information aesthetics

a collection of mainly graphical results from a research project that focused on revealing how people feel anger, joy, fear, sadness & love. a simple survey asked 250 participants between the ages of 6 & 75 years from 35 different countries to graphically represent these emotions on a set of human silhouettes. the resulting drawings were compiled in layered Photoshop documents. in addition, participants could express emotions textually or choose appropriate colors. the text results were analyzed on frequency, while the color choices determine a DNA-like frequency pattern.

[link: emotionallyvague.com]

see also: personality DNA test & Playboy centerfold averaging & Google Project.

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[from Fernanda Viégas at Infovis'07]
Robert Kosara organized a panel entitled “The Impact of Social Data Visualization” where he brought together, for the first time, a set of people involved in the emergent field of social data analysis: Ola Rosling, Brent Fitzgerald, Martin Wattenberg, & myself.

Gapminder, Swivel, and Many Eyes were all represented and each one of us shared our perspective on what it means to democratize visualization, set data free, and increase data understanding around the world. To me, the power of the ideas put forth by the panelists and the energy we got back from the audience questions made it the best session at InfoVis this year.

A revolution was in the air and you could feel it in the room.

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[link: eagereyes.org]

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a real-time data visualization projected on a physical table that aims to augment the developing verbal dialog by displaying a representation of conversation to all people present. the visual graph on the table demonstrates turn-taking, domination, interruption & activity throughout a conversation.

the Conversation Clock uses tick marks along concentric rings. just like a clock, each ring contains a single minute of tick marks. the inner rings represent earlier times in the history of the conversation. each mark is colored according to the microphone from which input was received & sized to indicate the amplitude of the associated waveform. as a result, phenomena like activity & turn-taking become easy to observe, such as people not speaking versus dominating the conversation, or aspects such as interruption, silences, and argument also make visual impressions on the table.

[link: uiuc.edu & uiuc.edu (PDF, 471KB)|thnkx Andrea]

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a collection of aesthetic data visualization from the (new?) Yahoo! Design Innovation Team, also known as "Yhaus". interesting examples include "I You He She", an application that shows live questions from Yahoo! Answers to generate an overall, impression of people's raw feelings & thoughts. "Delicious DNA" compares social bookmarking patterns with colorful barcode patterns. "traffic map" depicts a forecast view of traffic conditions.

currently available as large Quicktime movies only.

will they become the true competitors of Stamen?

[yahoo.com|via tom-carden.co.uk]

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aesthetic & interface & social & text . comments (5)

a novel technique for visualizing & analyzing complex graph structures, such as of social networks. the method is designed specifically for graphs that are “multivariate,” i.e., where each node is associated with several attributes. unlike visualizations which
emphasize global graph topology, PivotGraph uses a simple grid-based approach to focus on the relationship between
node attributes & connections.
the graph is rolled up by two different data attributes (x & y-axis). the area of each circle is proportional to the size variable of the node. because of the grid structure of the graph layout, straight edges would almost always have serious occlusion problems. therefore, quadratic curved edges are drawn between nodes, with widths corresponding to their weights.
[ibm.com(pdf)]

aesthetic & infovis & social . comments (4)

a very interesting chat interface which uses the 'mouse as a baton' for conducting a conversation. instead of simply pressing 'enter' to send a message, the interface allows the user to control the flow of text & the size of circles used to visualise their messages, much like gesturing in real life. [mit.edu & mit.edu]

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a physical & visual representation of the conversational dynamics between two people as they converse across a long table, embeded with light emitting diodes (LEDs). the LEDs are activated by two microphones which pick up the duration & volume of the conversation, triggering light animation from the end where one speaks toward the other. if both people speak simultaneously, the lights start animating from both ends. [mit.edu|via we-make-money-not-art]

everyday & infovis & physical & social . comments (0)

a sketch idea for a business card which helps people identify and characterise those they are associated with. the proposed card uses bluetooth to track a person's movement & spoken activity during a meeting, which is then recorded and displayed.
[ideo.com]

everyday & social . comments (0)