts here, because many of them are right in line with my own recent thinking. The following items are highly paraphrased from my notes during the talk.
Utterback writes all of her own code, mostly in C++, but also uses Processing to sketch ideas.
In computational media, the rules are implicit and hidden. When the user has to deduce the rules, the interaction may be frustrating. When not frustrating, though, this quality can make for a beautiful process of discovery.
Always avoid “one liners.” Make sure your work has enough conceptual complexity to stand the test of time.
Consider how an installation affects your physical body — are you looking up? down? arching your back? bending toward the floor? Notice what emotions and behaviors we associate with those positions. (Eyes cast downward, for example, indicates shame. Looking straight ahead indicates engagement.) Don’t make the user uncomfortable, unless you are trying to make the user uncomfortable.
It is very important to do user testing. When coding, you are writing rules that define the accepted parameters of user behavior. Not everyone will behave as you do, so test to make sure your rules are flexible enough to work for others.
Using camera input automatically makes a piece social. People will move in front of the camera with others, interact with each other and the piece, and create their own meanings from the interaction.
People intuitively understand how to move and interact with mirrored video, by virtue of experience in the physical world (i.e. using mirrors). Think about how to translate other shared physical experiences into intuitive, digital interface mechanisms.
Utterback tries to bridge the gap between the “fleshy world” of the body and the rules-based world of the computer.
Her work in drawing systems (such as the piece Untitled #5) contains many hand-drawn elements, overlaid with digital manipulations. (Not all the forms are code-generated.)
This kind of work is fun, because people move in goofy ways, like kids.
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Posted: October 7th, 2009, 8:26pm PDT by Scott
It’s done! This weekend’s creating coding workshop at GAFFTA went really well, despite Loveparade’s pounding revelry just outside. In case you missed it, you can experience all 10.5 hours of coding bliss in under two minutes — just watch the video below. Also, check out some of the great projects that the students made.
My souvenir Gray Area logo pin:
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Posted: September 2nd, 2009, 2:49pm PDT by Scott
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Get the latest Java Plug-in here.I’m very excited to announce that I will be co-teaching a two-day introduction to Processing at the new Gray Area Foundation for the Arts here in San Francisco! The workshop is the first in a series on creative coding, and coincides with Gray Area’s grand opening celebrations and initial exhibition, featuring work by C.E.B. Reas, Camille Utterback, and Stamen Design.
The Gray Area folks have created an amazing space downtown, and this workshop is an exciting chance to learn a ton of great new skills, and even meet one of Processing’s co-initiators. (C.E.B. will be making an appearance.)
The workshop is scheduled for Saturday, October 3rd & Sunday, October 4th, 1:00 – 6:00pm both days.
See GAFFTA’s site for the complete schedule, details, and registration.
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Posted: June 23rd, 2009, 3:13pm PDT by Scott
An amazing stop-motion video with sticky notes as pixels. Click “HQ” to watch it in high quality.
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Posted: June 10th, 2009, 5:00pm PDT by Scott
Thanks to TechCrunch for capturing some video of App Store visualization on display at Apple’s WWDC conference this week. A massive grid of iPhone application icons, arranged by color, pulsates as each app is purchased through the App Store.
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Posted: May 19th, 2009, 8:56pm PDT by Scott
Questions & Answers is my latest project: an experiment in new, non-linear narrative forms, or what I’m calling data-as-narrative. But really it’s just a fun way to explore some of the crazy, interesting stuff people write online.
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Posted: April 29th, 2009, 11:11pm PDT by Scott
I generated this image from the genetic code of a California case of H1N1 (posted today by the CDC). I fed the data into my color tools project, and assigned one color for each base found in DNA: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). The colors were chosen by searching ColourLovers for each of those base names and using the top result, i.e. the “best” colors for A, C, G, and T, according to ColourLovers.
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Posted: March 26th, 2009, 1:43pm PDT by Scott
The outcome of a conversation with Mike and Jason during class: What would happen if you mapped red, green, and blue to x, y, and z?
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Posted: March 9th, 2009, 7:03pm PDT by Scott
The aftermath of last Thursday’s pie fight at Powell and Market. Photo by Steve Rhodes.
This year’s annual Valentine’s Day pillow fight at Justin Herman Plaza. Photo by marymaddux.The SF Chronicle reports that the city is absorbing huge cleanup costs thanks to messes left behind by recent flash mobs. Maybe mobbers should adopt a “leave no trace” philosophy, like that informally followed by the early mobs, when people would converge, act, and disappear, leaving only confusion in their wake. Leaving behind garbage, shaving cream, and feathers that clog the fountains and halt the cable cars is no fun for anyone.
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Posted: February 14th, 2009, 1:38pm PST by Scott
I’ve been thinking about how best to auralize data. I realize that’s not a real word (yet), but consider auralization to be visualization’s auditory sibling. The music video by Johannes Kreidler above, while hokey, is both innovative and entertaining.
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Posted: February 5th, 2009, 7:30pm PST by Scott
A new project I worked on with Cici and Simon. More info on the project page.
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Posted: January 22nd, 2009, 12:47pm PST by Scott
Add Chris Jordan to the list of people I want to meet.
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Posted: January 22nd, 2009, 12:11pm PST by Scott
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Posted: January 13th, 2009, 1:14pm PST by Scott
Lately, I’ve been thinking about data visualization as a narrative form. How can data be presented so that it truly tells a story in addition to revealing unseen information?
This student art project at Dartmouth College renders a polar bear on-screen. When electricity use in the dorm is high, the temperature rises, the ice melts, and the polar bear falls into the arctic waters. By unplugging, students can help the cuddly character “live” happily on the ice in a cool climate.
It’s a data visualization at its core, but by using a cute character—as opposed to a bar chart—the presentation triggers an emotional response and truly tells a story. Not only that, but the story is interactive, and the viewer/participant’s behavior determine the outcome.
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Posted: December 31st, 2008, 8:30pm PST by Scott
No, it’s not a map visualization—it’s a mapping visualization.
This gorgeous video illustrates all the edits made to OpenStreetMap over the past year. Since all the data on OpenStreetMap is user-contributed (like Wikipedia), you can just picture OSM users all over the world driving around with their GPS devices, uploading new data to the site. (Try watching it full-screen in HD.)
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Posted: December 23rd, 2008, 8:15pm PST by Scott
Yet another astounding UI development enabled by iPhone: grade-level, idle fingerboarding “enhanced” (for better or worse) with 3D graphics and rock music.
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Posted: December 14th, 2008, 11:40pm PST by Scott
Announcing the release of new research on visualizing network relationships. Play with the demo, download the presentation poster, and read the research paper.
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Posted: December 5th, 2008, 6:33pm PST by Scott
Sometimes I would get distracted while doing the dishes and play these appliances as though they were instruments. Be honest: Have you ever heard a dishwasher duet that sounded so good?
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Posted: December 3rd, 2008, 1:05pm PST by Scott
If you’re at MassArt, you have to stop by the Wentworth gym (just across Huntington Ave.) and check this out: Expresso Fitness has created a stationary bike with moving handlebars, a shifter, and, yes, a 3D graphics engine. And it is awesome.
By providing you with an on-screen avatar and over 50 courses to choose from, the Expresso system prevents your brain from acknowledging the painful, boring, physical fact that you’re really just sitting in one place and pedaling for 30-60 minutes. You’re distracted from any physical sensations when you realize that there are other people on the course with you (a gender-balanced and racially diverse crowd, as it turns out), and, as in a video game, you are motivated to beat them, to do better. So you start passing your fellow cyclists, even though you know that they’re not real, and they don’t care. You can literally ride right through them, and they won’t even blink. Keep an eye on your pacer—he’s really the one to beat, as you’re pedaling through Muir Woods, or an Aztec ruin, or even up in space.
If fake bicyclists aren’t enough to motivate you, maybe real ones will. Like an old-school arcade, Expresso tracks each rider’s performance, presenting a sort of high score list at the end of each ride. Did you beat Tommy M.? Ouch, looks like Jane S. tore through your best time! If you provide the bike with your email address, it will notify you when other, real people beat your times. And of course you can log on to the website at any time (from home, not while on the bike) to track your progress, miles pedaled, calories burned, and so on. Since your motions are being recorded, you can also race yourself—your “ghost”—and improve your mad (stationary bike) skillz.
This Internet-connected bike isn’t just monitoring you, though: it’s recording everyone’s rides, aggregating the data, and generating some interesting factoids. That’s how Expresso knows that people riding its bikes pedaled 1.4 million virtual miles, burning 44 million calories in September, as reported in the company newsletter.
For a long time, gymnasia have been decidedly low-tech places—think medicine balls, stretching mats, and free weights. But with tools like Wii Fit and Expresso bikes, our workouts are going digital.
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Posted: November 27th, 2008, 2:15pm PST by Scott
From Michael Chang, the guy who brought true scalable type to Processing, comes a demo reel of data vis interaction inspiration. In my own work, I’ve focused on just “getting it to work” and display the data, but now I want to make sure the whole experience is as beautiful and fluid as in Chang’s work.
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Posted: November 16th, 2008, 2:30pm PST by Scott
Disturbing facts from today’s Times article “Lose the BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe”:
- No US President has ever used email while in office.
- No US President has ever used a laptop computer while in the oval office.
- For the first time ever, the weekly Democratic radio address was delivered in a new, so-called “moving picture” format. (Obama’s speech was videotaped and posted on YouTube, see above.)
It will be interesting to see how this new administration uses modern technology to communicate, inform, and influence the public. (Will Obama still TXT me? Can I subscribe to an executive orders feed? Will Malia and Sasha write guest posts on a White House blog?)
On another note, update your bookmarks from barackobama.com to change.gov, the temporary website of the Obama-Biden transition team. Note, too, the URL’s brand extension of their campaign. Clever.
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Posted: November 12th, 2008, 1:55pm PST by Scott
Image from Flickr by TorleyI attended a captivating talk last night by Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Their research focuses on manipulating social interactions in virtual environments, thereby testing subjects’ reactions to situations that could not occur in physical reality. For example, in virtual reality, my avatar could be made to maintain eye contact with yours at all times, even though in physical reality, I am avoiding eye contact. Creepy, right?
I highly recommend watching the lab tour video, but if you don’t have time, here are some of their most interesting findings he presented:
Although constant eye contact makes subjects extremely uncomfortable, the result is greater engagement and increased learning. This has significant implications for teaching via VR environments. Imagine if each student perceived that the teacher’s avatar is looking at them.
When study participants’ avatars were made to be 10 inches taller than their co-participants, they felt more confident and were always more able to convince the “shorter” person of a certain point of view. Same goes for more attractive vs. less attractive avatars. Also, the confidence that appeared in users with taller or more attractive avatars was maintained outside of the virtual environment for at least an hour. (No longitudinal studies have been done yet, but maybe repeated exposures to tall, attractive, virtual selves could increase feelings of self-confidence. VR is already being used to treat various phobias, like the fear of flying, but perhaps it could be extended for more general treatments of mental health.)
There are almost no obese avatars in Second Life, where prejudice against obesity is as prevalent as in reality. Subjects who spent 10 hours a week using Second Life with obese avatars did not enjoy it, and their decreased self-esteem actually extended beyond the game and into their real lives to a degree unexpected (and undesired) by the researchers.
Similarly, players in World of Warcraft advance more quickly in the game if their avatars are tall and “attractive,” even with all character skills being equal. Short, “ugly” characters progress more slowly.
The lab has developed software that can track facial expressions using a regular web cam and relay that information to remote participants. Imagine video chat, but with a 3D on-screen avatar whose face mimics your actual facial expressions. (Watch the video. It’s eerily well-done.)
Side note: The talk was free, and presented by Café Scientifique at SRI. There are lots of local “Café Sci” groups all over the world. Check out their website to find a local group and tons of interesting speakers. The SF group, for example, has an upcoming talk on “How Computers Look at Art.”
Also, if you’re in the Bay Area, note that SRI is also presenting a sort of Doug Engelbart retrospective in December.
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Posted: November 6th, 2008, 2:30am PST by Scott
That’s not the catchiest headline, but it’s what this post is about. I’ve finally solved the problem I’ve been working on since September: how to take a bunch of circles of different sizes and group them around a central point, while preventing any overlap. See this illustration:
This turned out to be much more complicated than I had expected. If all the circles were of the same diameter, it would be easy to calculate regular positions and space them evenly. But I have a project with circles of all different sizes, and I needed them to be near each other, maybe even touching, but not overlapping. I knew it was possible, because I’d seen it done before, such as in visualizations on Many Eyes.
I started by trying to solve the problem using trigonometry. Measuring radii, tangents, and such seemed to be the answer, but got very complicated very quickly. Then I turned to the Traer Physics library for Processing. My idea was to have a central point of “gravity” that would attract the circle objects, but then make each circle repel the others, so they would sort of come together and then space out. JohnG, on the Processing boards figured out a way to do that, but his example used objects of uniform size and mass. With a variety of sizes, again, it got more complicated, and was using more computation power than I needed. After all, I didn’t need cool, fluid-like motion. I just needed to arrange things properly.
My answer came from Mike G. (thanks, Mike!), who suggested using a square-spiral approach, no trigonometry involved. Take circle A, placed at center. Then place circle B at center as well, but move it to the right one pixel. Then check to see if it’s colliding (overlapping) circle A. If so, move it down one, then left one, two, then up one, two, then right one, two, three, and so on. Keep “spiralling” outward along a progressively larger square path, and eventually you will find a point where the two circles no longer overlap.
This was a major breakthrough, and I got pretty close to figuring it out myself, but had to call in Mike for help. He sent me some code this morning for spacing out three circles. Things got more complicated the more circles I added, but I managed to get it working, finally, this afternoon. Give it a shot, and play around with adding/subtracting circles and seeing how the cluster is recalculated. As a bonus, I factored in a spacing variable, so you can have the circles sit farther apart or closer together. The next step is to integrate this into my iTunes visualization.
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Posted: November 4th, 2008, 4:27pm PST by Scott
A New York Times interactive feature running today captures the moods of its visitors. It’s simple and typographically beautiful, and reminds me of Simon’s emotion-related projects. You can even filter by McCain and Obama supporters, to compare their states of being. (I’m the “exhausted” one at lower right.)
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Posted: October 29th, 2008, 2:14am PDT by Scott
Colin’s mid-semester presentation has me thinking about sound and image. Now that it’s on my mind, I see interesting examples everywhere.
First, making music with your face:
Next, building a visual landscape with sound. (Watch it in low-res below, or in high-definition on Vimeo.)
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Posted: October 29th, 2008, 1:59am PDT by Scott
Finally! Someone makes fun of CNN’s gratuitous and distracting use of multitouch technology to display data that would be much more clearly communicated through simple static displays. Thanks, SNL! (Hint: Jump to 1:30 into the video.)
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Posted: October 12th, 2008, 1:06am PDT by Scott
For my next project at Berkeley, I created a real time visualization of estimated train arrival times within the BART system. So next time you need to head over to the East Bay, just check the visualization and you can see how far away your train is from the station.
More detail on the project and process behind it are documented here. Thanks to BART for making their arrivals data available!
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Posted: October 6th, 2008, 12:20pm PDT by Scott
Here’s a video demo of my iTunes Library Visualization project. I recommend watching it in HD on Vimeo—click the outward-pointing arrows to make it full-screen and then click “HD” to get the best quality image. (You can also play it above, at low-quality.)
Each track is represented by a disc. Longer tracks are larger discs. The tracks can be organized in space by length and frequency of playback (i.e. most listened-to tracks fly toward the front, least listened-to recede). Grouping by genre adds color and clusters all tracks of the same genre around one point. Once the tracks are colorized, they can be reordered while maintaining the color (so, for example, you could see if you listen to jazz more often than hip hop).
Future enhancements will add text to label groups and track names, and better physics to handle collisions and spatial overlapping.
Built using Processing and the ProXML library.
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Posted: September 23rd, 2008, 7:15pm PDT by Scott
I just finished a visualization for my second assignment at Berkeley. It was made using Tableau, a rapid-visualization application, and Photoshop. You can read more about the process behind it.
Presidential campaign contributions made by individuals during the 2007-2008 election cycle, by political party and contributor location
Using FEC data of individual contributors to presidential election campaigns, this bar chart illuminates that both California- and San Francisco-based individuals give significant portions of the total amounts received by campaigns of each party. It is also clear that Democratic campaigns have received over 1.5 times as much as Republicans in this election cycle, at the national, state, and city levels. Contributions to Independent and Libertarian campaigns barely even register in comparison, and Green ones not at all.
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Posted: September 18th, 2008, 2:21pm PDT by Scott
The latest ad from the Alliance for Climate Protection contains some rotating, 3D type reminiscent of David Small’s Talmud Project. Watch the whole thing, or just jump to 15 seconds in.
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Posted: September 16th, 2008, 7:02pm PDT by Scott
My Processing workshop went very well on Saturday. When a group doesn’t interrupt with questions, I worry that they’ve tuned me out, but it turns out everyone was just busy hacking away, making crazy blinky shapes and colors! From the official report:
Scott took us through the Processing IDE briefly, discussing the parts of the window, how to run your program, how to get help, and a few other useful tips. Then he jumped right into how to program - we were all able to create a simple diagonal line immediately. He walked us through flat sketches, moving sketches, 3-D sketches, text, importing external images, various control structures, and a brief explanation of objects. About 6-8 remained after the workshop and continued playing with the language.
All agreed Scott did an excellent job of introducing Processing and that it’s a fascinating and useful language.
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Posted: September 12th, 2008, 3:42pm PDT by Scott
You won’t believe me, but square A is the same value of gray as square B. (Don’t just take Wikipedia’s word for it—verify it yourself by sampling the two squares in Photoshop.)
When we perceive an object to be three-dimensional, our brains automatically account for the lighting conditions, and compensate for nearby color and brightness values.
I’ve been reading a lot about visual perception for class, and this is one of the most interesting images so far.
Thanks to ColourLovers for posting this.
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Posted: September 12th, 2008, 3:08pm PDT by Scott
A few weeks ago, I wrote admiringly about the groundbreaking, orientation-independent interface of my favorite iPhone game, Dizzy Bee.
I shared my admiration with the folks at Igloo Games, and got a response from Nathan, the designer and developer behind Dizzy Bee, the company’s first product. He agreed to answer a few questions for me, sharing some of the process behind this innovative game and UI.
Scott: How many others did you work with to create the final product?
Nathan: Three total. I did all of the programming and design. Art was handled by my good friend, and the sounds were contracted out.
How did the concept for the game originate? Can you describe your process for evolving the concept and new ideas?
The game started as a twist on a labyrinth game. I felt there would be a lot of accelerometer-based flat games, so I decided to try a vertical version. (Many people seem to prefer to play it flat, though.) I’m a big fan of character-based action, so I like to put eyes on just about everything—rather than balls and holes, I wanted to have good guys and bad guys. I felt like controlling multiple good guys would be really compelling, so I started with that. It wasn’t clear what was going on, who the main character was, and what you were trying to do, so I decided we’d have a main character to draw your focus, and we would build toward controlling multiple friends—that’s were the cages were born. Then we put in the basic bad guy that moves almost the same as you, and we knew we had a game. After that, it was just playing with different physics aspects to make unique characters. The birds just have a maximum speed that they go, so they kind of fall slowly. The big guy is much larger and heavier than you, so he doesn’t fit in certain places. I tried tons of different enemies/objects out. The ones I could make a cool stage out of stayed, and the rest were tossed.
Once you had the idea for the game play UI (which uses only the accelerometer as input), how did you start thinking about the UI elements that appear between stages?
I often have to make temporary art while I’m prototyping things. I felt I could draw a blob and call it an island, so that’s where the island/sea concept came from. I had originally gone for a more novel approach for unlocking stages. I had wanted each island to have a theme and a port city. After you complete the port city (kind of an introduction to that island), you could play any level on that island. So after beating the first island you would have 3 new port cities, and if you beat those right away you would have 12 new levels to try. I still like the idea, but the difficulty ramping wasn’t working. People would find a stage that was way too difficult, and the unlocking of islands wasn’t really a reward at all, so I changed it to a more traditional progression.
As for the Results Screen, I wanted good replay value, so I decided on 3 things to grade people on. [The three scales that determine one’s score are: fruits saved, flowers collected, and percentage of fruits that exited the level in a chain—meaning, they were saved at the same time. See screenshot above.] I wanted those to be very prominent. Also, if the fruits lived or not and if they chained or not are very important, so I wanted that to be visually represented as well. The rest I just left up to my artist, and what you see is what he came up with.
How would you describe the Dizzy Bee UI?
It’s an up-less spinny UI. As I was making the game, I took care to make sure that nothing after the splash/loading screen had an “up”. The dialog boxes originally could be rotated 360 degrees as well, but unfortunately I couldn’t get the refresh going fast enough to make them smooth, so I had to settle for 90-degree increments.
Another thing I like to do with UIs is take one theme and apply it to everything. For example, I made a level editor in Mario vs Donkey Kong 2, and in that there were lots of things that would scale up and down with an elastic type effect, finally settling on the correct size. In Dizzy Bee, all of the UI elements are like a spinner on a nail with a weight at the bottom, so they like to keep some momentum and eventually settle in the right spot. Also, each weight is a little different, so each individual element moves slightly differently.
What terminology did you use internally to describe all these elements? I tend to use “UI” to refer to more traditional interface elements, like the text and tap-able buttons that appear outside of the stages.
I use UI very broadly to mean anything that’s not the in-game action. There are a few terms to specify which part more closely. I use front end to describe any title screens/credits/file selectors. Level select is the island/sea section screen. HUD is anything that is shown while playing the game, such as players’ lives or health. (Incidentally, Dizzy Bee has no HUD.) Pause menu for… well, you know. Lots of companies use these same terms in different ways, which has caused me some confusion in the past.
I’ve called it an “orientation-independent” UI. Were you or others on the Igloo team thinking in those terms, or did you use other language to describe what you were building?
I was just thinking in terms of Dizzy Bee is an “up-less” game, but I looked back at an old e-mail, and I also used the term “orientation independent”. There are a lot of things I do during development that I question if anyone will even notice. Thanks for recognizing it, and pointing it out.
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Posted: September 9th, 2008, 10:04pm PDT by Scott
Take a look at this dynamic animation of the history of OpenStreetMap, an open-source mapping platform, in which all data contributed by users who walk, bicycle, and drive around with GPS units. It’s interesting to see which cities and roads get mapped first, and then to watch as the data expands outwards towards more remote areas.
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Posted: September 5th, 2008, 3:28pm PDT by Scott
Yesterday marked the second day of the course I’m taking at UC Berkeley titled, simply, “Visualization.” I’ll be recording my most valuable learnings from the course here on the blog, mostly for the benefit of fellow DMIers. If you find this interesting, just follow along on the blog, or find more information on the class wiki. Yes, everything related to the course is on there—the readings, completed assignments, everything.
One of our readings for class was “The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations,” by Ben Shneiderman. In it, Schneiderman outlines a taxonomy that covers nearly all types of data:
- 1D (point, one value)
- 2D (x/y, planes, maps, etc.)
- 3D (x/y/z, space, objects with depth)
- Temporal (4 dimensions)
- Multi-dimensional (or nD, basically any datum with >4 dimensions or values)
- Trees (hierarchically structured data)
- Networks (graph structure, or non-hierarchical, but related)
I recommend spending a few minutes with his article.
We also talked about Nominal, Ordinal, and Quantitative data.
- Nominal data is named, or labeled (e.g. apples, oranges, starfish, racecars), although the labels are not related in any direct way.
- Ordinal data is ordered (e.g. grade A meat, grade AA, and grade AAA). The order is known—whether from low to high or best to worst—but not the relative distance between each measure. (For example, we know that grade AAA meat is different from grade AA, but we can’t say whether it’s 2.5 times better or 88.3 times worse than AA.)
- Quantitative data is quanitifiable in that its relative position to other data can be easily identified. (22 is 12 more than 10.)
Whether you use N, O, or Q depends on what your goal is for the visualization. For example, you could start with the numbers 10.5, 24.8, and -7.1. Your conceptual model tells you what the meaning of these values is. For example, the conceptual model could be distances, angles, or temperatures. Let’s use temperatures.
- If considered nominally, the values could be categorized as burned or frozen.
- If considered ordinally, the values could be categorized as cold, cool, warm, or hot.
- If considered quantitatively, the values would represent a range of relative temperature values.
Why bother with all this? Because not all data types can be visualized in all ways. Jacques Bertin was the first to approach this subject in depth, with his 1967 book Semiology of Graphics. In it, he indentified attributes of visual language (e.g. position, size, shape) that could correspond to the different types of information communicated. Nominal data is more easily represented than quantitative data, it turns out. For example, it’s difficult to sequence using color (since the eye does not naturally perceive blue coming after yellow or before red), although color is great for labeling nominal values (cities, suburbs, disputed territories).
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Posted: August 31st, 2008, 7:01pm PDT by Scott
This morning’s Times had a little write-up on IBM’s many-eyes.com, with an emphasis on the benefits of collaborative data visualization.
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Posted: August 29th, 2008, 1:18pm PDT by Scott
I’ll be teaching a workshop on Processing in just two weeks here in San Francisco. If you’re in the Bay Area and would like to learn how to get your computer to do really neat stuff, learn more about the workshop here. Space is limited, but don’t worry—if you can’t make this one, there will be many more coming soon!
Thanks to everyone at NoiseBridge for their encouragement, support, and assistance.
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Posted: August 29th, 2008, 11:09am PDT by Scott
Wednesday was the first day of the semester at UC Berkeley, where I attended the first lecture in my Visualization course. In it, the professor was obligated to mention John Snow’s 1854 map of cholera deaths near the Broad Street pump in London.
It’s a landmark work in the fields of both visualization and epidemiology. But I was still surprised when, the next day, exploring my local used bookstore, I came across The Ghost Map, a book that recounts every detail of the epidemic and Snow’s path toward discovering its means of transmission. I’m looking forward to reading about how Snow came upon the insight to use a visualization—a map, in this case—to convince others of his theory that the disease was carried in water, and that the Broad Street pump was the source of so many infections. (In case you haven’t heard the story, his visual argument was a success. The pump’s handle was removed, so the people had to look elsewhere, to uncontaminated sources, for water.)
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Posted: August 26th, 2008, 2:32pm PDT by Scott
Ted Nelson’s dream has finally been realized by artist Joe Davis with his Telescopic Text.
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Posted: August 18th, 2008, 6:53pm PDT by Scott
If only I had taken my early anticipation project, extended it into the third dimension, and thought to make it more game-like, I might have ended up with something like Coign of Vantage.
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Posted: August 11th, 2008, 7:55pm PDT by Scott
While working on my own 3D visualization of my iTunes library, I came across this visualization of Netflix data. It seems interesting, although not very dynamic. It includes several essentially static 3D plots of the data.
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Posted: August 7th, 2008, 7:59pm PDT by Scott
I had my first taste of 3D in Processing during our last class, and now I’m hooked. Here’s my first attempt at generating a bunch of spheres, each one a different random color.
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Posted: August 3rd, 2008, 12:20pm PDT by Scott
People have been talking about resolution-independent user interfaces for years — such a UI would gracefully scale larger and smaller, and look good on any display, whether an old 72 ppi CRT or a higher-resolution 163 ppi iPhone.
But I’ve never heard anyone dream of, let alone implement, an orientation-independent interface, one in which text and other elements would always be displayed “upright” from the user’s perspective, regardless of the physical orientation of the display in space.
The creators of the new iPhone game Dizzy Bee have done just that, however, and the execution is completely flawless. Just as the iPhone itself has set the standard for multi-touch interfaces, Dizzy Bee has broken new ground and established a successful structure for future orientation-independent UIs.
Here’s how it works: UI elements rotate freely so that their bottoms point down in the physical world, as detected by the iPhone’s accelerometer. This is appropriate, given that the game itself is played by rotating the physical device in order to direct the bee (and other elements) as they “fall” in the direction of gravity. Here’s an example of the UI shown between levels — this is one of the islands around which Dizzy Bee navigates:
And here’s that same screen, as it appears when I rotate the device around 180 degrees:
Notice how, while the island and compass rose remain fixed on the display (so they appear “upside down” here), all the text elements rotate to stay “upright.” Here’s a shot of the screen that appears when you complete a level:
Here’s that same screen, but I’ve tilted the device 225 degrees clockwise:
From this, I will infer four new guidelines for successful orientation-independent interfaces:
- Each UI element’s top and bottom edges must be defined.
- A point at which the rotation occurs must be specified.
- Elements should be placed so as not to overlap too much, no matter the rotation.
- Background graphics should be appropriate at any rotation.
And as if a ground-breaking UI weren’t enough, Dizzy Bee is also just really fun to play, with cute graphics, great sound design, and lots of puzzling levels to play through — for only $2.99! See it in action here:
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Posted: July 27th, 2008, 11:04am PDT by Scott
This is something I worry about: As most of us spend less time in front of books (and each other) and more time in front of computers, are we gradually training ourselves to read computer-speak more easily than printed language? Many of us are now more comfortable engaging with web page, PDFs, menus, links and lists than we are with those pre-compiled and edited, clunky physical contraptions we call books. I notice myself reading offline less and less, and I worry about what that says for my mind and the nature of my thinking.
I suppose that’s why I was interested in Nicholas Carr’s recent article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. He makes a similar confession, although, despite much rambling and speculation, doesn’t arrive at any helpful conclusions to help us explain this shift.
Motoko Rich has a related article in today’s Times, “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?,” which scarily illustrates how today’s teenagers with Internet access may never read an actual book. Until this morning, I had only worried about my generation — I remember being so engrossed in reading as a child that my parents would have to put a hand between my eyes and the page in order to get my attention — but now we see the first generation that will live their entire lives with high-speed net access. I was born “unplugged,” and opted in at my own volition. But these kids were born plugged in, and they may never know life any other way.
So in 20, 30 years, when these kids are our leaders, debaters, thinkers, policy makers and caretakers, what and how will they be thinking?
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Posted: July 9th, 2008, 12:15pm PDT by Scott
A new game called Rolando has been announced for iPhone. I don’t totally understand what’s going on in the video above, but it looks a lot like the Phun, the ingenious-yet-silly physics experimentation app that Jason and Elaine have mentioned. Maybe this developer took the Phun engine and adapted it into a game, adding some interesting finger-touch controls?
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Posted: July 9th, 2008, 11:14am PDT by Scott
I recently got my invitation to join the beta test of Fire Eagle, a new location-tracking service from Yahoo. Now, technically, it doesn’t “track” where you are, but rather, when you tell it where you are, it listens, and then shares that information with other online applications that you approve. The more apps you plug into it, the more useful it is.
For example, an app on my iPhone could monitor my geographical location and ping Fire Eagle with an update every so often. So iPhone says “now he’s in New York,” and Fire Eagle updates its record. Then, say my weather-tracking app checks with Fire Eagle, which tells it “last I heard, he’s in New York.” So the weather app says “cool, thanks” and then presents me with the forecast in NYC automatically, and I go “whoa, how did you know I went to New York? You’re just a silly weather app.”
Fire Eagle bills itself as “the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online,” and so far, I’d say it lives up to that promise. Although it’s essentially just a database that tracks only one thing (your location), the more applications and devices that become “location-aware” by connecting to this service, the more useful it will become.
I should mention that, of course, there are huge privacy concerns (or should be) whenever people voluntarily share their whereabouts with a corporate entity, but Yahoo swears that they retain only your most recent location and no historical data. (Of course, other services that you authorize to access your Fire Eagle data may retain the information longer.) I appreciate that the UI even has a “My Privacy” page that enables you to temporarily “hide” yourself and ostensibly delete all your location data from Yahoo servers.
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Posted: June 9th, 2008, 9:28pm PDT by Scott
My last project of the semester was a response to the concept of gesture. This is my second-ever installation-ish piece, and it was well-received. When someone moves in front of the camera, the motion is detected and represented on-screen as the spinning of hundreds of tiny discs. Faster motion makes the discs spin faster and change color more rapidly. The effect is even more interesting when using a projector to cover a whole wall with the spinning discs.
From watching people interact with this piece, I learned that everybody loves to see their actions interpreted and expressed in an alternate form. Although I find this project visually interesting, I was concerned about the fact that it doesn’t communicate any explicit information. That turned out not to be a problem from the user’s perspective, as everyone I’ve shown it to immediately starts waving their hands around, jumping up and down, and making all sorts of strange motions, becoming entranced by the patterns that “they” are creating on the screen.
After a couple minutes, though, the colors become such a hodgepodge that they cease to exhibit interesting patterns. So, following one of the great pieces of feedback I received, I added a timer that resets the grid once a minute. That reset encourages further experimentation and allows people to “take turns.” Users seem to get more invested in their motive experimentations when they can claim full ownership of the visual result, as transient as it is.
Watch a video here:
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Posted: June 3rd, 2008, 12:24am PDT by Scott
Image source: Jason Michael, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 License
Most keys on a keyboard make intuitive sense, even to a novice computer user, since nearly all of them are labeled with either familiar symbols (such as letters or numbers) or with recognizable words (enter, delete, escape). The Apple key, however, has no familiar symbols beyond the company logo, a mark whose meaning on something that you press is unclear. Also on that key, the presence of a second, even less-meaningful mark — the so-called “propeller” — and the lack of a written label add to user confusion.
Try explaining basic user interface tasks to anyone new to the Mac, and you’ll see what I mean. You can refer to it as “the Apple key,” which is descriptive, but the apple symbol has no on-screen significance. The propeller mark does appear on-screen, but only the Mac-initiated know that propeller means command. As a result, the Apple key is now called the command key, but that wasn’t always the case.
Having wondered about this glaring usability flaw for years, I was excited to discover this interview with members of the Lisa development team from the February 1983 issue of Byte Magazine. The Lisa was Apple’s short-lived, yet groundbreaking predecessor to the Macintosh. In the interview, Larry Tesler, who was in charge of the Lisa’s applications software, explains how the Apple logo ended up on the keyboard:
[In a prototype version of the keyboard] you saw two keys that said Command on them. The new version has only one, and instead of saying Command it has a picture of an apple on it. The reason is that the key’s used as a shortcut to choose a menu command. If you look at a menu, on the right you’ll see this little apple symbol and a letter.
Image source: DigiBarn, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License
If you hold down the Apple key and the letter, you get the command. We couldn’t find any way to symbolize the Command key that would fit nicely in a menu and be recognizable to people. We tried and tried. Finally we decided that the apple looked nice and had a nice sound to it — “Apple X,” “Apple R” — and it keeps Apple in the mind of the user instead of “control” or something else. It’s a symbol that everybody using this machine will recognize instantly, so we decided to put it on the key as well as on the screen.
The Macintosh project “borrowed” many user interface concepts from the Lisa team (who, in turn, had borrowed from Xerox’s Star), including the innovation of associating key-combination shortcuts with graphical menu items. But the Macintosh abandoned the Apple symbol in its menu shortcuts in favor of a geometric, propeller-like shape that represented “command.” Although the new abstract symbol is even less meaningful to the uninitiated, it makes more sense as visual shorthand than the company’s logo. For almost the entire history of the Macintosh, though, this key has been marked with both symbols, even though the Mac’s on-screen UI always referred to it as “command” and never “Apple.”
Only in the last year or so has Apple dropped the vestigial logo from the command key, starting with the new aluminum keyboard (below) as well as on the MacBook. The word “command” or at least “cmd” has been added, too — something that should have been done 24 years ago.
Image source: Declan Jewell, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License
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Posted: June 2nd, 2008, 8:08am PDT by Scott
I finally made it out to Mass MoCA, and I have to say, my favorite piece, far and away, was, of course, text-based. Jenny Holzer’s “Projections” features two enormous projectors set at either end of a blacked-out warehouse space, pointed at each other, and throwing text across every surface in the room. I was so hypnotized by the visual effect that I forgot to read any of the actual words. I initially scoffed at the museum’s description of this as an “interactive” installation, since the piece itself doesn’t do anything differently as a result of your presence, but as I strolled around the room, I observed how my viewpoint changed, affecting the perspective in which the text was shown to me, which in turn defined its legibility. Standing here, I can read the words on that wall, but not the other. The piece becomes interactive as soon as the viewer-participant realizes that s/he must physically move around the space in order to take it all in. And when you’re tired of moving, there are several giant, 15-foot diameter beanbags set on the floor, so you can stumble over to one and sit or lie down comfortably to take in the text. One moment in particular stands out for me: the excitement, mixed with some fear, of watching a 20-foot long capital “R” approach menacingly before “spearing” me with its edges and blinding me with the projector’s light.
You can watch a live video stream of the installation, but it doesn’t do justice to the physical experience of moving around and through the letters.
Also at the museum was a projected, rotating, writhing, computer-generated tree by Jennifer Steinkamp — which I expected to be interactive, and was disappointed when I discovered it would go on writhing with or without me — and also a most striking, yet subtle installation by Mary Temple — apparently sunlight casting shadows of tree branches on a gallery wall, until you realize that you are standing in a windowless room.
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Posted: June 1st, 2008, 1:40pm PDT by Scott
Now that I’m looking for innovative uses of SMS, I see them everywhere — even on yogurt containers. This recent Stonyfield Farm lid suggested I send a text message to get climate-related information on a company, so I did:
SENT TO 30644: cc stonyfield farm
RECEIVED REPLY: Climate Counts has ranked STONYFIELD FARM 2nd out of 11 Food Products companies. UNILEVER leads this sector. Learn how to change the world at [climatecounts.org]. To get action alerts & let companies know climate change matters to you (up to 6 msg/month), reply ACTION
Getting a minimal readout on a company’s environmental behavior via SMS is a novelty, but not that useful. For that reason, I don’t think we’ll suddenly see shoppers texting as they stroll the aisles. The power of branding is too strong and our ecological sensitivity is too weak. An SMS will not help anyone decide between Coke and Pepsi, and I’m not buying a Toshiba laptop over an Apple, despite Apple’s relatively poor environmental record (sorry), because there are too many other factors at play.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen an SMS-based service promoted on a yogurt container. Can you imagine seeing that only a few years ago? I wouldn’t have known what to make of it.
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Posted: June 1st, 2008, 1:07pm PDT by Scott
You have to read this fascinating report from The New York Times on how new billboards with cameras are “watching” passersby and collecting data on who really looks at the billboard and who does not.
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Posted: May 20th, 2008, 11:00am PDT by Scott
Yesterday, Google launched their newest product, Google Health, a web-based tool that lets you track your medical conditions, history and medications all in one place. Some medical providers can even connect to Google Health, so you can import your complete health history as easily as you can invite all of your MSN contacts to sign up for Gmail.
Scary, right? Of course Google promises that they will keep your information “safe and secure,” but safe and secure from whom? The privacy policy mentions that they will use your personal health data in ways not clearly defined:
Google will use aggregate data to publish trend statistics and associations. For example, Google might publish trend data similar to what is published in Google Trends.
They might. Or they might not. This vague “policy” doesn’t inspire confidence. But it gets worse:
None of this data can be used to personally identify an individual.
We know this isn’t true, as we’ve already seen how ostensibly anonymized data can be used, with some detective work, to reveal identities. And if no one has ever captured and published this particular data before, how can we be certain that individuals can’t be identified with it? More importantly, does lumping my information in with others’ and then publishing it on the web qualify as keeping my health records “safe and secure”? Obviously, Google and I disagree on this point. But we have already transitioned into a world where Gmail mines our emails, and Mint monitors our personal finances, so why not do the same with medical records?
An efficient, secure tool for managing one’s own health information would be an enormous asset. I just don’t think that a web-based, hosted solution is in the individual’s best interest. Convenience doesn’t always have to come at the expense of relinquishing control of our private data.
Also see: NY Times story
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Posted: April 21st, 2008, 10:40am PDT by Scott
Frame That Spam! Data-Crunching Artists Transform the World of Information, an interactive piece on wired.com, showcases several beautiful examples of art generated from data. The usual crew are well-represented — Aaron Koblin, Casey Reas — plus some names that were new to me.
Many of the pieces are more artsy and less “design-y” than the work we do at DMI, simply because the visualizations are intended to be more emotional than practical. I define practical as interpretable, meaning the data values could be extracted from the visual elements. A bar chart is easily interpretable: the height of each bar (y) represents a number, and its horizontal position (x) reflects another value (time or some other grouping). Waves and waves of technicolor text, in contrast, may be beautiful and evoke a general sense of the data involved, but is probably not easily interpreted, except by the algorithm that drew it.
I keep struggling with this artificial distinction between art and design, wondering why emotional pieces are labeled art, while more ostensibly functional pieces are considered design. Doesn’t good design evoke an emotional response? And can’t artwork be functional, too? I usually identify more as a designer than an artist, but I am beginning to question the usefulness of both of those terms. Traditionally, art was more purely expressive, and design more data-driven, but now that we have “fine artists” doing intensively data-driven work, the distinction is starting to feel outdated.
Image credit: Detail from Textour by Tim Walter.
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Posted: April 18th, 2008, 2:27pm PDT by Scott
I’ve officially submitted my Search Explorer project to Rhizome’s 2009 commissions process! Watch the demo, and if you like what you see, I’d appreciate your vote!
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Posted: April 16th, 2008, 8:41am PDT by Scott
We reviewed our “gesture” projects in class last night, and while I think we all had some interesting ideas, no one envisioned an interface where your entire body could provide the input.
I just found out about this project called “You Move You Interact,” described as:
…an interactive installation, where one is supposed to build up a body language dialogue with an artificial system so as to effectively achieve a synchronized performance between the real user’s body and the virtual object itself. The project aims at exploring a spatial sphere, where the user/performer is invited to develop his own creative inspiration based on his own body gestures and movements. [ymyi.org]
Also interesting: It’s done using Processing.
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Posted: April 16th, 2008, 7:54am PDT by Scott
An innovative use of motion sensors and a familiar video game encourages coordinated action on the part of otherwise non-connected individuals.
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Posted: April 13th, 2008, 10:33am PDT by Scott
The leading psychologist of creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has long argued that creative activities such as writing, playing music, computer programming, mountain climbing, and chess playing are major sources of enjoyment and productivity. Such activities, he says, put us in a state of “flow,” or intense, unfettered focus and concentration. The beauty of this state is that we can have fun and be productive. The most creative people tend to fluctuate between intense interaction and intense concentration. They also tend to be the happiest when engaging in a state of flow.
That’s an excerpt from Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City. I’d never considered programming to be on par with mountain climbing, or even chess, really, but it makes sense: programming is really just problem solving. It requires absolute focus and a particular mindset to solve the problem of translating the vision for your project into code that the computer will understand and interpret as you intend.
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Posted: April 7th, 2008, 9:30pm PDT by Scott
Last week, the New York Times reported that New York City has subpoenaed the creator of TxtMob, a web- and SMS-based service that helped facilitate protestor communications during the 2004 Republican National Convention. From the story:
The subpoena, which was issued Feb. 4, instructed Mr. Hirsch, who is completing his dissertation at M.I.T., to produce a wide range of material, including all text messages sent via TXTmob during the convention, the date and time of the messages, information about people who sent and received messages, and lists of people who used the service.
The good news is that Tad Hirsch, TxtMob’s creator, is refusing to turn over any records, at least for now. The bad news is that this subpoena happened at all, adding SMS logs to the list of electronic communications that governments want to get their hands on, next to emails, web browsing histories and telephone calls.
Another unrelated yet awesome thing that Hirsch has done is to make the source code open and free. Maybe I could use this to power a future project…
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Posted: April 3rd, 2008, 10:59am PDT by Scott
My AOL data project has gotten me both interested in and terribly frustrated with the challenges of working with massive amounts of data. Data manipulation and optimization is not my bag, but I’m afraid it’s going to have to be soon. In any case, I thought I’d share some of the great resources I’ve found.
Interesting Datasets
I would love to do projects with each of these.
- AOL Search Data
- Enron Company Emails
- The Entire Contents of Wikipedia
- Hillary Clinton’s Schedules as First Lady
- Public Transit Data Feeds
- World Database of Happiness
Compilations of Publicly Accessible Data
These sites all point to datasets that you can download and incorporate into your projects.
Pages tagged with “publicdata” on del.icio.us
Subscribe to the feed on this page to keep an eye on what interesting stuff others find.A Meta-index of Data Sets
A great starting point, with more helpful links than this post.Digitized Historical Collections from the Library of Congress
The central starting point for all records at the Library accessible via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol. I’m not 100% sure what that means, but it sounds like something I could use down the line.Infochimps
A newly launched site with lots of potential to grow into something interesting.Copyright Free and Public Domain Media Sources
Points mostly to photographs and other images, and mostly older ones, at that. Thanks, Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.
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Posted: March 27th, 2008, 2:31pm PDT by Scott
WikiLeaks, a wiki site that helps insiders release information anonymously, was in the news last month when its primary domain name (wikileaks.org) was removed from the Domain Name System. A San Francisco judge ordered the move, which effectively made it impossible to reach any part of the wikileaks.org website directly. Fortunately for whistleblowers worldwide, the site was still accessible via an alternate domain name — wikileaks.be — which was registered in Belgium, and therefore not subject to injunctions from US judges. (Technically, it was also accessible by IP address for those motivated enough to bypass the DNS.)
Two weeks later, the judge reversed his own decision, and wikileaks.org came back online. The case raises some interesting questions, starting with, when you’re dealing with a wiki, who do you sue? The “owner” of the wikileaks.org domain is in Australia, the physical servers are in Sweden and Belgium, and the contributors are anonymous and unlogged. So, when the bank Julius Baer wanted to sue someone for leaking internal documents, the only domestically identifiable party was Dynadot, the San Mateo-based registrar of the wikileaks.org domain. (Of course, the bank’s approach backfired, as it only drew more attention to WikiLeaks — and to Julius Baer’s alleged wrongdoings — than ever before, which was exactly what they wanted to avoid. I, for one, had never heard of WikiLeaks before I heard about the case in the news.)
WikiLeaks is a case study in something completely new: a collectively authored publication where every contributor is fully anonymous and untraceable. At least one other site I’ve seen, Strictly No Photography, uses a similar model to share protected information (photos, in this case). It will be interesting to watch these models evolve, paying close attention to how various legal structures react to them.
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Posted: March 24th, 2008, 11:42am PDT by Scott
I’ve been looking into crowds and mobs, seeking to identify elements common to positive large-group experiences. This week, I picked up Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy,” looking for answers.
During truly ecstatic events, participants have the sensation of merging with the group, becoming part of a larger whole, and having the “experience of self-loss in the crowd.” With the temporary loss of individual identity comes the temporary loss of individual responsibility. Inhibitions are lowered and moral judgement may be impaired, since “the crowd” acts as one force. This explains how ordinary, generally moral people can riot, and how straight-laced conservatives can let it all hang out at Mardi Gras. (Yes, alcohol plays a role, too, accelerating the lowering of inhibitions and an increased sense of connection with others.)
Ehrenreich observes that instances of collective ecstasy are very much non-hierarchical:
Hierarchy, by its nature, establishes boundaries between people — who can go where, who can approach whom, who is welcome, and who is not. Festivity breaks the boundaries down. …
While hierarchy is about exclusion, festivity generates inclusiveness. The music invites everyone to dance; shared food briefly undermines the privilege of class. … At the height of the festivity, we step out of our assigned roles and statuses — of gender, ethnicity, tribe, and rank — and into a brief utopia defined by egalitarianism, creativity, and mutual love.
Ehrenreich refers to our modern era as the “postfestive” era, since centuries of hierarchical civilization have all but eliminated the class-undermining expressions of participatory joy that threaten it.
Given that, how can we design experiences of collective joy for a postfestive people?
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Posted: March 23rd, 2008, 6:06pm PDT by Scott
During his presentation last week, Colin mentioned his research into sustainability and the cradle-to-cradle concept, specifically. I thought I’d share my recent experience with Green Phone, which I first heard about in this New York Times Magazine article in January. It’s an easy way to recycle old mobile devices — and you get paid to do it. Here’s how it works:
- Go to greenphone.com.
- Tell them what model of phone you have, and set up an account.
- They generate a postage-paid mailing label for you. Print it out, and stick the label on a padded envelope.
- Put your old phone and accessories in the envelope, and drop it off at the Post Office.
- Wait a couple weeks for them to receive and test your phone. If it’s in good working condition, they’ll cut you a check! If not, well, they’ll recycle all the parts (including toxics, like mercury) and hey, no big loss on your part — you didn’t even pay for postage!
I had an early RAZR and they cut me a check for $22. (It would’ve been $28, but the screen was damaged.) From my point of view, the best part is that they recycled all my useless accessories, like the charger and earbud, which I could not have recycled myself locally.
Be sure to use my referral code of 50957 to get a 10% bonus. (Just using the link above should work.)
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Posted: March 21st, 2008, 12:16pm PDT by Scott
A couple weeks ago, my research into SMS as an interactive medium led me to a friend of a friend who happens to be named Brian House. Brian graciously agreed to talk with me on the phone, and our conversation validated a number of ideas I had about SMS.
Brian’s most well-known project is called Yellow Arrow. Done in 2004, the project involved distributing thousands of yellow arrow stickers, on each of which was printed a unique code. These stickers were sent all over the globe, where user-participants could stick them on surfaces, pointing to things of note. Then, by sending a text message with the arrow’s unique ID, the participant would “register” a “memory” or story about that place or object, such as “this is where we first kissed” or “this is the best chinese food in town.” Subsequent visitors can send in the same text code and will receive back the original story. Yellow Arrow was featured in the recent Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA.
The real thing I wanted to talk to Brian about, though, was TXTML, a system he built as part of his Master’s thesis that can be used to create “interactive text-messaging applications.” I’m looking into doing some projects with SMS, and will be evaluating TXTML for whether or not it would be a good tool for what I want to do. In short, it sounds like TXTML is great for creating individual experiences and narratives. Since it’s smarter than typical SMS engines, it can remember each user’s history, and custom-tailor the interaction for each individual. (For example, you text “I am Scott,” and it responds “Hello, Scott, I remember that you like the color blue.”) It may not be suited to mediating the group experiences that I want to design, but I can certainly learn a lot just by working with it.
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Posted: March 21st, 2008, 10:51am PDT by Scott
Over New Year’s, I got to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, and I’m finally going to post some photos from my visit.
First, what I really wanted to see was the computer with the first true GUI — the Xerox Alto:
Next up, the classic PDP-1, known to me as the machine on which the very first video game, Spacewar!, was programmed by some folks at MIT in 1962. Today, you can play Spacewar! online. When you do, notice that the spaceships are affected by “gravity” from the black hole in the center of the screen, but that the fired missiles are not. That’s due to the fact that the spaceship calculations were already maxing out the PDP-1’s processor cycles. And yes, that hulking monolith in the background is the CPU. The display and light pen are the interface. And those really are stacks of manila punchcards on the desk.
Two more landmark devices: On the left, an Interface Message Processor. This particular IMP was one of the first nodes on the ARPANET, which of course eventually grew into the Internet that we know today. On the right, one of Doug Engelbart’s first mice.
And now for a computer that nobody except the museum has heard of: the Kitchen Computer. From the museum’s description:
The Kitchen Computer was featured in the 1969 Neiman Marcus catalog as a $10,600 tool for housewives to store and retrieve recipes. Unfortunately, the user interface was only binary lights and switches. There is no evidence that any Kitchen Computer was ever sold.
I guess for some people, filing 3-by-5 cards in a box is easier than learning binary. Actually, just memorizing all your recipes would be easier than learning binary. “If it’s not usable, it doesn’t work.” An early, expensive lesson in the importance of usability.
And finally, some early ASCII art (“in color” even!) — the Mona Lisa represented in ASCII by H. Philip Peterson in 1964:
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Posted: March 20th, 2008, 10:38am PDT by Scott
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that yesterday’s 5-years-in-Iraq protest was well-orchestrated, in part thanks to frequent updates delivered to participants via text messages. C.W. Nevius reports:
I was told to simply text message the “DASW [Direct Action to Stop the War] text mob” to get up-to-the-minute messages describing the latest action sent to my cell phone. At 3:08:29 p.m., for example, I received a message that said, “DASW current estimate - 150 arrests - thanks for taking to the streets and joining in.”
This is the first time I’ve heard of a small, local activist group (Bay Area DASW) employing SMS to help keep their participants in the loop. It’s a great idea, and could shift the dynamic of other direct actions in the future. Protests can be intense and a little scary when you see hordes of activists running up against walls of police — “What’s going on down there?” “Is everyone okay?” Panic breaks out when individuals can’t see over the crowd to get the bigger picture. “Are we safe here?” “Should we keep marching, or turn back?” A centralized organizing committee, armed with binoculars and mobiles, can now monitor the protest status among themselves, sending only pertinent information about the big picture to participants, such as number of arrests, or “look out, tear gas deployed, head SW on Market.”
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Posted: March 13th, 2008, 12:22pm PDT by Scott
One of Simon’s earlier posts reminded me to pick up the latest issue of Technology Review. In it, there’s a piece on two new image-handling technologies — Photosynth and Seadragon — both of which now fall under the Microsoft umbrella. Photosynth enables smooth, seamless visual navigation of high-resolution imagery, and Seadragon generates 3-D composites out of ordinary two-dimensional photographs. Yeah, I know that doesn’t make sense, but it’s true. You should just watch the 7-minute demo.
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Posted: March 12th, 2008, 9:27am PDT by Scott
“Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine” is another excellent article in this Sunday’s New York Times. Although nothing new to anyone at DMI, it’s a great summary of recent steps toward redefining human-computer interactions, and it even gives a shout out to Processing.
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Posted: March 11th, 2008, 6:24pm PDT by Scott
A great article, and a great headline, from Sunday’s New York Times: “Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK)”. One highlight from the piece:
“Texting is in between calling and sending and e-mail,” he explained while taking a break from study hall. Now he won’t even consider writing a letter to his mother, Jan. “It’s too time consuming,” he said. “You have to go to the post office. Instead, I can sit and watch television and send a text, which is the same thing.”
Ummm… no. That’s not the same thing at all. If writing a letter were the same as writing an SMS, then you wouldn’t always choose SMS.
Semantics aside, it’s scary to think about how SMS and other, similar technologies are already mutating our methods for interpersonal interaction. As the author points out in the article, the telephone was similarly (if not more) disruptive, but of course, to me, the landline telephone is “normal,” because I grew up with it. So the proverbial kids today are growing up with email, IM, VOIP, and SMS, and all of those communications media are, to them, just “normal.”
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Posted: March 7th, 2008, 1:11pm PST by Scott
I noticed this graphic during my first visit to Obama’s website. In case the candidate needed another means of inspiring potential supporters, he now has the techno-teen and dynamic media crowd. Howard Dean may have pioneered the use of the Internet for campaign fundraising, but Obama is the first I’ve seen to enlist SMS. (I was unable to find any SMS features advertised on Clinton’s site.)
With the Wyoming primaries coming up on Saturday, I visited Obama’s site again today, just to see if he had any special messages for supporters in that state. Notice that a different code is presented on the Wyoming page:
I thought I’d test this out and try to figure out how the system works.
Scott: MA
66262: Thanks for joining Massachusetts for Obama, For additional Obama updates Reply JOIN to this msg. Text HELP for help. STOP to quit. Std charges may apply.
Scott: Join
66262: Welcome to Obama Mobile NEWS & UPDATES. Reply with your zipcode to get local Obama info. Text HELP for help, STOP to quit. Std charges may apply.
Looks like the system is using all best practice recommendations, including double opt-in, support for required SMS commands (e.g. HELP and STOP), and reminding us that charges may apply.
Scott: 02139 [A Massachusetts zip]
66262: Thank you for updating your zip code with Obama Mobile. We will contact you shortly about upcoming events and local news. Send HELP for help & Stop to quit.
I suddenly realize that the campaign will not care about Massachusetts again for months, and I likely will not receive any updates. Help!
Scott: Help
66262: Obama for America! More info on http://barackobama.com/ To stop, text STOP to 62262 or call 877-822-5093
Okay, the “help” wasn’t that helpful, and the attempt to communicate excitement using an exclamation mark falls flat. (It’s trying to a evoke a different kind of excitement than “Ok C U L8r!”) Let’s try sending the main signup code of HOPE.
Scott: hope
66262: You are already subscribed to Obama Mobile. Text HELP for help, STOP to quit. Std charges may apply. More info at www.barackobama.com/mobile
At this point we can infer that you can sign up for “Obama Mobile” by sending essentially any text message to 66262. Your message could say “hope” or could contain a state abbreviation — it doesn’t really matter. Let’s tell it we’re in Wyoming, since that’s where all the action is this weekend.
Scott: Wy
66262: Welcome to WY for Obama Mobile. Text HELP for help, STOP to quit. Std charges may apply. More info at www.barackobama.com/mobile
Scott: 82601 [A zip in Casper, Wyoming, where the candidate is campaigning today]
66262: Thank you for updating your zip code with Obama Mobile. We will contact you shortly about upcoming events and local news. Send HELP for help & Stop to quit.
Okay, I guess that’s it. Now, we wait. In the meantime, we can think about how Obama Mobile appears to be a stateless server, which means that it’s not smart enough to remember what I said a minute ago when I say something else now. Each exchange is an independent conversation, which I think is typical for SMS systems today. I want to research this further, though, since I ultimately want to develop an SMS application of my own.
One other thing to note is that Obama Mobile also offers ringtones for your phone. Yes, Obama ringtones. My favorite is #12: “Hi, this is Barack Obama asking you to answer the phone.” Yes, it really is his voice, and yes, you bet he felt silly recording that, but hey, whatever it takes to win, right, Hillary?
Political commentary aside, it’s fascinating to see how everyone today becomes a media producer at some point. Candidates used to make sound bites in front of cameras — now they’re doing it in recording studios, and they’ll beam the audio straight to your phone. We’re still consumers, but now we’re producers, too, whether we want to be or not.
I’ll update this post if and when any TXTs from OBMA come in. It’ll be interesting to see what he has to say.
Updates: Received this message at 4:17 pm MST today:
Ready to caucus for Barack tomorrow? Fwd this msg & make sure everyone knows their caucus time and location. Info: 866-675-2008 ext 4 or WY.BarackObama.com
Received this message at 7:39 pm MST:
Our moment is now! Fwd this msg & tell all your friends to caucus for Barack tomorrow. For caucus info call: 866-675-2008 ext 4 or http://WY.BarackObama.com.
Received on caucus day, Saturday, March 8, at 11:01 am MST:
Make sure everyone goes to their caucus today for Barack! Times change across WY. For caucus times call 1-866-675-2008 or visit http://WY.BarackObama.com.
Received at the end of the day, Saturday, March 8, at 6:24 pm MST:
Barack wins Wyoming & the campaign moves on to Mississippi for Tuesday’s primary. Help us grow this movement for change, ask friends to text HOPE to 62262.
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Posted: March 6th, 2008, 12:32pm PST by Scott
I recently had the good fortune to visit the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA. It’s on exhibit until May 12, and I recommend that everyone interested in dynamic media and emerging technologies go see it. If you are reading this blog, that means you. (The image above is Jim Lambie’s installation on the first floor of the museum — literally, on the floor — and is not part of the design exhibit.)
I found out about the exhibit in a roundabout way. I was doing some research on the Make Controller Kit, an open-source hardware device that I’m considering for future projects. That site points to a number of great projects made with the kit, my favorite of which is Lightweeds by Simon Heijdens. Heijdens’ site mentioned that his work was on display at MoMA, so I went to the museum simply to view his project, with no idea that I’d also see a number of other phenomenal projects.
Lightweeds is a brilliant concept: Project lifelike “weeds” onto interior walls of a space, or what Heijdens calls the “artificial” space of a gallery. Collect live data from the environment outside the building (temperate, sunlight, wind velocity), and make the projected weeds grow and behave in response to that data, thereby establishing a connection between the natural and built environments. Here’s a close-up of one “weed” blowing in the “wind”:
Another highlight is the piece I Want You To Want Me, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, who I recognized immediately as the same folks who brought us We Feel Fine.
I Want You To Want Me mines the Internet, looking for people who themselves are looking for someone else: a date, a partner, a spouse. The touch-screen interface represents each individual as a balloon which can be tapped to reveal something about who that person is (e.g. Mike, age 29, in Philadephia) and what he’s looking for (e.g. “a hot babe” or “a man my age I can really settle down with”).
The project is extremely engaging. Users’ innate voyeuristic instincts make the content interesting and relatable, and the balloons (data) can be manipulated through multiple views and filters, which enables the discovery of people who may want each other in real life. Both of these characteristics were inherited from the We Feel Fine project, but I Want You To Want Me employs far-superior graphics and a touch interface. (As an installation, it doesn’t have to struggle with the limitations of a web-based distribution platform.)
The absolute highlight of the exhibit, though, is Shadow Monsters, an installation by Philip Worthington. You enter a small room with a very bright light on the wall behind you, and your “shadow” is “cast” on the opposite wall. The shadow, however, is augmented in real-time to suggest how it would be seen in the mind of a child who’s been told to sleep, but can’t stop worrying about monsters under the bed. While your projected shadow grows horns, teeth, scary eyeballs and shaggy hair, the space is activated with growling, grunting, and gargling — the sounds of hungry monsters preparing to devour little children. My favorite moment was when I made an alligator-like shadow puppet with my arms, and it grew large teeth and spat in disgust toward the opposite wall. (There was audio for the spitting, too.)
Not to brag, but that last bit of computationally enhanced performance art drew a brief standing ovation from a crowd of onlookers. You see, with Shadow Monsters, there are the shadows, and there are the people casting the shadows, both of which could be considered performers, since they both contribute something to the space. And then there are the people outside the space looking in, watching the performance.
But, in reality, the onlookers are part of the performance, too. They unwittingly play the part of the little child, peeking out from under the covers, afraid and confused, unable to explain what’s real and what’s not, and unwilling to get out of bed (and into the space) until they can figure out what’s really going on. My theory is that I drew a few claps because I wasn’t afraid to “get out from under the covers” and really explore the system. (I was fairly confident that it would not actually eat me.) I raised my arms, stuck out my legs, made enclosed shadow-spaces (which is how to trigger eyeballs, I discovered), and did a number of other physical actions that would have gotten me kicked out of the museum, had I not been within that installation space. But I didn’t care, because I wanted to know how the algorithm worked, and besides, my attention was on the large projection in front of me, so I wasn’t thinking about how silly I looked until people started clapping.
I will end with the beginning. Most visitors to the exhibit won’t even notice the first piece, Genomic Cartography by Ben Fry. It’s a sequence of human DNA, visualized as extremely small, pink and gray letters, printed on a white wall. But the exhibit title and introduction are set on top of the piece, so it looks like just an interesting background.
I took away three profound insights from this exhibit:
The fact that the Museum of Modern Art, a venerable institution, staged this exhibit completely validated my decision to study dynamic media. This is absolutely the future, and absolutely what I want to do.
About half of the dynamic installations, including Shadow Monsters, were built using Processing. Awesome. Again, I feel like I am totally going in the right direction here, and I am inspired by the high quality of work that can be done with the Processing environment.
Most of the exhibited artists and designers are within a few years of my age. And they have stuff in MoMA. That gives me hope and also scares me. I better get crackin’.
I cannot recommend a visit to this exhibit highly enough. If you can’t make it to New York, the exhibit’s website is a nightmare to navigate, but at least you can read about all of the projects there.
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Posted: March 4th, 2008, 10:56am PST by Scott
A new game called Trism is in development. It looks like Bejeweled, only the colorful blocks are triangles, and the UI more interesting because it uses touch-dragging and directional tilting of the device to manipulate the game. So as you match up blocks and they disappear, new blocks slide “down,” depending on which way “down” is in real life. (Sort of like Connect Four, except that in Connect Four, there is only one “down.”) So you can rotate the iPhone around in order to affect how new blocks slide into the game. Take a look at the video. It’s an innovative new UI.
iPhone-related bonus link: iPhone Stopwatch Hits 1,000 Hours, the geekiest video I have seen in a long time. Maybe ever.
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Posted: February 26th, 2008, 11:40am PST by Scott
As part of my research, I’m looking into the psychology of crowds, and what makes some “crowd” experiences positive, and others negative. I had an experience recently that Joe suggested I document here.
In line at Boston Logan, I waited impatiently with hundreds of other people, bracing myself for the mad rush that happens just before and after the metal detector. You used to be able to put your bags on the conveyor belt and walk through, but now getting through security involves no fewer than 13 separate steps, depending on how you count them:
- Remove any liquids and laptops from your luggage.
- Place your luggage on the conveyor belt.
- Place your laptop on the conveyor belt, in its own bin.
- Remove your shoes.
- Remove your jacket.
- Remove your belt (if any) and empty your pockets of everything — wallet, keys, change — except for your boarding pass! You will need that in a moment.
- Place your shoes, jacket, belt, and pocket contents in a bin on the conveyor belt.
- Add to that bin a small plastic, resealable bag which contains any liquids or lotions that you want to take on the plane with you. Oh, and of those items, not one may exceed 3 fluid ounces. (Note that this step requires extensive preparation prior to arriving at the airport.)
- Wait until a TSA agent gives you a blank stare, which is your indication to proceed through the metal detector.
- Get scolded by the TSA agent for not holding on to your boarding pass, as instructed in step 6.
- Deflect nasty looks given to you by the 8,000 travelers in line behind you as everyone waits for your boarding pass to be retrieved from the gray bin.
- TSA agent now allows you to pass, having verified that you are in possession of a little scrap of paper that any 5-year-old could have mocked up in MacPaint.
- Collect all your belongings, repack your bag, apply anti-fungal foot cream (aerosol varieties prohibited), get dressed in front of strangers who now hate you, and proceed to gate.
That would be stressful enough. But add to it general anxiety about flight, lack of decent food, sleep, hydration, and other physical and emotional stresses associated with travel, and most people’s general mood at this point, in the security line, is one of unpleasant anticipation.
So I’m back at Logan, it’s early, and I just want to make sure I don’t miss my flight. I have prepared for all 13 steps the night before. My lotions, liquids and gels are apportioned and sealed. My shoes are untied, ready for instant slip-off. I’m trying not to make eye contact with anyone, assuming they all feel the same way — grumpy and distressed — but it turns out they don’t.
I only know that because Mr. TSA himself decided we needed a little refresher course. He approaches, walking alongside us, lifting a number of large bottles of verboten shampoos and suntan lotion into the air. He is literally yelling: “THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO YOUR LIQUIDS. YOU MUST PUT ALL YOUR LIQUIDS INTO A SMALL PLASTIC BAG.” He is five feet away from my face and yelling directly into it. The corridor is about 20 feet wide; I think he could use his indoor voice and communicate more effectively. But he continues down the line, hitting all 13 items on our to-do lists at full volume.
Finally, having reached the last passenger, he shuts up, turns around, and starts heading back to his post. And that’s when the horrifically magical moment happened: Someone said “thank you.” Thank you! This verbally abusive authority figure has, in my eyes, been nothing but rude, obnoxious, and insulting, lecturing us about things that we should already know. But someone thanked him for what I interpreted as abuse. And then another person thanked him. And another. And soon, once about ten people had said “thank you,” he felt obligated to respond with “you’re welcome.”
Did this people think he was doing them a favor? Did they think he was a hero? Have TSA agents been elevated to the mythical level of firefighters and first responders? “You can do no wrong. You are keeping our country safe. Thank you for everything.”
It was fascinating to me that anyone would respond this way, and that after the first “thank you,” that others followed. What does that say about the crowd’s dynamic relating to this authority figure? How can the collective emotion be so different from my own? And how can this sort of interaction inform our approach to emotional designs?
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Posted: February 25th, 2008, 3:15pm PST by Scott
As you can see, people seemed to have a good time at the ASCII art show on Saturday. I had a blast, and was really pleased with how my ASCII Photo Booth turned out.
The “booth” was weeks in development, and often took priority over my regular school work. But I learned a ton about Processing, worked with live video for the first time, and also figured out how to generate and print PDFs. Also, although I was half-expecting the application to crash at some point, it never did. What more could I have asked for?
Here’s what it looked like during installation:
It was fun watching people use it for the first time, and I got some usability-related insights that will help me improve future installations. But most people understood it right away. You sit down in the chair and see your image translated into ASCII text on the screen. Click the mouse, watch the countdown — 3… 2… 1… Smile! — the screen flickers for a moment, and a second later your image emerges on paper from a laser printer. Cool!
One thing I observed is that the best images were created by the people who didn’t rush and took some time to experiment with the system. They would lean in closer to the camera, then farther back, watching the on-screen text regenerate in response to their motion. The final images were sharpest when the subjects sat completely still before and during the exposure. That felt appropriate, given that ASCII is old technology, originating from a time when computers were much, much slower and unable to process images at all. As with early photography, a clear image in ASCII takes time to develop.
I was happy to see people walk away with a physical artifact of the experience, in this case a photo of themselves or of a friend. I hope that one or two of those dynamically generated, original artworks will end up on a refrigerator somewhere. (If you had your picture taken, leave a comment below and tell me about your experience.)
More pictures from the evening below. The gallery sign (excellently designed by Colin, who curated the show):
JK’s ASCII video wall:
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Posted: February 19th, 2008, 11:39am PST by Scott
Project: Pick a potential thesis issue you want to explore and respond to it.
Theory: I’m very interested in how the virtual and the physical realms trigger affect each other and effect changes or events in each other via ongoing feedback mechanisms. It boggles my mind to think about how many (physical) actions we take in the real world as a result of (virtual) information fed to us through networks, where data exist as light and are literally weightless. How do flashes of light become manifested in the physical, experiential world?
My theory is that the user is the point of intersection (and interaction) between the physical and virtual realms, between objects and information. The Earth enacts gravity and other physical effects. Computing systems enact data transfer and processing. But only sentient beings can find meaning in both, because they can understand what gravity means and understand what data transfer is by extrapolating outwards, taking what they grasp about these physical/virtual systems and applying them to hypothetical scenarios. I can imagine what would happen if I threw a glass vase up in the air: It would fall back down, hit the ground, and probably break into pieces. I’ve never thrown a vase before, but I can model and predict that outcome with near-certainty because I have inferred the rules that govern the system.
So, as a user/sentient being, my job is to intepret inputs, deduce the rules of the system (that would produce those inputs), decide on a course of action, and then physically manifest that action. In the case of a digital system, my physical output (throwing a vase, pressing a key, clicking the mouse) is input for the virtual system, which responds according to its own rules, and on and on the feedback loop goes.
I don’t think this project was extremely successful at addressing those ideas, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Try it out, and see if you can (1) deduce its rules and then (2) use them toward your own ends. Post a comment below with your findings.
Credits: Word list courtesy of mieliestronk.com.
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Posted: February 17th, 2008, 10:48am PST by Scott
How could we even begin to wrap our heads around giving visual form to zillions of imperceptible ones and zeros that fly around the world every second?
Akamai Technologies claims that they handle 10 to 20% of the world’s Internet traffic. (Akamai is hired by other companies like Adobe, Apple and MySpace to host web graphics and streaming audio and video.) With access to data on about one-fifth of global network traffic, they’ve put together some interesting visualizations. These don’t pretend to be maps of the Internet, as others have done, but are still interesting ways to represent overall throughput, latency, and connection paths.
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Posted: February 15th, 2008, 9:58am PST by Scott
Project: Respond to readings about anticipation, particularly as it may be used for communication.
Theory: I was particularly interested in two definitions of anticipation by Mihai Nadin:
Anticipation is an expression of the connectedness of the world, in particular of quantum non-locality.
Anticipation is an attractor within dynamic systems.
With connectedness and attraction as my two main themes, I set about creating a system whose elements would not just react to, but act in concert with the user’s input. Specifically, the idea is to use the element of anticipation (instead of words) to communicate instruction about how to interact and trigger events within the system.
Medium: This is my first project done using Processing. I won’t say anything more about the interface — just try it out and leave a comment. Was it successful?
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Posted: February 13th, 2008, 11:43am PST by Scott
I was exploring Lawrence Lessig’s blog earlier and noticed that his commenting system uses reCAPTCHA, a CAPTCHA system run out of Carnegie Mellon.
What’s interesting about reCAPTCHA is that the words shown are unknown, even to the system. A regular CAPTCHA displays known words in distorted text, hopefully in such a way that only humans (and not spam robots) can read them. The human user types in the characters shown, and the system validates that the entry is correct.
reCAPTCHA uses words scanned from old books, and correlates the user’s input to a portion of the original work. Like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the Carnegie Mellon system deploys micro-tasks and takes advantage of distributed human labor to complete giant projects via minimal contributions of many. The idea, of course, is to perform OCR on books that are not practical to digitize using software (due to blurry letters, old typefaces, etc.).
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Posted: February 11th, 2008, 7:04pm PST by Scott
“Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is.”
That’s Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, quoted in an article in yesterday’s New York Times on the concept of the paperless home. The dream of the paperless office, it seems, will never be realized, in part because paper is such an efficient medium for collaboration, but also because the company — not the employee — usually foots the bill. At home, where “users” are also the purchasers of paper and pricey printer ink, there’s more incentive to go paperless. Cost savings are great, but so are clutter-savings. That, coupled with inexpensive scanners, are leading more (but still very few) households to digitize receipts, tax returns, business cards and all other manner of daily ephemera that needs to be stored, but doesn’t need to be in your way. Digital cameras and MP3s have gotten us comfortable with maintaining valuable information in digital form. But it doesn’t just have to be photos and music anymore.
Now we bank online, pay bills online, write to each other, buy, sell, and trade — all online. These transactions all used to be recorded with physical, paper documents, but now they are recorded as digital data first, then only expressed physically on paper as needed. Utility bills now arrive via email, and even some physical interactions (such as in-person purchases at an Apple Store) trigger emailed, digital-only receipts.
What does this mean for us? Less paper sounds good, but locating physical documents is sometimes easier and more efficient than finding digital ones. So search technology still needs to improve. And paper documents don’t disappear when, say, coffee is spilled on your keyboard, or there’s a power surge, or you drop your laptop down the stairs. So backing up will be ever more important, but so will filing systems. We’ve had years to standardize methods of storing and organizing physical documents (visit any library), but how will digital documents be managed? Call me skeptical, but I don’t think it’s best to leave that up to the end users. We need thoughtful, well-designed software for managing all these different documents before the paperless home can be as efficient and enjoyable as it sounds.
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Posted: February 10th, 2008, 9:10am PST by Scott
Thanks to some database help from Colin, I’ve now just finished installing Gregarious! It’s an open-source, web-based feed aggregator, which simply means that all the Dynamic Media Institute folks can now read each other’s blogs by going to one page (instead of eight). Try it out at dmiboston2009.com.
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Posted: February 8th, 2008, 10:52am PST by Scott
Now that we often spend more hours each day interfacing with our “digital hubs” than actual people, and our lives are lived (or, at least, acted out) more digitally every day, who are we? Are we cutecuddles909@aol.com, or CoolDude on Match, an account number used for online banking, or a MySpace URL? What happened to Scott, the neighbor, the friend, the classmate?
Today, he could be all of the above, and likely many more. With so many online services, the sheer number of login identities we manage is overwhelming. I maintain a list of all my login names and passwords (since I use a different password for every service), which today contains 110 different identities. Clearly, it’s neither convenient, efficient, nor reasonable to expect people to keep track of so many logins. Hence, some new technological solutions that allow you to have one single login used on multiple sites.
OpenID, Yadis, and LID all enable you to use a URL (or, technically, a URI) as your login identifier. This is huge because it means that, on any website or online service that supports these open standards, you can login with yourblogurl.com instead of an arbitrary username or — even worse — your email address (which inevitably will change, meaning you have to go update it for all of your 110 accounts).
As of today, this website is fully OpenID-enabled. Meaning, I can use its URI to verify my identity when I login to other sites, and you can use your OpenID to verify your identity when posting comments on this blog. Go ahead — give it a shot, and let me know what you think. It’s easy enough to get an OpenID with a third-party service, but I recommend using something like phpMyID on your own server, so you truly maintain control of your own identity credentials.
Of course, I’ve been writing as though a username/password combo is a digital identity, but there are some larger questions here. What does constitute one’s digital identity, and is it something that should be protected? If so, how can it be protected, from what does it need protecting, and why? With OpenID, I can verify that you “own” a certain URI, but just because you own johndoe.com doesn’t mean you are actually named “John Doe” in real life. Nor does it mean that you’re necessarily the John Doe that I know from work. Even with a valid OpenID, you could be anyone. I have no idea who you are. All I know for sure is that the person who logged in as johndoe.com on site A is the same person who logged in as johndoe.com on site B. So, taken together, I can observe relationships between this one virtual identity, and start to build a profile about who I think the real person behind the keystrokes is. The OpenID project is explicit about the fact that it does not even attempt to resolve issues of trust and honesty online — it is only used to ensure consistent “identities,” although now I’m not even sure what that means.
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Posted: February 7th, 2008, 7:23pm PST by Scott
Update your bookmarks: The “Found Type” blog is no more! Its typographical observations will live on, but under the auspices of this more broadly focused blog, as directed by my research into potential thesis topics.
The new blog will explore current happenings in dynamic media and digital culture. By documenting my research and observations here, I’ll maintain a record of great ideas and insights, and maybe you (or someone else out there on the net) will even find something of interest.
All posts from foundtype.alignedleft.com have been relocated to alignedleft.com/blog and stored under the “Type” category.
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Posted: November 28th, 2007, 10:39am PST by Scott
This New York City street sign just sounds so desperate to me. I think it has to do with the lack of periods. Both the initial sentence, and the final “Please” drag on and on without periods to formally end them. Also, the “Please” is in slightly smaller type, which makes it even more pathetic. I wonder if that makes the sign any more successful in its goal of changing dog-walkers’ behavior (at the expense of grammatical correctness).
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Posted: November 9th, 2007, 10:34am PST by Scott
Hey… Is that a dis? I presume by the distressed typewriter lettering that you found her lurking in the underground forums of IRC or posting risque personals on Craigslist, not perusing the respectful recipes at Epicurious or emailing her elected representatives. Who are you, anyway?
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Posted: October 18th, 2007, 7:45pm PDT by Scott
I am a new fan of Louisville, Kentucky. Such a beautiful town, with great people, and a gorgeous, though underutilized downtown area. Part of that has to do with how Interstate Highway 64 runs right along (and above) the waterfront, cutting the city off from its own greatest natural asset. The recent Waterfront Park development is a massive improvement, but when you’re tossing the frisbee by the river, it’s hard to ignore the noise from hundreds of cars and trucks passing overhead.
So in comes a design-savvy citizens group, primed to take back the waterfront, prevent further expansion of the interstate, improve traffic congestion and revitalize Louisville’s downtown. They call themselves “8664,” and they designed this spot-on logo to generate interest in their cause. What impresses me the most is that, without using a single word, this banner communicates everything they want you to know: what they stand for and what action you can take next. Plus, this reproduces well at all sizes, and by co-opting the Interstate’s own visual language, they create an instant connection with the viewer. Aren’t all of us used to taking direction from this typeface?
Also, they have a dynamite presentation on their website.
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Posted: October 5th, 2007, 2:50pm PDT by Scott
For years, I’ve found the similarities between these two logos striking.
At left is the logo representing the professional services company formed by the 1998 merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand. (The designer of the logo is unknown to me.) At right is the logo for Yves Saint Laurent, using handlettering created by the famous A.M. Cassandre in 1963.
35 years and several industries apart, yet they both “work,” successfully conveying either elegance (as with YSL) or, well, just a really long name. Actually, I’m not sure what the PWC logo is supposed to convey, although I’d assume they’re shooting for stability, professionalism, and honesty. But I’m not sure how the wiggly “waterhouse” letters accomplish that. Maybe they just had to squish those letters together to make more room.
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Posted: September 19th, 2007, 2:00pm PDT by Scott
How can you not love how these Os just lean over and roll off the baseline, just as a cuckoo’s call trails off into nothing? Just perfect.
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Posted: September 11th, 2007, 2:18pm PDT by Scott
How cool are these Gs? I’ve never seen a G like this before, where the cross-stroke points out (to the right) instead of in (to the left). The result is a form that looks almost like a rotated Q.
Also, the combination of sharp and rounded corners here makes for some interesting shapes. Take the Y for example: it looks like a goalpost.
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Posted: September 5th, 2007, 4:40pm PDT by Scott
Clarendon is one of my favorite typefaces. An early slab-serif, the original face was designed by the Englishman Robert Besley in 1845. At the time, it was an entirely new form, something of a hybrid between typical Roman letters and the extremely heavy Egyptian forms of the day. Besley was going for shapes strong enough to be used alongside Roman text for emphasis, but not so strong that they would overwhelm or distract from the main text.
Using boldface for emphasis was a very new idea at the time — italics were more typical — and few, if any, fonts had bold variants of the same face. (When bold text appeared, it was usually set in a different typeface than the surrounding text, thereby causing typographers to struggle for bold/non-bold pairs that would complement each other.) Thanks to Besley, using boldface for emphasis is now common, and most common typefaces are designed with bold variations.
My personal connection to Clarendon has been cultivated over a lifetime of wonderful experiences in the United States’ National Parks, where it is used on the ubiquitous brown road signs. From “Campsites, 100 Yards,” to “Lock Your Vehicle, Keep Valuables With You,” Clarendon has always been there to give me guidance and direction, telling me where to go and what to do in some of the most beautiful places on Earth. Heading out to the backcountry for a few days, I don’t realize how much I miss Clarendon until I return — perhaps dropping back into Yosemite Valley or coming around a bend at the Natural Arches — when it reminds me not to feed the bears.
So I was shocked when I learned from the NY Times Magazine story “The Road to Clarity” that the National Park Service has decided to phase out Clarendon, replacing it on all their signage with the newly designed NPS Rawlinson. Now Rawlinson’s not bad, but… it’s just not Clarendon. A Transportation Research Board publication claims that Rawlinson “requires less horizontal sign space than Clarendon while improving sign readability and retaining Clarendon’s unique signature quality.” I don’t doubt that Rawlinson uses less space, but it does so by using completely different letterforms, thereby retaining nothing of Clarendon’s “unique signature quality,” whatever that means. (Besides, if two typefaces share a “signature quality,” then it’s not “unique” anymore, is it?)
But I’m just being grumpy. Every time I’ve been in some truly breathtaking place (in this country), Clarendon has been there, too. So I associate the two, and, in my mind, Clarendon has a great “brand”: It’s outdoors, rugged, strong, awe-inspiring, fresh, clean and invigorating. Clarendon is solid, liquid, mossy, foggy, windswept and out-cropped. Rawlinson is none of that, and will never become that, at least not for me, in my lifetime.
But hey, at least the NPS didn’t choose Myriad. I’m hoping and praying that this sign was a mistake. (Note to NPS designers: Use “create outlines” before sending your PDF to the sign shop!)
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Posted: August 28th, 2007, 11:27am PDT by Scott
Time to celebrate summer with a post about letters in sand.
Those millenia-old little granules provide a lot of lettering options. Wet, they stick together better, but dark sand is fairly low-contrast. Dry, they want to lay flat, and so are hard to shape into forms, but with deep enough troughs (or a sun low enough in the sky), you can get some nice definition, such as with the rough serifs above.
But really, the best parts are that (A) you’re on the beach, and (B) nature’s own Etch-a-Sketch is easy enough to reset whenever you want to start afresh.
