The time taken to add your ‘data’ to Dopplr is something you really don’t mind as the benefits outweigh the ‘cost’.

What if you could record data about anything and visualise this in a personal report?

Nicholas Feltron has been doing just that for quite a few years – collecting everything any and every piece of mundane information and visualising them beautifully in his annual Feltron reports.

Daytum was created as a way for Nicholas to store all of this information. You sign into site and add a ‘thing’ with an ‘amount’ – cigarette : 1

This then gets logged into the system with a timestamp and as you smoke you keep updating the site. A mobile twitter interface is thankfully on hand as updating your data via a website is a chore upon a chore. Now you just have to tweet your ‘thing’ with your ‘amount. A similar system called your.flowing.data created by Nathan Yau is entirely built on top of twitter to store your data.

These are systems for the committed – You have to be in the mindset to fire off a tweet to record that thing.

Can objects we naturally interact with start to share the data they store?

The Wifi body scale is automated and is single minded in what it records.

Another great example is the Sleep Cycle iphone app – It is an alarm clock that wakes you up when you are in the lightest part of your sleep cycle. It does this by monitoring how you are moving while you sleep – the phone accelerometer registers your motion and figures out the best point you can wake up. Aside from sleeping better,  the app produces a variety of graphs to help you understand your sleep cycle.

So can we automate the collection of any data without changing our normal behaviour?

Poyozo could be the development that does this ->

Poyozo gives you your own data back by downloading the information you’re currently giving to the web on to your own computer. You can opt-in to importing your data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Last.fm, Google Calendar, any email service, any RSS feed, Flickr, Wesabe, Listit, Skydeck, Dopplr, your Firefox browsing history, the local weather, and your location, allowing you to access all of this personal data as easily as the companies that run these services can.

So if we could be generating our own automated annual Feltron reports. What insights could they offer? Could they offer insights into our behaviour and moods

I was having a lovely lunch time chat with Mike Stenhouse about this very subject – He has been exploring a lot of these ways to visualise connections between data at trampoline systems and also in his own time. He started explain some of the prototypes he had built, gave some brilliant examples i’d never heard of and we chewed over some other random scenarios.

Did you gain weight one week (wifi scales) because you ate at a certain restaurant (foursquare) or you went on a business trip (dopplr). Were you sad at work  one day (twitter), listening to incredibly depressing music (last.fm) and searching for a new job (bookmarks) and buying something to cheer youself (purchases). Could the report then identity that you were the happiest on a certain day or offer some insight into why.

Would be eventually be drowning in data from our lives and eventually be finding patterns with no meaning? Maybe so, but I for one would love to try it and see.

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This then starts to make you think about what you could design either from a functional or aesthetic point of view.

Then from a personal point of view – what artifacts and objects do I have that I would never want to lose. Could I make a copy of an object – in essence save it’s memory. If you copied a family heirloom – a vase for example. Does this still pass on the memories associated with that object.

Could that object even be alive?

How I arrived at this point was when I saw the following image via the shapeways blog. It is an artistic exercise by a dutch design studio wieke somers to look at how products can be made with human ash.

If we put aside the notion of rapid protyping with human ash and use conventional materials – Can we copy objects and use it ‘ash or even ‘stone” as a texture to recreate that object.

Could handheld scanning be so cheap that you can scan anything?

Handheld scanning could soon be so mainstream that you could scan your cute puppy.

Image via flickr

And immortalise it forever…

Image via flickr

Is there a business model there? Unethical? Nonsensical? One people would use?

What if you could send the ‘data’ of your objects to someone as a gift and they take this into a the 3D printing equivalent of snappy snaps – 1hr later they have an object.

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Assemble your A-Team

I think it was June 2009 (it *was* June 1st), a little email pops into my inbox – come to a quick brainstorm for a new pitch. It’ll only take a couple of hours. So off I trot and find myself in a room with a hand picked team (Ez, Tom, Dave, Matthew) being introduced to Shane and Sophie from onedotzero.

We are set a brief – Create the new brand identity for the festival on the theme of ‘Convergence and collaboration’. The festival identity has to work across print, motion graphics and if possible interactive. They’ll come back in two hours and we’ll present our ideas – If they like the idea we get the job. No pressure then.

I break out the white board doing my best ‘ideator’ impression breaking down audience segmentation and the like.

1.50 minutes go by – We’ve got zip. Nada.

Then suddenly it all started to click. We knew onedotzero had a massive global fanbase and community, a healthy 700 or so fans on twitter and well we wanted to harness that conversation and visualise it. That was the core of the idea. We presented this back to Shane and soon after we heard we had the job.

So this wasn’t your typical process for creative development. The reason why it was so rapid was a few fold- As an agency we had all just come out of Hyper Island training. They taught us how to break down creative workshops into short intense bursts of activity. This was a pitch and time of five people is sacred so spending this thinking time in an optimised and way was essential.

The other major takeout from Hyper Island was that creative teams should be tailored to the task in hand. If you know your output from the briefing then you need the people who will be making those things in the first creative sessions. This might sound like a facepalm of obviousness but remember we are dealing with an ad agency used to the art director/copywriter model. This was actually a masterstroke by Rob Steiner and Tony Wallace who put the team together.

Friendfeed is your friend

Through the creative development of any idea, we build a physical wall of stimulus. This let everyone on the team (and indeed) the office see what we are upto (this is very important later).

Once the initial concept had been resolved, we now had the very very hard part of actually realising this. We then went through a massive discovery phase (collecting hundreds of stim images) on how to realise ‘kinetic typography’, conversation and metaphors around this.

Collaboration – Living the idea

We knew pretty early on in the project that we would needed help to create some sort of ‘visualiser’ for all this conversation. I had really wanted to work with Karsten Schmidt aka Toxi for a really long time and I knew he would be the perfect person to take the idea further. Luckily for us, he graciously accepted to collaborate with us. David talks about this moment as being defining and I think so to. We would have never succeeded without Karsten coming onboard – This was key to the project and also pretty brave of everyone to let go a little to bring him into the creative team.

Sketches

The amazingly talented Karen Jane had also now come onto the project as our superstar designer and the creative team was now complete. KJ started on a very rigorous design investigation phase and out of this came some super interesting studies of how lines start to intersect each other.

This led to one of our first ‘eureka’ moments when she produced this little sketch.

The metaphor of convergence was clear in the sketch, it felt a bit rigid but we all knew this was the start of a great direction. We just had to convey the ‘conversation’ in there as everyone was clear this was core to understanding the idea.

Magnets

Karsten also started to explore use the metaphor of magnets ‘pulling in the conversation’ as a way of visualising the strands of conversation.

This led to another study in field lines.

Some old code immediately rapidly led to some great sketches.

This then led to further study by KJ which stared to apply the field lines to create the lockup of the ‘onedotzero’ logo.

So now the basic principles of the system were set. We would take the ‘onedotzero’ logo – break the letters down into ‘poles’ and create a system where lines flowed over the poles. Simple really.

Set the goalposts

The last part of the puzzle was moving into 3 Dimensions. For Karsten this was totally trivial and again very rapidly we led to the next sketch.

So the type is impossible read, there is no visualisation of conversation but in that we’ve got nearly all the tasks needed to push things forward. The goalposts were now set…More parts to this story soon…

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It is a transport  mechanism for carrying any sort of message – be that human conversation, computer messages, collating messages or sending messages.

How can I show the value of messages?

My good friend Mike Stenhouse created Out of five – a beautifully elegant way to capture reviews. You tweet in the name of the gig/film/book with a rating (out of five) and a short review.

@oo5 Coraline 4.0 simply wonderful

You have a record of what you’ve experienced with a date and a way of getting at that data later (through your own rss feed). Also a brilliant social aspect kicks in as the reviews are trasmitted through twitter so if you are following a person who reviews something – you see their review and could find a way into OO5 that way. Also all the reviews collated together and you start to see other peoples reviews of the things you like – You could follow those people as they could be your influencers if you share the same tastes.

Nathan from flowing data has been beta testing your flowing data for a little while and now it has launched. The mechanic to OO5 is very similar but it is more open in terms of what it records – In that you can record any metric – If you want to track your weight you just tweet -

d yfd weigh 160

Again all that data you send in can be extracted and the other benefit is that data visualisations can be generated straight from the site.

Beautiful stuff.

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Guardian – Open Platform – The entire guardian newspaper (and many years of archive material) all available to use via an API.

Guardian – Data Store – An incredible resource of data – Everything from ‘Champagne imports’ to ‘Swine Flu cases’. All available as Excel Spreadsheets.

New York Times – I believe they were the first newspaper to open their content via an API.

Wattson – If you’ve ever wanted to know how much electricity you consume then the Wattson is for you – You clip it to your electricity supply and it collates all the usage info. You can then interface with the API to start to play with the data.

Pachube – Taking the Wattson to a much higher level – Pachube is a dataset collated from buildings – Lots of environmental data to play with – building temperatues, humidity, lights. Building 2.0 here we come.

Last.FM – The API has exposed a mass of user data regarding music usage.

Flickr - Photographs on tap with a very comprehensive API. Very well documented.

Programmable Web – A great resource of APIs and datasets.

Trynt – Lots of APIs to use including an IMDB API.

Open Government Data – An initiative led by Microsoft publishing data from governments.

Timetric.com – Lots of data with an API.

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Processing – The environment of all the experts – I think processing is very easy to pick up and learn but you will need to work at writing code. The forthcoming ‘Beautiful Data’ book might be a good way in.

Many Eyes – A very usable way to create quite straightforward datavisualisations – Created by IBM.

Flare – A set of libraries for Flash which let you prototype visualisations – you do need Flash knowledge for this.

Arduino – Linking physical objects to the internet a la ‘Physical Internet’ has really started to interest me and there is a growing crowd of people ‘Doing it with others’ – The Arduino is a very simple to use piece of electronics that can be flashed to control devices or transmit data to the internent. Thanks to Make and Instructables – There has never been an easier time to break out the soldering iron and get building.

Yahoo Pipes - Even non coders can start to play with data – Using Yahoo pipes you can take all sorts of data feeds and aggregate them together to manipulate them.

Flowing Data – Nathan is a curator of data and  stats – Flowing data is a superb resource for more traditional forms of data vis. He also created ‘your flowing data’ which is a system of capturing data through a mobile interface and twitter. Sort of like daytum.

Serial Cosign -A great resource.

Visual Complexity – A great resource.

Infosthetics – A great resource.

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Karsten Schmidt – Karsten is an incredible coder and designer – His ‘Social Collider’ project with Sascha Pohflepp starts to reveal relationships between conversations on Twitter.

Marius Watz – A great fine artist in his own right – Marius has explored ways of rendering data as physical forms – his wood etchings are beautiful. When exploring visualising stock data for the Knight Capital Group, the end result have an aesthetic of an atom bomb going off. He also runs the generator.x generative art site, vimeo and flickr groups where you can spend hours taking in the work.

Aaron Koblin – The incredibly brave and beautiful Radiohead ‘House of Cards’ promo brought a lot of attention to Aaron and the data vis scene as it was generated entirely by data – Not one to rest on his laurels, he has been quietly plugging away with some bizarre subversions of the Amazon ‘Mechanical Turk’ system. ‘Dollar bills’, ‘George Bush’ and even ‘Daisy Daisy’ go through the crowd sourced blender.

Jer Thorp – If anyone can make beauty out of the new york times then Jer can – His use of the NY Times API as a dataset has started to reveal some inspiring visuals. If you want to get your hands dirty then there are two tutorials to play with – one for the NY Times and one for the Guardian. His recent work ‘Just Landed’ shows how twitter can be mapped to location.

Jonathan Harris / Sep Kamvar – Gleaning emotion and sentiment from the internet and displaying this is a damn hard thing. Making an emotive art piece out of this mass of information is even harder and Jon and Sep continually do this. ‘We Feel Fine’ and ‘I Want You To Be Me’ are two examples of how they visualise emotion scraped from the ether.

Advanced Beauty – Matt Pyke curated twenty motion pieces exploring ‘synasthesia‘ – visualisaing sound. Many of the pieces are based on generative art processes and are showcases for cutting edge motion graphics artists.

Jason Bruges – Jason Bruges heads up an architectural design studio exploring visualising data created in realtime by physical interaction. Some very simple interactions such as wind powering lights or displaying the latent imprint of lift usage by hacking into the building lift interface – Very exciting stuff.

Ben Fry – In my opinion one of the founding fathers of modern data vis and co-created processing – His body of work is staggering and he currently heads up the Seed Media Group.

Casey Reas – Also co-created processing with Ben Fry and has exhibited many generative art pieces in traditional gallery spaces.

Robert Hodgin - I’ve been a massive fan of Robert for more years than I can remember as he is a leading experimental flash designer and coder. He creates pure beautiful eye candy.

Golan Levin – Another artists exploring visualising emotions – ‘The Dumpster’ was a great piece. It scanned the internet for comments about relationships breaking and then visualised them. His physical interaction pieces are hilarious – check ‘Snout’.

Ear Studio – I first encountered ‘Listening Post’ last year at the Science Museum – it was hidden in a dark corner and it was just transfixing – It was a bank of small screens that spoke back snippets from the millions of posts on chat rooms across the internet – effectively giving the internet a spooky synthesised voice.

UVA – A great design studio playing with light, sound, space and architecture.

Marcus Wendt – Marcus and the field.io team are not classical data vis but they are doing some stunning generative artworks.

Pitch Interactive – A really interesting interactive design agency doing some some great vis work.

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This allowed me to reconnect with a lot of people I had admired from afar as we used data visualisation, generative art, motion and code to start to explore this space – honestly we’ve got a lot more exploration to do. So in my travels I worked with some exceptional people and also made contact with a whole scene and started to see the ‘scenes within the scenes’.

I don’t believe that data visualisation is just the expression of a static data set in a graphical way to try and glean an insight – To me it is taking any data set – static or realtime and expressing this is any other way in any medium.

So lets talk about people (who I think are exploring interesting visualisations with code and interaction), data (what datasets are out there to use), and tools (how to get your hands dirty).

People

Data

Tools

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Kinetica Art Fair is developed by Kinetica Museum in partnership with P3 and supported by the Contemporary Art Society.

More than 25 galleries and organisations specialising in kinetic, electronic and new media art are taking part with over 150 exhibiting artists. The Fair will be like no other with living, moving, speaking and performing art.

The Fair provides unparalleled opportunities for the public and collectors alike to view and buy work from this thriving international movement and to participate in the programme of talks, workshops and performances.

It’s on from friday 27th -> monday 2nd in London town and the lineup of speakers and performances looks great.

www.kinetica-artfair.com

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But this effect isn’t new. It is very very very old. If you’ve every played a divx video without the right codec installed, you get these compression artifacts because your computer doesn’t understand how to render the video.  I’ve seen it many times when you skip through a video and the frames start to ‘blend’ together, but never investigated if some bright spark had applied it in some creative way. Well, with the Kayne video coming to light, a lot of the design blogs are point towards David OReilly as being one of the first artists/directors to intentionally glitch video.

After immersing myself in the world of compression glitching I’m really loving how this technique instantly puts you on edge and unsettles you.  Taking it further and glitching the edits or blowing the compression so much you can’t actually tell what you are looking at really makes you look harder. A brilliant way to subvert the medium.

Chairlift – Evident Utenstil

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Angy Kitty

References -

Shape + Colour

Create Digital Motion

Motiongrapher

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