In Weblog on
8 September 2007 tagged aesthetics, blocks, information-visualisation, stamen, twitter, Work with 1 comment
Blocks has been out almost a week and the dust is settling a little. Off the cuff remarks are fading out and thoughtful responses are emerging. The second post on Visual Methods, a new blog from MIT Comparitive Media Studies student mike_d, has some good feedback.
I won't address his specific criticisms of Blocks here because agree with a lot of them and we're working on improvements that should go some way to addressing them. However, I do take issue with beginning criticism of the piece using the "standards of canonical information visualization". This relates to the uselessness posts Mike and I made earlier in the week.
Mike_d calls me out on my Techcrunch comment, suggesting that I want both useful and useless at the same time:
No offense to Tom, but it sounds like he's playing both sides! He admits to its potential uselessness but simultaneously suggests that that it is quite functional. Based on Stamen's previous work, I do think they are trying to produce useful information tools and not just pretty designs, but justifications like this seem like an easy way out of more careful consideration of their design. And frankly, the "works for me" defense seems completely antithetical to the principles of information visualization!
I really don't think I'm playing both sides here. Unfortunately, when I respond to people who think Blocks is useless, I'm conceding terms and fighting an uphill battle to make my real point. Perhaps that's a mistake (and yet here I am again).
I think that people who insist on evaluating Blocks as a tool - and conclude that it's useless - are wrong: I've found it useful myself, hence the "worksforme" comment on Techcrunch. But what I really think is that they're looking too hard for the purpose and utility of it before appreciating that it's really a way to look at Twitter from a different angle. I don't think it needs to start from a position of usefulness to be interesting. Furthermore, it's not that it is/isn't useful, it's whether utility is the guiding concern. For us (with Blocks) it wasn't.
(image by Mike, illustrating my words, as a response to Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino's post)
At Stamen we're knowingly operating on a fine line between aesthetic-driven visualisation (effective information visualisation that is also beautiful) and data-driven aesthetics (beautiful things that also represent data). It's a largely unexplored line (perhaps the area that Mike_d's first post has identified as emerging) that I would compare to the line between designer/coder that I comfortably and steadfastly occupy every day.
Fundamentally though, Blocks is a visualisation of Twitter and its users for Twitter and its users, by Twitter and its users. We have made an attempt to make it understandable for people who don't use the service, but that's a hard task and it's confounded if you're looking for something that's not there.
There aren't really any metrics there, just the things that people said in the order that they said them. Squared.
In Processing, Weblog on
6 September 2007 tagged feedwordpress, planet, Processing, Processing-Blogs, Processing.org with 6 comments
If you're reading this on Processing Blogs, or via its feed, then everything should be fixed. For some reason, Feedwordpress just stopped working and wouldn't re-subscribe to lots of the feeds that were previously fine.
Feeds are now being grabbed robustly by Planet and merely massaged by Feedwordpress. Here's the current list:
Please do let me know if I'm syndicating too much or too little, and especially if I'm missing people or if I'm syndicating your blog and you don't want me to. Otherwise, the site should run itself for a while.
In Processing, Weblog on
4 September 2007 tagged Animations, Design, information-visualisation, Maps, Processing, Processing.org, questions, stamen, war-games, yahoo with 3 comments
Whilst I wrestle with my reaction to the reception of Twitter Blocks, it's interesting to look at what other people in information visualisation are working on.
Yahoo's new design research outfit, apparently also known as yhaus, have just put up a site outlining their work so far. The first thing I noticed is that they've snagged an amazing subdomain: design.yahoo.com. The second thing I noticed is that compared to other teams I'm aware of in the field (including Stamen) they have a pretty good gender balance (a thorny issue but I'm noting it anyway). The third thing I'll note is the guest appearance of non-Yahoo work in the portraits of the team: I see Torrent Raiders, Fidg't... what else?
Sadly, all but one of the demos there so far is a big Quicktime movie. I know that with millions of users Yahoo has to be a stickler for browser support and compatibility, but I hope they get a chance to take this work live on the web as well as demo it in movie form. There's some solid realtime Flash and Processing work hiding in there, and people (OK, I) want to see it in its interactive entirety.
There's clearly some healthy collaboration and influence going on there (much as in our work, e.g. Ben Fry's zipdecode looms large over the interactive version of our Trulia search animation). Yahoo's Aaron Koblin is best known for his Flight Patterns piece, and this visualisation by Michael Chang of Yahoo trip planner data is very similar:
Likewise, Aaron's work on traffic patterns bears a close resemblance to Flight Patterns:
I don't want to pick on them too much, because it's really beautiful work I admire a great deal (and it might seem like sour grapes), but both the pieces I've highlighted do suffer from something we've tried to avoid at Stamen: animated information graphics on top of black backgrounds and vector maps can easily look like screenshots from a modern-day War Games:
I'm glad other people as well as us are experimenting in public, and I'm glad sites like Infosthetics and Visual Complexity are cataloguing our efforts. We need our own visual language around this kind of visualisation that doesn't resonate with the imagery of war.
Apple's iphone has made a strong impression with slick transitions in its interface design, but the maps application still borrows from Google's pseudo-shadows and static pins. The playful interfaces of the Nintendo's Wii games certainly offer a different path, but the rest of the games (and movie) industry's cinematic-realism aesthetic exerts a strong influence over our generation of designers and it isn't going to meet these goals any time soon.
It's a fairly regular topic of conversation at Stamen: how can you make a visualisation of e.g. 911 calls actually look like emergencies, and not birthday parties or toilet flushes, without freaking people out and without making it mundane? Is it possible to use great circles to connect air travel destinations without it looking like missiles? Can you animate growing and shrinking red and yellow circles on an aerial map without it looking like Gulf War I weapons company propaganda?
It's a bloggy weekend here at Random Etc, if you're reading along I'm definitely interested to hear your thoughts.
In Processing, Weblog on
2 September 2007 tagged Art, Flash, information-visulisation, Processing, Quotes, stamen, twitter, Work with 11 comments
We finally kicked Twitter Blocks out of the door yesterday. It's been in development for about a month, mainly by Ryan Alexander and myself (but all Ryan whilst I was working on Oakland Crimespotting, he's a star). It's the first time we've done 3D things using Flash and it's amazing what's being done with Papervision3D at the moment. On the other hand, having 3D shoe-horned into the 2D Flash engine means the learning curve is a lot steeper than the native-3D Processing/OpenGL worlds Ryan and I are used to.
Whenever Stamen launches a new thing, my immediate reaction is a sigh of relief followed by a slightly obsessive-compulsive trawl of what people are saying about it online. (I use a combination of alerts from Technorati, Google Blog Seach and Bloglines to keep track).
The interesting thing about working with companies like Digg and Twitter is that your work inherits all the criticisms and detractors of those sites as well. Digg's users are clamouring for a picture section, so when we launched Digg Arc many of the responses ignored the piece entirely and chastised Digg for paying attention to visualisation and not to the main site. The same argument is already being used against Twitter Blocks, even though the amount of time Twitter's developers put into it was tiny compared to the amount of time they're putting into stability and new features.
Don't get me wrong: some of the early feedback we're getting is very positive, the team at Twitter have been very receptive and we're proud of our work. This much is good. Some of the feedback we're getting points out that the work isn't immediately understandable (I agree, and maybe we could do some more explaining, but I think we're OK for now).
However, there is also a strong and steady flow of negative comments that I've gathered here so I can think about them all in one place.
“Pretty visualization but I doubt its practicality.” PoppuPot
“Twitter Blocks is the kind of thing that demos well at conferences. Not too useful in real life.” Dave Winer
“exploring myneighbourhood : fun 3D view but so what? not sure i will do that everyday.” jean-michel gobet
“Well its interesting that its a new Twitter toy, but I just don't get it. Functional?” programwitch
“Puzzled but Entertained” … “Not really got the slightest idea why this is anything other than an interesting folly.” Tom Coates
“What is the point? Beats me.” Russel Heimlich
“I have to say I was absolutely gobsmacked by how utterly pointless it is.” EirePreneur
(The last one is, short of a personal insult, pretty much the harshest thing anyone has ever said about work I've been involved in.)
To address Tom Coates' point, if you're entertained we've done our job. If you're puzzled then maybe we can help explain things better next time. But I don't mind if some of our work is seen as a folly (“an extravagant, frivolous or fanciful building, designed more for artistic expression than for practicality”). Not everything that everyone does has to be useful or profound. (Nevermind that we've personally found Twitter Blocks a useful way to explore the Twitter network in the last few weeks, with frequent remarks of “I didn't know X was on Twitter”).
Jim Bumgardner (aka KrazyDad, author of O'Reilly's Flickr Hacks) addressed the “so what?” response to frivolous work in a blog post called Utility is Overrated a couple of months back. In the comments there's a comparison with Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation. In it, she states that “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art”. I don't want to point at Twitter Blocks and say “art” (the Motorola sponsorship in particular makes that tricky) but I think that people are thinking too hard about things if they're looking for the “point” of it.
I'm not asking that people stop casting a critical eye over what's presented to them, especially when it's being hyped to death and it's commercially branded. It's fine to ask “what's it for?”, especially of new tools or things that aim to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of this or that. But why not also accept that some things might just be for entertainment and ask “am I having fun” once in a while instead of looking for a problem to be solved or an important statement to be read? Some things just are.
In Processing on
21 August 2007 tagged admin, Processing, Processing-Hacks, Processing.org with no comments
Sadly (due to my neglect as sys-admin) processinghacks.com hasn't been accepting new edits/users since I moved hosts a few months ago. I finally got around to fixing it today, so everything should be working now.
The site hasn't quite reached the ambitious heights I had in mind for it when toxi and I first put the wiki together and drafted the contents. Some of the hack suggestions are out of date now, and many of the existing hacks don't work with the latest release yet. That said, I hope to put some time towards kicking it into shape over the upcoming weeks and I'd be delighted if you'd join me.
I should also mention that there's a good incentive to get your hacks written up, because we're planning to move Processing Hacks to processing.org - you might have seen a note about that in the Learning section. Fame and fortune (or at least some geeky glory) await!
In Weblog on
15 August 2007 tagged crime, crimespotting, Maps, modest-maps, oakland, stamen, Work with 4 comments
Mike and I have been working on this all week, and it's time to let people see it.
Hopefully the site is self-explanatory, because now I have to work on all the things I wasn't working on so we could get it out there!
In Processing, Weblog on
1 August 2007 tagged Code, Data, java, lucene, Processing, Programming with 2 comments
In the spirit of continuing our impromptu database week on Processing Blogs (my post, toxi's post, then Florian Jennet updating the sql library), I thought I'd post another quick example using Lucene.
Last week Ryan and I needed a reliable way to search inside a data set we were working with. I had previously tried and failed to write my own useful search routine for the same data, so I wanted to take a look at Lucene instead. (This week, I might have used SQLite, but I hadn't tried it last week!).
Lucene isn't a relational database like MySQL or SQLite, although it has a few similarities with the way most database engines speed up queries using indexes. That's because Lucene is "just" the indexing part. You tell Lucene about your data, one part at a time, and then construct queries to ask it which parts of your data match the query. The key thing is that you keep hold of your data yourself and structure it any way you like, Lucene keeps its own representation of the data for searching. Because of this it can index much more data than you can store in memory.
Anyway, I put up an simple example Lucene applet here that indexes the text of Time Machine by H.G. Wells from Project Gutenberg and lets you type queries against it. The text itself and the Lucene index it builds are both quite small (tens of KB, compressed), but the applet is around 750KB. This is because Lucene's core jar file is about 500KB so it's more suited to standalone projects and applications.
The code is kind of documented, but Lucene was really too much for me to understand properly in just one day. Nevertheless, again, I hope people find it useful!
In Processing, Weblog on
30 July 2007 tagged Code, Data, java, Processing, Programming, SQL, sqlite with 2 comments
SQLite is a great standalone SQL database engine - not ideal for every situation (particularly large websites), but more than good enough to have already made its way into desktop projects from Apple, and more recently Adobe and Google.
My colleague Mike recently used it as a way to distribute data from a 511.org transit website scraping project he's been doing. I wanted to see if I could download his data (gathered and processed using python) and access it using Processing.
Web searches for SQLite and Java (java wrapper sqlite, etc.) turn up lots of matches, including this promising tutorial from Tim Anderson, but sadly the most prominent matches didn't work for me. It's a real pain to get up and running and installed in a reliable way, mainly due to the need to compile SQLite natively for each platform and then talk to the native code using Java.
Enter this amazing project, a JDBC library for SQLite written in pure java that uses NestedVM to compile the C code for SQLite into something any Java VM can use. It's frightening to think about the amount of misdirection, abstraction and interpretation going on here, but it worked first time and plenty fast enough for my purposes.
Take a look after the jump for the code I ended up with. I hope people find it useful:
[Read more →]
In Weblog on
23 July 2007 tagged dance, earthquake, Flash, san-francisco, stamen, uniqlo, Video, Work with no comments
In a recent post about Google's Authentic Voice Problem, Nat Torkington documented the "time-honored marketing blog post formula":
- Find something topical.
- Identify the shiznit you wish to pimp.
- Find a line (however tenuous) between the two and the post just writes itself!
Something Topical.
There was a small but significant earthquake just outside Oakland last week. Lots of people were woken up by it. Dentures and tea-cups rattled throughout the bay area. Amazingly, around 6,000 people had reported it on the USGS's site by 10am in the morning. Go people!
Some Shiznit to Pimp.
I've been looking for an excuse to post about Uniqlo's clock website, featuring Japanese dancers on a one second timer, it's completely hypnotic (and yes the dancers are cute, I know that too). Now you can get your own for your blog, and share it with the world. 6,000 people have shared it so far.
The Line.
At Stamen we make beautiful interactive maps, native to the web. Imagine if the production qualities of the Uniqlo clock were brought to data as important as people's accounts of how an earthquake felt to them. That's the kind of work I aspire to, and I think that's where we're heading. What other tenuous lines should I be drawing in order to articulate this, I wonder?
In Processing, Weblog on
31 May 2007 tagged Animations, information_visualisation, movies, Processing, real-estate, stamen, trulia, vimeo, Weblog, Work with no comments
A few people have asked if I'm still using Processing now that I've joined Stamen (best known for their Flash work). Whilst it's true that I've been quiet on the Processing front, hard at work learning Actionscript 3 for Flash 9 to enable us to deliver Trulia Hindsight, much of that piece was informed by early sketches I wrote in Processing. (The graphs we made of a day of diggs were also made with Processing.)
Here are four movies we made from Trulia's data to get across the ideas we wanted to develop into Hindsight. It's a lucky thing that Flash 9 can shift many more points around the screen than Flash 8, otherwise we'd have been stuck. That said, it's still way behind Processing with OpenGL for this kind of visualisation, so choose your tools wisely when building a proof-of-concept in a different language to the one your project will be delivered in!
In the first few weeks of working with Trulia, we did some initial work exploring non-geographic views of their data such as tree maps and node graphs and so on. In the end though, the most compelling thing we came up with was to explore the different dimensions of the Trulia database in the form of animated maps.
Here are two movies, the first is San Francisco and the second is San Jose, showing the properties animated along an intuitive axis: the year they were built.
San Francisco by Year (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo
San Jose by Year (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo
And here are two more movies, also made with Processing, that show the properties that were sold in the last 10 years (under $2m), this time animated by sale price:
San Francisco by Price (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo
San Jose by Price (Trulia Hindsight Prototype) from Stamen on Vimeo
The animations by sale price aren't available in Trulia Hindsight (yet) but we hope to work more on these less-intuitive dimensions for animation in the future.
No doubt whichever direction we go in next I'll still reach for Processing to try things out. It's the tool I find it easiest to think in, and although Flex Builder (based on Eclipse) is a great IDE, I still find myself wanting to bend Actionscript to be more like Processing when it comes to prototyping my ideas - it seems I'm not the only one!
