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.
Published on December 16, 2009 12:57 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Tags: everyday objects, geography, maps, playgrounds, sampling points, visualizations
Joi Ito posted this week his contribution on neoteny to Seth Godin’s free new e-book What Matters Now:
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.
Published on December 16, 2009 12:20 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Tags: adults, games, joi ito, neoteny, play, russell davies
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:
Published on December 15, 2009 3:05 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Tags: data visualisation, graph, landscape, space data
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 [...]
Published on December 11, 2009 4:21 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Information Tags: cookbooks, knowledge, transparency
#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
Published on October 14, 2009 5:01 am.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Tags: exhibition, impulse, sensor data, Social Media, Twitter
Published on October 13, 2009 7:30 pm.
Filed under: People and Information, Quotations
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.
Read his full post here.
Learn more about the program via Tigoe.
Published on October 13, 2009 5:30 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Information Tags: maps, nyu, traceroutes
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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!
(via Facebook Measures Happiness in Status Updates | FlowingData)
Published on October 9, 2009 5:04 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Information Tags: aggregated data, Facebook, graph, happiness
Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness (via TEDtalksDirector)
Published on October 7, 2009 7:01 am.
Filed under: Links, People and Information
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 [...]
Published on September 20, 2009 1:39 pm.
Filed under: People and Information, Things I Have Written Tags: aggregate, case studies, crowdsourcing, directv, new york times, suggestion
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 [...]
Published on April 22, 2009 9:10 am.
Filed under: Links, People and Information Tags: choice, user experience design
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 [...]
Published on April 6, 2009 8:20 am.
Filed under: Links, People and Information Tags: archives, art, biological systems, human language, phenomena, typefaces
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 [...]
Published on March 30, 2009 8:01 am.
Filed under: People and Information, Things I Have Written Tags: fandom, flash mob, restaurants, social communities, Twitter, Yelp
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 [...]
Published on February 27, 2009 4:30 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Information Tags: crowdsourcing, Everything is Miscellaneous, exhibition, institutions, MIT, museum, sociable media group
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 [...]
Published on February 26, 2009 3:30 pm.
Filed under: People and Information, Things I Have Written Tags: advertising, dna, duncan watts, experience, social networking, wave function
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).
Built with Processing, Jeff’s visualizer is a good deal of fun. I’m particularly glad that [...]
Published on February 23, 2009 11:03 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Information Tags: oscars, Twitter, visualizations
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 [...]
Published on February 13, 2009 10:06 am.
Filed under: Links, People and Information Tags: student project, visualizations
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 [...]
Published on February 12, 2009 1:05 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Tags: archives, art, experience, monetizing, museums, online communities, photographs
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 [...]
Published on February 3, 2009 3:33 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Tags: backcatalogue, experience, new, posters
