Archive for the ‘CIID Thesis’ Category

Data Gestures

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Data Gestures

Data Gestures is a title of my final CIID project. It’s a very busy period for me so I’m publishing only a small info now.

Description:

This mobile application is a result of exploration of mobile gestural interfaces for personal data mining. By providing means both for
collecting and visualizing data on the go this software tries to assist it’s user in deep understanding of patterns emerging in his everyday life.

Full info:

Every day is a stream of small actions and decisions that we make, from getting out of the bed in the morning to choosing what to buy for the dinner. Separately they might seem irrelevant but gathered together and put into right context might give a whole new insight into our life. This project is trying to answer how to design a mobile application that would assist us in collecting and visualizing this data. Proposed application is focused mainly on money spending of the user. We can add items that we buy and assign them to several
categories. That data if carefully tracked it can provide us with information about things like eating habits or when put together with
data from other sources it can give impression of overall quality of his life. Interface of the application allows us also to filter the data or search for specific information. Taking small screen size and gestural interface as a challenge Data Gestures project is moving away
from data visualization paradigms known from desktop computing. Because of using multitouch input personal data mining becomes playful and useful at the same time. Buy being able to perform all this operation on the go and having dedicated interface tracking becomes easier. Data visualization available all the time with us (as long as we have mobile phone) is another incentive for gathering even more data hopefully influencing future decisions for a better balanced life.

My final project (thesis) mid term presentation.

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

talk-to-me

Recently I had a discussion about my final project with Niels Clausen-Stuck (my advisor) from Designit and Jan-Christoph Zoels from Experientia. I still have to digitalize all the feedback that I got from them but for now here is my presentation. It’s style is something that I developed earlier this year – mixing post-it notes with photos. It’s seems to be working because people love it :)

Is Data Visualization a way of story telling, exploration, or expression?

Monday, June 15th, 2009

I’m just starting my thesis on data visualization recently I was talking about this issue with my thesis advisor. After reading Peter Gassner’s article Data Visualization Is A Tool, Too! on www.datavisualization.ch I decided to write this blog post.

I see three big roles of data visualization:

DataVis as a way of telling stories.

gapminder
It’s purely informative role. You show big amounts of data in graphical way to explain something. E.g. you can try to convince you client why one solution is better that another or try to show what are the consequences of some decisions over time. In this case data is already preprocessed and served to you in a way that is easy to understad and grasp quickly. We have to remember though that very often such datavis are only supportive material that works in a specific context. Great example of that are Hans Roslin’s talks from Gapminder where without him talking we would be watching only boring graphs.

DataVis as a tool for exploration.

digg_arc_large
This approach comes from scientific data visualization where representing data visually is one way of coping with information overload. Because data is very often in a very raw form you have to play with it to find ‘your own story’. Trying out what happens if you display all the data at the same time and treating data as an interface is something I’ve learned from Shawn Allen from Stamen. Above picture is well known Arc visualization that they made for Digg.com where you can observe incoming stories that people vote for on Digg.com website.

DataVis as a way of expression.

greet

Sometimes we are just inspired by beauty of data and we are focusing purely on aesthetics. When we use data as a base for our artwork that is perfectly fine. Above picture is a visualization of Wii Remote movements recorded by people while showing how to greet somebody in their culture. No labels, no description just pure study of the flow of Wii parameters. But should we still call it data visualization or computational graphics?

There is never ending discussion about simply decorating data vs. making it more meaning full. In my opinion which direction we should choose depends on the mix of above three roles. And nobody says that we can’t make it beautiful and meaningful at the same time, what is what I always try to do.

Improving iPhone photo quality

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

p1000552

Have you ever tried to make close-up photos using your iPhone? Yes, it’s impossible… iPhone camera has fixed focus so every time you want to take photo of something that is closer that 30 cm the photos come out blurry. I needed to take a lot of pictures of post-it’s and I was very annoyed by the quality of the results. I knew that there are some protective cases with build-in lens that can fix that, but they are too expensive to me.

But today I came across a small magnifying glass in our studio. Hmm. I decided to try it. I attached it to my iPhone with a tape and did some quick test.

p1000554

The results were UNBELIEVABLE!

text
plant

I think I’ll use it a lot this month :D (before I can get new iPhone).

Exam

Monday, February 16th, 2009

learning-experience

On Friday I had the middle of the year exam presentation. Our task was to present what we had learnt and what are our plans for the thesis. Beside Simona and David among our examiners there were Prof. Joachim Sauter from ART+COM and Martin Frey from IDEO Munich. I’ve got some very valuable feedback from them.

Here are the slides:

I want my thesis to …

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

img_0139

During the last three months of my studies at DKDK/CIID Pilot Year we will be working on your final thesis but last week we were already asked to think a bit about it. We had to prepare our initial thesis statement and send it to our faculty. Because I want to blog about my thesis progress this is a good thing to start with. Here is what I have send:

I want my thesis to …

For me thesis is natural continuation of my previous skill and experience. Beside building on them I would like to incorporate into it more user centered design and research that is only possible while having proper amount of time to do it. For me thesis is a chance to bring something new to the field and build a network of people working in the same area that could be starting point in my professional career.

I’m interested in/inspired by…

Beside studying Computer Science I was always interested in visual representation of things. I went all way thought web development, graphics design, graphics and animation programing to interactive installations. In all this stages I was mainly interested in user interface design. The layer that is between user and the system. I was investigating different possible input methods from mouse and keyboard, gestures, video processing to multi touch. At the same time i like complex system / networks and data visualizations. Recently I started thinking about information overload that is nowadays part of our everyday life. After Oren Horev lecture about tangible user interfaces I started thinking about GUI. GUI has much larger resolution that TUI. Maybe thats is the reason why it allows us to be overloaded by information. On the other hand the more tangible interface is the less information it can communicate. I was wondering how making GUI more tangible could lead to decreasing complexity of the system and make them more affordable and easier to understand to people.

During my thesis I would like to challenge myself in…

focusing more on users and their needs. My skills in technology tend to play first role in my projects so this time I would like to spend more time on doing proper user research. I’m hope that better understanding their needs and context will develop far more useful solution / product not only a cool / hi-tech / mind blowing / interactive something.

Comfort zone:

User interface design, graphics/ai/ui/web programming, interactive installations, basic electronics, data analysis, brainstorming, video prototyping. 2d graphics and animation software, video editing software, java/c++/js/html programming environments.

Outside comfort zone:

User research, danish language, 3d graphics software, finding target user group, soft skills.