« September 2007 | Main | December 2007 »
October 26, 2007
Idea 2007 Conference: a brief report - Day2 part 2/2
After talking about the Day1 at the IdeaConference, its time to share what happened in day2, 5th October 2007.
Day 2
Bob Freeman see some photos
Bob Freeman from Radical Media started talking offering an overview about RadicalMedia (a 3 minutes video has been showed ) and talking about his past experience in MTV during the 80s and the 90s
The speech was about the 192021 project, and Bob said "We are in the business of giving directions.
The project is interesting in terms of social, economical, cultural, artistic and living aspects and trends: from the phenomena of global urbanization (50% of the world population lives in the cities, in 1800 they were 3%)
The founding members are 6: Freeman, Wurman, Hawley, Kamen and Keeley and they have 6 advisors and other partners, that will help in offering their services
The main aim of the 19.20.21 project is about creating an understanding through usefull information about trends, challenges, issues and opportunities emerging from the 19 biggest cities in the world (more of them are really close to the ocean)
The outcomes will be delvered through all the information channels: online, print, exhibitions, tv and seminars in order to delviver the right information for the right audience
In the Q&A section, some critical points emerged: the quality of information, the sources of information, the crafting of information and the need to be with no point of view or politcially oriented
Other important aspects were about the sharing and manteinment of information (info will change, they are not static) and the role of global companies and brands. On the other side the information will be primally OPEN, but some of them could be CLOSED
Chenda Fruchter see some photos
Chenda has an interesting, and also really funny, about the 311: a public phone number that offers governament info about NYC 24/7/365 in 180 different languages and that has 400 call takers answering to more than 45,000 calls a day.
Behind the phone number there are peole helped by a software based CSM
The service went live on 09th March 2003 and from there a lot of weakness and strong points emerged: mainly related to the domains of questions and the way of talking to users and getting feedback from them.
In terms of User Experience Design, the interesting aspect of the service is about talking to each user in the same way...a funny example have been from the NYC mayor call 
Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg see some photos
Fernanda and Martin are the main reason for which I went to the IDEA Conference: I wanted to listen and discover more about the Many Eyes project.
They introduced to the audience the story of Information Visualization, starting from the tech/scientific approach from the early 90s till nowadays, with a broader and more "human oriented use of information; they also offering some nice examples (the Ben Frys ones are always marvellous).
From this point of view, they started focusing on the Many Eyes project (launched in January 2006) introducing the aim behind the initiative and the tools available for the users: from treemaps, to word-trees, from tag-clouds to bubble charts.
The key point of the project is about the social role of information visualization and the power of sharing and discussing about public data among users
In terms of results, I found interesting that a lot of users are not infovis professionals but journalists, bloggers, sport fans and other type of users that are typically not involved in infovis analisys.
Users are also involved in uploading, collecting, researching and sharing data; its also happend that users started discussing on the data itself, even if they are not interested in visualize them.
Many of the visualizations produced by Many Eyes users have been used on blogs, online magazines and th number of users, data and outcomes are always growing up.
The successful results of the project could also bring IBM to start thinking about commercial use of the Many Eyes approach
To me, Many Eyes is a very good and important project because of 3 factors:
- the social aspects (discussing, sharing outcomes among blogs and online resources )
- Critical approach in understanding public data
- Not professional users involved
I also think that Many Eyes could need some small features, such as:
- Easy embeddable
- Data portability
- Languages support
- Flash technology instead of Java (=more users)
I would like to thanks Martin and Fernanda for sharing this experience and to had let me bored them with questions and curiosities on their work
David Rose see some photos
David from Ambient Device is an previous MIT guy and he spoke about the Preattive Devices and the concept behind the DataCast Phenomena.
He brought some very nice examples ( from the Orb to the Ambient Umrella) and the interesting aspect of his speech was about the Interaction Design in the preattention/ambient display of information.
The key aspects of data-cast phenomena are really challenging for all the professionals involved in defining the proper solutions to give, to the user, the right information at the right time not requiring any special attention.
From a business prospective the diffusion of ambient devices is really interesting and it also related to the price of small chips.
Mike Kuniavsky see some photos
Mike, after David, started talking about the User Experience Design about the material aspect of information.
He illustrated the thingM project about a wine "chooser realized and crafted observing users and creating several level of prototypes, in order to better shape the whole experience.
After talking listening the emerging role of physical computing and the use of net-information, it seems that preattive devices and the "smart-objects are starting to cast information as a physical shadow on ur real world.
Jake Burton see some photos
The last speech was the Jakes one and he offered interesting points about his role in designing physical/digital environments for the 9.11 memorial (the most documented event ever)
He offered suggestions about the role of generating and collecting information, using also a bottom-up approach and involving users in understanding and sharing experiences
Conclusions
At the end of the speeches session, Peter Merholz invited all the speakers and the audience to start sharing and discussing about what the IDEA conference was about.
A lot of themes emrged, as its possibile to see on Peters blog
Events, IA / Information Architecture, Ideas, infoVis / information visualization / infoviz, resources, Talks / Speaking, User Experience, User Interfaceshttp://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/10/26/idea-2007-conference-a-brief-report-day2-part-22/
Share:
Posted by InfoVis at 7:15 AM | Comments (0)
October 3, 2007
US elections donations: a visual approach
Some weeks ago, discussing with Marco in front of a cup of coffee, an interesting data source emerged: the database of followthemoney: it offers a comprehensive coverage on money transfers from donators to parties candidates all over the US.
Above a screenshot from the Java Applet
We started thinking from some past inspirations and after some discussions and some more coffes, Marco started to develop a first prototype as a Java applet ( based on the fantastic Prefuse ) in order to understand some relations among candidates and donators.
The representation is quite simple: a graph in which nodes are related each other using oriented arrows ( they represent the direction of money transfer ) having on them the exact amount of donation; the stroke of each arrow, instead, represents the relation between the single amount and the maximum one.
Some considerations:
- a lot of small donators give almost the same amount of money to both parties
- the stroke of arrows should be not linear connected to the maxmium amount but, maybe, using some exponential relation in order to pay attention to the behaviour of small donators.
In next weeks we would like to go deeper in designing and devloping such tool, in order to release it soon as a free Java Applet.
In the meanwhile you can have a look to some more screenshots.
I would like to say "thank you to Marco for the efforts provided till now and for sharing this.
Feedbacks and comments are welcome.
IA / Information Architecture, Ideas, infoVis / information visualization / infoviz, Projects, resources, rias / Rich Internet Applications, User Experience, User Interfaceshttp://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/10/03/us-elections-donations-a-visual-approach/
Share:
Posted by InfoVis at 6:12 AM | Comments (0)
