Posts tagged ‘information design’
May
03
2010
Feb
25
2010
Charting the Beatles
Charting the Beatles is an ongoing project exploring the music by the Beatles through infographics. The series of visualizations take data from secondary sources like sales statistics, biographies, recording session notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings to illustrate the song keys of each album, the band’s working schedule, and the ways in which they self-reference their songs, etc. They’re really beautiful and draw you in to read the all the details. This detailed tracking reminds me of Feltron’s data-tracking of his everyday routines. Via information aesthetics.
Aug
25
2009
The Best and Worst Cities to Look for Work
Source: http://www.good.is/post/transparency-the-best-and-worst-cities-to-look-for-work/
Now that I’m done with my masters program, it’s time that I start looking for a job. GOOD published an interesting infographic visualizing the unemployment rates in American metropolitan cities.
For myself personally, location is appearing to be a factor as to the kind of opportunities I can find relating to interaction design or user experience. For example, after living in Hong Kong I’ve come to realize that over there, design is not highly valued as a business strategy but still strongly perceived as simple re-styling or giving different physical forms. Toronto, on the other hand, is home to a handful of creative design firms, particularly in web, branding and advertising, yet I haven’t found many consultancies specializing in user-centered design, especially ones seeking interaction designers. It seems that the opportunities that appeal to me are more prominent in the US, especially San Francisco, NYC and Boston, as well as some cities in Europe, including London.
Let the search continue, wherever it may lead me.
Nov
21
2008
“My Documents” Visualization
In my Information Architecture and Visualization class that just started two weeks ago, our first assignment required us to come up with a visual representation for the structure of our own My Documents folder. We were not allowed to clean it up or organize it further before analyzing our folder structure. During my study I realized how many levels of folders I actually had – some went to 7 deep. I had a few concepts in mind ranging from 2D graphical designs to 3D objects and installations: Mondrian-styled rectangular patterns, nested boxes, bookshelf analogy, etc.
In the end, I came up with an architectural-styled paper sculpture where the base rectangular area is the root folder and the other stacks of rectangles are the subfolders within that root. The height of each folder is denoted by the number of files that it contains. I decided only to visualize 3 levels deep, otherwise it would become too complex.
And here are my concepts
One problem I realized halfway through construction was that I had cut the sizes of the subfolder rectangles to fill up the entire root folder rectangle – this actually made it quite difficult to distinguish the actual boundaries of each subfolder. Higher up in the structure, however, I allowed for more room between the stacks, which makes it easier to understand. In 3 weeks I will be exhibiting my work with my classmates, so I will have these problems resolved by then.
Nov
18
2008
Visualizing Mobility Patterns
Dan Boyarski, former head of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design, visited HK PolyU as a guest lecturer over the past three weeks to conduct a design studio workshop with my class. We were asked to collect data about ourselves over five days to create a visual representation. In this sense, it becomes information design in the form of a self-portrait.
I tracked the locations I visited, my routes and the modes of transportation I took, then sketched out my patterns following the form of the Hong Kong map. I also kept track of the times at which I travelled so I considered the use of colour to differentiate the different days and times of travel.
Because of the rich data set I had collected, it was important to convey the information on both a macro and micro level for the viewers. Macro view gives a big-picture idea of the data set (the map pattern), while micro view communicates the details of my travels, such as the date, time, exact location, duration. I created a colour-coded timeline to engage viewers on the micro level, which also acts as a legend for the line colours and types on the map.
I presented the final piece as a printed poster 23″ x 16.5″.
Detailed Views
Data Set
Concept Sketches
