Posts Tagged ‘visualization’

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.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in CIID Thesis, Projects | 2 Comments »

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.

Tags: ,
Posted in CIID Thesis | 3 Comments »

CIID Interaction Design Pilot Year @ infosthetics

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

picture-12

Finally infosthetics.com published our (me and Kevin edited it together) article about Data Visualization course that we had last year at CIID. We described the process that we went through and wrote some lines about each project that we did.

Check this out : Data Visualization Education at The Interaction Design Pilot Year.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Copenhagen | No Comments »

Energy Rehab

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Energy Rehab – this is the final name of our project. It took some time before I get used to it but now I think it’s quite cool.

p1050261

Basically we extended our idea about stickers indication how much energy device is using into energy prepaid cards. Just like in mobile phones.

p1050262_

You buy a limit of energy, charge devices with some initial amount of energy and them you recharge them based on your needs. If you don’t have energy left on your card you can transfer some energy from other devices or even borrow it from your friends.

p1050269

And here is some early prototype:

img_0497

Because of lack of time and human resources (it was already a lot of work for both of us) we didn’t manage to include all features in our video. They were about real word usage of our system and some interface issues. For example we developed a new type of stickers (this with two arrows forming a circle) that can recharge themselves. You don’t want you fridge to run out of electricity, do you? We have also a nice idea about assigning ID’s to our stickers. You could simply flip your energy card, draw a symbol representing you device, tap, and slider you finger on the card towards the sticker to transfer the drawn icon to it.

img_0517

Here is our final video:

Oh, and I have to mention once again how much I love Inkscape for drawing vectors! This time I really needed some hands for the flash animation for the movie so for the first time I was sketching in Inkscape and the results were surprisingly good in very short time:

sketching

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Copenhagen, Projects | 3 Comments »

P3 Guld

Monday, January 26th, 2009

Last Friday in cooperation with copenhagen based shiftcontrol studio I played as a VJ during danish public radio P3 music award show! This was my second time as a VJ and it was a big one :]

img_2916

During the last week we prepared two applications in Processing. Jørgen was playing during Mike Sheridan show:

Jorgen playing during Mike Sheridans act.
Mike Sheridan

I was playing during The Wong Boys show.

Vorg playing during The Wong Boys show.
The Wong Boys shot

I will post better photos and videos in next couple of days but you can already watch P3 Guld ceremony on DR website.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Copenhagen, Projects | No Comments »

MoneyVis – visualizing private data

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

In the second week of our data visualization course we had to focus on one bigger project. Most people still worked with UNdata but I decided to choose a data set more important to me. Three years ago I started a small experiment. I keep track of all money I spend. I have one simple text file with one entry per line. Each entry consist of date, price, name of item and category. Because I moved to Denmark recently I decided to add currency information to the prices so I can switch between Polish Zloty and Danish Krone easily. Here are 3 example entries out of 1500 :)


PLN
2005-12-15 3.90 juice @ food
2007-11-09 650.00 trip to venice @ fun
DKK
2008-10-01 3800.00 iphone @ hardware

Because I wanted to display all the data on one graph I decided to convert all the prices to one currency. Euro was obvious choice so I found conversion rates between Zloty – Euro and Kron – Euro for each day for past three years. When I get this data I wrote small script to convert all the prices automatically.

This is first bar chart showing my money spending. Each category has it’s own color and when you move mouse pointer over one of the bars you can see how many money you spend for items in this category in this month.

money_vis_01

You can also filter by category to display only this data that you are interested in.

money_vis_02

As you can see stacked bar charts are quite confusing if you want to compare categories over time so I invented a nice way to make them more clear by splitting one bar chart into several smaller bar charts.

money_vis_03

In one of his presentations Shawn mentioned that they always try do display all the data available. This inspired me to quickly hack displaying data not only for particular months but also for particular days. Because this was quick and dirty code, neither filtering nor separating of categories worked properly but still it was quite impressive. Finally I could see why blue (hardware) bar in October 2008 is so big. It’s my iPhone :)

money_vis_05

Here is my interface in actions. If you want to watch it in HD mode you have to go to the Vimeo website.

The goal of this week was to tell the stories by visualizing data. It was a great experience to show that stuff in front of the audience while telling about my trip to Venice last year of how my cost of living changed after moving to Copenhagen in September 2008.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Copenhagen, Projects | No Comments »

UNdata – visualizing public data

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

Finally! This is what I was waiting for so long, a data visualization course with Shawn Allen from Stamen. They are one of the most known design agencies specializing in data visualization in the world and I really love their works.

The course started with quick introduction to ActionScript. I already knew it so I jumped right into coding. To get a lot of interesting data we were using UNdata website. To simplify process of loading xml data files into flash Shawn had written a small library and shared it with us. After a while I realized that it was a little bit limited for stuff I wanted to do so I wrote my own classes for parsing UNdata xml.

Here you can see results of my work. You can click on this image to open interactive visualization and play with it.

birth_rate_sml

If you are interested in source code for this visualization along with my classes for UNdata you can download it here : BirthRate.zip

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Copenhagen, Projects | 1 Comment »