Ian Fitzpatrick writes, collects and shares things here.
Some of these things have to do with brands, some of them have to do with buildings and places or machines or computers (which are, you know, machines, too). Each of them has to do with people, and the ways in which we respond to the stimuli around us.
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Ed Cotton posits that geography is becoming cool again, and I’m not certain that I disagree.
We can now tell where a plane is mid flight, we know how many miles we ran and if we are clever, we can map those miles, we can see exactly where photographs were taken and our cars can be effortlessly guided to our destination by satellites.
A great point. As we immerse ourselves in both maps of our creation (think Flickr), maps we need (think GoogleMaps), and an overwhelming volume of data that can be plotted in near-real-time about just about everything, a greater understanding of both where it is that we operate, and where we are in context of the world around us seems equally inevitable and appealing.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Published Dec 16.09
Joi Ito posted this week his contribution on neoteny to Seth Godin’s free new e-book What Matters Now:
Read the full post...The future of the planet is becoming less about being efficient, producing more stuff and protecting our turf and more about working together, embracing change and being creative. [...] It’s time we listen to children and allow neoteny to guide us beyond the rigid frameworks and dogma created by adults.
Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Published Dec 15.09
Mitchell Whitelaw has a really intriguing post this week on the notion of combining data visualization with actual visceral exploration.
In the wake of the announcement from the UK Met Office that they will be making available data from more than 1000 globally-dispersed weather stations, Manuel Lima made something of a call to arms for the data and information visualization set:
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Published Dec 11.09
via ChristmasGorilla, a link to a fantastic New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik (@adamgopnik) on the ways in which we use cookbooks, highlighted by this nugget:
Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense.
I’ve hammered at this point, as well, on a few occasions – usually in the context of process transparency (and frequently in the context of food). Gopnik, however, is far more eloquent in his take.
Link: What's the recipe? on The New Yorker Categorized as: Links, People and Information Published Oct 14.09
#garden is a piece that investigates the social media impulse. Several potted plants are set up in the exhibition space, rigged with electronic sensors and a water pump. Based on sensor data, the #garden will communicate its mood nightly via Twitter, a social media “microblogging” platform. Twitter users can give the #garden water by responding to its posts.
via Vimeo
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Published Oct 13.09
Categorized as: People and Information, Quotations Published Oct 13.09
Zach Taylor created the two above maps to chart the traceroutes from his computer to the 50 most popular sites on the internet. The first traces the routes from his apartment, the second the same routes via the NYU network.
Learn more about the program via Tigoe.
Link: How to get to the Internet on Zach Taylor's Weblog Categorized as: Links, People and Information Published Oct 09.09
An interesting evaluation of American happiness as measured through Facebook updates:
As we all know, Facebook lets people update their friends with status updates, and with millions of users, that’s a lot of data. Look at the aggregated data over time, and you could see some interesting trends.
The Facebook Data Team recently measured happiness in the United States based on these updates with a metric they call United States Gross National Happiness.
Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. This graph represents how “happy” the nation is doing from day to day, by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when they update their status: When people are using more positive words (or fewer negative words) in their status updates than usual, that day is happier than usual!
Link: Facebook Measures Happiness in Status Updates on FlowingData Categorized as: Links, People and Information Published Oct 07.09
(via TEDtalksDirector)
Link: on Categorized as: Links, People and Information Published Sep 20.09
A handful of related thoughts, leading to a larger one:
Last week, my new favorite television show, Hung, ended its initial season run on HBO. On a lark, I posted to Facebook and Twitter for recommendations for a new series into which to sink my teeth. 24 hours and a few hundred suggestions later, a handful [...]
Categorized as: People and Information, Things I Have Written Published Apr 22.09
Michael Surtees has a great post today at DesignNotes on choices in user experience design, highlighted by this fantastic diagram outlining various approaches to presenting users with options:
The great thing about today is that it’s not entirely hard to let a person use any of those options for a site or service. It just takes time to implement.
Link: on Categorized as: Links, People and Information Published Apr 06.09
Oded Ezer, I Love Milton, 2008
Over at Design Observer this morning, MoMA Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli (who gave a brilliant TED talk, by the way) has a wonderful piece on the work of Israeli designer Oded Ezer:
Ezer thinks that since, very often, a type designer chooses a typeface for its ability to embody and render the feeling of a project, the step from object to creature is direct and typefaces should really become living, biological beings. As he explains it, “The term Biotypography refers to any application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof to create or modify typographical phenomena.” These fantastical creatures not only literally embody the dream of design and science coming together, but also let us dream about a super-human language that is shaped by biology, rather than by culture — the dream of a universal means of communication that we have sought for centuries.
It’s a gorgeous writeup. The slideshow is astounding, as well.
Link: on Categorized as: Links, People and Information Published Mar 30.09
I’ve grown fond of Yelp lately, albeit more for entertainment purposes than any real utility. I derive no little pleasure from the social communities’ noticeable divide – unabashed fandom and fawning on one side, a strong proletarian streak on the other.
Most entertaining are the not-infrequent scathing customer reviews of America’s 5-star restaurants – a particularly [...]
Categorized as: People and Information, Things I Have Written Published Feb 27.09
To celebrate the institutions’ 150th anniversary, the MIT Museum is crowdsourcing its’ celebratory exhibition, asking users to nominate pieces from their substantial collection for display – 150 of which will ultimately be included.
It’s a wonderful idea, as befits a museum of this regard (it really is a priceless space – one often overlooked even by local residents), and not dissimilar to an idea espoused here with respect to the archives of the American Museum of Natural History.
Read more about MIT’s program here, or go straight to nominating. Better still, plan a visit to the museum itself and see Connections, a new series of works by the Sociable Media Group.
via Everything is Miscellaneous.
Link: on Categorized as: Links, People and Information Published Feb 26.09
Heavyset loyalists know that I’m a fan of Kevin Rothermel’s blog. A few days back, Kevin posted what he termed a ‘rant’, but is, in this reader’s opinion, is quite the opposite. In response to some of the wholesale generalities bandied about by a handful of unabashed social media mavens, Kevin writes:
Interesting doesn’t go away [...]
Categorized as: People and Information, Things I Have Written Published Feb 23.09
I posted on Twitter last night at 5:30 that I was ‘Anticipating tomorrows NYT Oscars Twitter visualization’.
Jeff Clark hit me up just a few hours later with a link to his own Twitter Oscar visualizer (nothing similar yet from the Times).
Click to see how Dustin Lance Black was received in the heartland
Built with Processing, Jeff’s visualizer is a good deal of fun. I’m particularly glad that timeline-based visualizations are becoming so mainstream, as it goes a long way towards legitimizing the mediums from which the data is captured – in this case, Twitter.
You can view the entire thought process behind the visualization here.
Link: on Categorized as: Links, People and Information Published Feb 13.09
Ben Terrett, on his fantastic blog Noisy Decent Graphics, posts today about a project he’s working on with students at the London College of Communication.
His students were charged with creating data visualizations based upon a measurable component of their own lives – it’s a particularly relevant assignment at the moment, as such visualizations are seemingly omnipresent.
The results range from the design-driven to the esoteric. My personal favorite:
Jamie made a pie chart. He measured all the ingredients he ate in a week and then made a pie. In the presentation.
I’d not have thought of that (and I’m guessing you’d not have, either).
Link: on Categorized as: Links, People and Information Published Feb 12.09
The far-more-on-top-of-things-than-I Noah Brier posted a link today to Saved by Science – a collection of large-format photographs by Justine Cooper of the archives at the American Museum of Natural History, and published by Seed.
In Noah’s post, he references this quote from an accompanying essay by Carl Zimmer:
I knew that natural history museums kept fossils [...]
Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Published Feb 03.09
Christian over at Zeppelin Repair posts today on a new poster by design student Olly Moss, whose re-thinking of the poster for The Deer Hunter brings a brand new perspective to a 30 year-old film.
Some years ago, I was enamored of the idea of founding a music magazine that would review and cover only backcatalogue [...]
Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information
Blog from renowned strategist / planner Mark Earls.
Dan Hill, head of research for the Sydney office of Arup, uses City of Sound for in-depth, thought-provoking explorations of urban informatics and the ways in which they help people engage cities.