Design

With the ever increasing availability of, and access to open data about the world around us, there is a constant stream of fascinating developments to try bring new insight into the dynamics of how our cities function.

A nice new project brought to my attention by Alexey Papulovskiy titled ‘Contrailz’ provides an elegant visualisation of the world’s flight paths. Now, we’ve seen projects with a similar focus in the past (Bio.Diaspora and Arup, to name but a few) but here we have a fully interactive exploratory environment to zoom and pan around the global patterns.

Earlier this week I mused about an accidental fusion between music and visualisation. This comes on the back of other pieces about smells and visualisation and the possibility of taste and visualisation. Now we find a new collaborative concept in the shape of gardening and visualisation, or HortiViz if you like.

To mark the scoring of a record number of goals for his club, Adidas have celebrated Frank Lampard’s 203 strike with a real-life 3D visualisation of where each of these goals were scored from.

In my most recent ’10 most significant blah blah blah’ posts at the end of last year I included (at number 8) examples of where designers were going beyond solely the visual representation of data. Some of these examples included Moritz’ Data Cuisine Workshop, experiments like Tasty Tweets and fun pieces like Pumpkin Pie Charts.

Thanks to Romain Vuillemot for sharing a really interesting visualization toolkit he has developed with Samuel Huron called Visual Sedimentation (VisualSedimentation.js), a JavaScript library for visualising streaming data, inspired by the process of physical sedimentation.

In the last hour or so, Benjamin Wiederkehr and his talented crew at Interactive Things have shared work they were involved in for Swiss German-language newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The project is titled ‘No time for anger’ and looks at four stories two years on from the Fukushima disasters.

“The Art of Clean Up: Life Made Neat and Tidy” is a new book by Swiss artist Ursus Wehrli presenting his wonderfully perfectionist’s eye for obsessively creating order where there is none.

There is never a short supply of dumb charts, particularly thanks to the totemic uselessness of outlets like Fox news. However, sometimes you see an example that leaves you quite frozen with fascination: How did it come to be? What were they thinking? How many people let this pass through the approval for usage?

A theme of steadily increasing interest to me and many others in the field right now is the ideal of physical data visualisation. Not just visual sculptures as data art but actual tactile representations of data that maintain and offer function.