100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work [flashbulbinteraction.com] is an online reference for product teams creating new applications for work involving thinking, with a heavy emphasis on visualization in the example domains used throughout: Clinical Research (data analysis visualization), Financial Trading (market analysis visualization) and Architecture (building information modeling visualization). Specifically written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools.

The ideas and illustrations in the "Enhancing Information Representation" and "Pursuing Aesthetic Refinement" sections are especially relevant to this blog's focus.

The work is freely available by the creative commons license as a browsable website, as a set of highly summarized idea cards (PDF), and as a printable 143 page book (PDF).

See also Visualizing Information for Advocacy.

Advanced Beauty [advancedbeauty.org] is an ongoing exploration of digital artworks influenced by sound, as a collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects.

The first artwork collection includes a series of audio-reactive video sound sculptures, as manifestations of sound, sculpted by volume, pitch or structure of the soundtrack. The films embrace unusual video making processes, the visual programming language Processing, high-end audio analysis and fluid dynamic simulations alongside intuitive responses in traditional cell animation.

Rendered in the 1920 HD format, with 5:1 surround sound, each artist was given the same set of parameters to work within; to start, finish and exist within a white space, creating a seamless coherence, all sculptures sharing the same white environment.

Watch all the videos online here, or check out a few below.

See also lyrics and audio-responsive visual and rethinking the music video. Via Ping Mag.

fLux, binary waves [lab-au.com] is an urban visualization installation based on the measurement and real-time representation of infrastructural (passengers, cars...) and communicational (electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio...) flows.

The kinetic wall comprises of a network of 32 rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimetres wide, placed apart every 3 meters. The panels rotate around their vertical axis, and have a black reflective surface on one side, the other being plain mat white. The microprocessors are connected to infrared sensors, capturing the surrounding infrastructural flows, and defining the frequency, amplitude and synchronization of the panel rotations. The installation proposes an urban sign having as subject the "urban", and as message to be a "catalyst" of urban flows in a play of kinetics, lights and sound.

The Emergence Project [emergenceproject.org] is a "software art" installation exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center's digital building facade gallery. It is based on the ideas and textual discourse that emanated out of the Chicago Humanities Festival: its presentations, performances, and panel discussions were captured, analyzed, and processed into a set of dynamic data visualizations that evolve dynamically over time.

The generative data artwork uses simple morphological rules to animate word clusters, based on linguistic proximity, similarity, and difference. It deliberately utilizes computer-generated animation to chart how complex patterns arise out of a multiplicity of simple interactions, a phenomenon known as "emergence".

Via Visual Complexity.

Guest-blogging on infosthetics.com is a tricky proposition. Since my last post the majority of things I've wanted to talk about have already been covered by our diligent host, Andrew.

Thankfully I stumbled upon this gem [flickr.com] from the charts and graphs group at Flickr. It shows a 2D plot of genetic similarity across Europe, colour-coded by country, alongside a political map of Europe using the same colours. A simply striking way to illustrate the complex process of reducing a multi-dimensional data set.

Sadly though, my (admittedly brief) attempts to find more information were confounded by pay-walls, landing pages and press releases. At least the latter provides a large format image for download! It's been a while since I was in academia, but I recall fondly being able to navigate the websites of scientific journals relatively freely from a university network, and being surprised when the same links failed at home. It's a shame so much good work is done behind closed doors, and that it's difficult for those of us outside the science community to correctly attribute and follow-up on interesting research.

I did find one publicly accessible article [technologyreview.com] though, and I'd love to read more. The methodology seems to be related to the antigenic cartography project, which thankfully has lots of information available to the public, and was written about on the O'Reilly Radar blog earlier this year after being presented at the ETech conference.

The use of side-by-side maps also reminds me of this recent map [pin-the-tail.com] showing the correspondence between increases in Democrat votes in the 2008 US election and cotton production in the 1860s. Again, an effective visual comparison presented casually on the web but it's almost impossible to follow up and find more. Strange Maps has expanded on it a little bit, including matching up the maps for a closer look at the correlation.

See also: Ben Fry's genomic cartography.

Guest blogger Tom Carden is an interaction designer at Stamen Design. He has recently contributed to several successful visualization projects including MSNBC's Hurricane Tracker, Trulia Snapshot and mySociety's travel time maps.

After the pizza box pie chart and the pie chart already eaten, now more pie chart craziness in form of a cleverly divided chocolate fudge cake [maryandmatt.net], made of out of exactly 70% milk, 20% dark and 10% white chocolate. If there is anything else in this world that is circular, eatable and proportionable, I am sure we will see it soon in form of a chart.

Via Swissmiss.

What Swivel and Many Eyes is for social data visualization (minus the commenting), GeoCommons [geocommons.com] could be for geographical mapping: allowing "non-technical professionals" to view and analyze geo-located data, without the traditional GIS overhead.

Relaunched a little while ago, the "Finder!" part of the service is designed to discover interesting publicly sourced datasets through browsing tags and categories, as well as upload, organize and share personally owned data. The "Maker!" part enables the creation of the according online maps, styled with shaded thematics, proportional symbols, graduated icons, points, lines and polygons without any required experience from the user. The so-called "Map Brewer" interface allows users to further classify and slice the data (e.g. quantile, equal interval, standard deviation, maximum breaks), and choose a base map layer (e.g. from Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps or Open Street Map).

I might be missing something obvious, but while I would love to browse through the maps already being made, I could not find any easy way to do so (except of hacking URLs). Also, is there any way to embed the maps in blogs?

Neil Fraser, a software engineer at Google, took 9 carefully selected cross sections from a MRI scan and glued them on wooden blocks to create a 3D representative model [fraser.name]. The result is a collection of 60 1-inch cubes, of wich 94 outside faces are simply varnished, and 266 internal faces feature a square slice of the MRI images. One can then "dig" into the brain to carve out custom shapes.

Using touch as well as the third dimension to explore 3D data is an interesting avenue, as alternative interfaces need to be explored as much as representation.

Martin Ouellette is President and Creative Director of Provokat, one of Canada's leading digital adveritsing agencies. For him, infoviz is more than a simple discipline, it's a culture phenomenon.

Hi, I am an interactive editor at msnbc.com who worked on the U.S. presidential election maps. Now that the election is over and I am well rested, I want to look back at what we have worked on all these months at msnbc.com. A few people wrote me asking about the process of creating a large scale project in a fast paced environment. Here is a longer answer to that question. Since this post will be a bit long, I will break it into several sections.

Click on image to see full size.

Pre-election content

We put a huge amount of effort into the Decision '08 Dashboard data explorer map. Many people had been preparing interactive content for our election coverage for months before I arrived. By the time I started in July 2008, most of the core functionality of the map had been developed. My first assignment was to support other developers and designers, by preparing data and writing small utility classes. Next, I created the polling data display and helped with designing the fundraising data display.

We wanted to map every data set we could find that came with geographic information. There were at least 10 data sets we wanted to map, but we launched our politics front map with only six data sets. We added user opinion, polling, candidate appearances and fundraising data over the next several weeks.

Most of our data sets were huge and we needed the technology to support and serve them to a large audience. This is where the team that builds our publishing platform came in. They built a new, user-friendly database tool just in time for us to use for the election.

The amount of information that the maps show is enormous. We have state and county level demographics data such as age, race and education from the U.S. Census and voting history of states and districts back to the 1980's. We also mapped individual contributions to the presidential candidates as well as every single candidate for a seat in the Senate and House of Representatives. Not a lot of our competitors have that kind of depth. In fact, I can't recall one that has this much variety of information either.

Of course, there are a few more things we wish we had done, but given the deadlines that we had, I think we did a good job.

Continue reading the post ».

The design of a new commemorative 5 Euro coin [pythonide.blogspot.com], also called the The Architecture Fiver, based on the subject 'Netherlands and Architecture'.

In the design of artist Stani Michiels, the portrait of the Dutch Queen Beatrix is constructed with names of important Dutch architects. On the outside the names are clearly readable, while they slowly get smaller to the center. The back side of the coin is designed as a book shelve shelf. The books rise as buildings towards the center. Through their careful placement they combine to outline the Netherlands, while birds' silhouettes suggest the geographical location of the capitals of all the provinces.

See also new UK coin design. Via Design Observer.

An electronically enhanced sewing machine [soundsbutter.com], able to represent sound through the height of the stitches it creates. The resulting stitch pattern thus becomes visually similar to an equalizer timeline. Unfortunately, currently a non-working prototype only.

Via SwissMiss.

In an approach similar to the very popular WorldMapper method, Show World adds the novel factor of animation. The online maps illustrate various census and world statistics from various non-governmental organizations by morphing the size of countries accordingly. Instead of land mass, the size of each country represents the data for that subject, both its share of the total and absolute value.

Google has discovered a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics online, and how many people actually have flu symptoms, by comparing their query data with data from the surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together.

It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted, and geographically located, very quickly. By releasing, and then visualizing [google.org] the aggregated search data to the public, the resulting influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and pandemics.

See also Who is Sick - Sickness Map. Via kottke.org and Flowing Data.

Amazon Windowshop [windowshop.com] is another 3D online shopping interface that enables the "immersive" exploration of movies, music and more, without the use of text.

The navigation reminds me a bit of TiltViewer. For more Amazon shopping interfaces, also check out Zoomii Visual Amazon Store, Amazon book map, Map Amazon, AmazNode, Oskope Amazon graphs and Viewzi book view.

An infographical and isometric Sims-like styled video created for the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), which highlights some of the complex issues surrounding the future of food in Japan. Topics include the amount of food imported from other countries, the problem of changing food habits, the aging farming population, and so on.

Watch the YouTube version below, or check out the high-rez version [maff.go.jp].

Some other isometric movies include a documentary about nuclear technology, and of course the legendary Royskopp music video. Via Pink Tentacle. Thnkx Victor!

Based on the stacked bar graph data visualization technique introduced by ThemeRiver (PDF) and StreamGraph, MemeTracker [memetracker.org] represents the daily news cycle of around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs. The system tracks more than 17 million different quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across the entire online news spectrum. The resulting graphs make it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly. In addition, one can analyze the media sites according to their "time lag" on reporting on a story.

See also LastGraph, Ebb and Flow of Box Office Movies and Tokyo: Right Now. Via Data Mining.

Over 20 pizzerias in the Philadelphia area (those in close proximity to large college campuses) were supplied with Economist-branded pizza boxes. Each pizza box [adsoftheworld.com] highlighted a specific data statistic, such as "Arable and permanent crop land by country" and "Mushroom exports to the U.S.".

After the pizza, one can always try a pie pie chart for dessert.

Via AdFreak.com. Thnkx Andrea.

A huge collection of international newspaper front page headlines [amazonaws.com] from Wednesday 5 November 2008, reporting the results of the recent US presidential election.

If you are interested in this subject, you should not miss Newseum, which features the front pages of almost all newspapers in the world, each single day.

Via Boing Boing.

A 25-minute documentary on the visual design of the London tube map, which is also coined as "The pinnacle of London Transport's modernist design", invented by an unemployed engineering draftsman, Harry Beck.

Check out the interesting video below.

Via smashingtelly.com and kottke.org.

An online data visualization tool [oecd.org] for exploring and analyzing regional statistics, in particular of the regional differences and structures of all OECD (short for Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) member countries. The tool compares geographical maps with several other forms of beautifully rendered visual presentation (such as scatterplots and focus maps) while using different mechanisms for selecting specific groups of regions.

Also note the parallel coordinates visualization well-hidden in a bottom tab.

Via Blog about Stats.