Posts tagged ‘visualization’
Sep
02
2010
The Wilderness Downtown
One of my favourite bands, Arcade Fire, has collaborated with Google and writer/director Chris Milk to create an experimental video for their song “We Used to Wait”. Made to play in Google Chrome, The Wilderness Downtown starts off asking for the address of your childhood home and then becomes in an incredible audio and visual experience that uses choreographed browser windows of varying sizes popping open or closing and displays animations of digital flying birds flying from one window to the next and a pair of feet running along a street. All of that builds up to a climax when images of your street and childhood home are blended into the video, creating moments of surprise, delight and nostalgia. Self-reflection and sentimental thoughts are triggered near the end with pause allows you to write a message to your younger self, after which animated trees sprout all along your old street.
Using HTML5 technology, the collaborators have created a technologically impressive and creatively piece of work to create an awe-inspiring audio/visual experience.
Aug
05
2010
Locals vs Tourists
The places people experience in a city differ depending on whether they are tourists or locals. Mapping geo-tagged photographs illustrate the distinction between tourist shots (red) and local shots (blue) in Montreal. These maps tell a narrative of one’s journey through a city through either the eyes of a local or tourist, highlighting the varied points of interest of each group. And indeed, they are usually quite representative of people’s expected patterns of movement. More city maps here.
Source: Urban Photo
Jul
29
2010
Colours in Culture
A visualization mapping of how different cultures across the globe attribute different meanings to colour. Not only is it interesting to compare the differences in how colours are perceived, but also how certain attributes or values carry meaning in a culture or not at all.
Source: Information is Beautiful
Jun
02
2010
May
06
2010
Cost & Effects of the BP Oil Spill
Interesting visualization of the tragic oil spill.
via VisualEconomics
Also, check out Boston.com’s The Big Picture for imagery of the devastation.
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.
Jun
20
2009
Memories Scientifically Visualized
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org
For the past few weeks I have been thinking about memory as my thesis project aims to design around memory recording, sharing, and recollection. Thus, it was quite interesting to read that scientists have just recently captured images of memories being formed at which point new proteins are created at brain synapses. This provides a step forward in helping to understand the mechanism of long-term memory as well as the memory-related diseases and impairments.
Jun
19
2009
Another Use for Post-its
Post-its are a versatile tool for designers for brainstorming and organizing thoughts. It also adds a little colour to an otherwise dull whiteboard!
A student from Savannah College of Art and Design created a fabulous stop-motion video using Post-it notes to animate. The Röyksopp song adds the perfect “pixelated” feel to the entire piece.
Apr
25
2009
The Crisis of Credit Visualized
Jonathan Jarvis uses the power of visual storytelling to explain the economic crisis in a clear and comprehensive way. By breaking down the complex situation into simple parts and using strong graphical lyricism, he is able to communicate the causal relationships between all the various stakeholders in this system.
Mar
20
2009
Travel Experiences
I just started a new project for my Collaborative Workshop run in conjunction with Tsinghua University in Beijing. My team consists of 3 members from Hong Kong and 3 from Beijing so it will be an interesting exercise in communication and teamwork . The project is focused on the “independent tourist on the go,” where the independent traveller is defined as one that arranges their own travel plans rather than going on an organized tour or travelling on business.
We targeted a broad group of travellers that we categorized as the Wandering Traveller, who is spontaneous, free-spirited and loves to connect with the local culture and people while exploring the world. To get a better sense of these travellers, we set up an online survey to collect stories, memories, and photos of people’s travel experiences to understand their values, motivations and what they deem important while abroad.
From our collected surveys, we categorized our wandering travellers into 3 types: those who are “On My Own” enjoy travelling solo and being challenged, “Laid-Back ‘Locals’” do not feel the need to sightsee but rather just enjoy the place as an everyday local, while those who are “On a Mission” are goal-oriented and create schedules to see and do as much things as possible.
We decided to target our use group to that of the solo traveller as these travellers seemed more varied and interesting. We conducted in-depth interviews to get a better sense of their various backgrounds and demographics, their motivations for travelling alone, and to understand their different concerns and needs while travelling.
After the interviews we were able to illustrate a more detailed description of our target group: the Solo Culture Seeker.
These people come from all around the world of different ethnicities and speaking different languages. We found that many of them tend to travel outside their own geographic area (and outside their own comfort zone). We found a correlation between sociability and the level of adventure exhibited by travellers, that is, the more sociable the traveller and more willing to communicate with other strangers, the more adventurous he/she tends to be.
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
