Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Trulia Hindsight - Processing Prototypes
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!
What I’ve been working on at Stamen: Trulia Hindsight
I'm just back from the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose where Shawn and I tumbled through a 15 minute summary of Stamen and our last few months of work: starting with Mappr, MoveOn and Cabspotting, through Mike's Oakland Crime visualisations, leading to Modest Maps, INdigital telecom and finally launching Trulia Hindsight:
Trulia Hindsight is the first project I've worked on from beginning to end at Stamen, and it's been a lot of fun. We developed the initial concepts as a group and then the ideas were fleshed out by me under Eric's guidance and with design input from Geraldine Sarmiento - thanks Geraldine!
We've got an initial write-up on the Stamen site, and Trulia's take on things is here. Hopefully we can get a chance to post some of the initial experiments that went into the piece and talk about some of the things we're proud of soon. For the moment though, it's time to breathe out and see what people think!
Cognitive Dissonance is Bad for Design
Thomas de Monchaux at Design Observer says Apple is bad for design, and the argument largely boils down to a matter of style:
"What is unique to Apple is more accurately called “style”: a clear signature vocabulary of forms and materials, superabundant to the mere requirements of function, that convey a certain sensibility, atmosphere, association, vibe. Of course, all those rounded corners may aid in manufacture and structure, but they also say in a comfortingly Jetsonian way: “I’m from the future, and so are you.” It’s the familiar tension between Modern and Modernist, in which a particular high style is mislabeled as “design,” and a corrupted understanding of the phenomenon of design is misrepresented as an additional “feature” of an object."
Adaptive Path's Peter Merholz says that isn't good enough, and that Apple is bad for design because they make it look easy but don't talk about what's hard. Everyone tries to copy them, but they're just not smart enough to pull it off:
"Apple is bad for design because they contain a brilliance that simply cannot be emulated. And that brilliance allows them to approach design in ways that are harmful for those organizations that aren’t brilliant. Dan, in his book Designing for Interaction, holds up Apple as an example of genius design — design that emerges from the mind of the designer. This is in contrast to user-centered design, systems, design, and activity-centered design, which all incorporate users more directly."
He continues,
"So, this could encourage other companies to practice genius design. The problem is, the people at those companies aren’t geniuses. Steve Jobs is a genius (and has had it proven numerous times throughout his career). And when non-geniuses practice genius design, bad things happen. Instead, what’s good for design in the overwhelming majority of cases is more of a user-centered approach, because this approach is accessible to many more people, and thus could have a much broader impact on design."
I think both Thomas and Peter have fallen into the same trap here and missed the real problem with Apple products: they look more perfect than they really are. The clean lines, smooth surfaces, and rounded corners are better finished than the internals. Every surface detail is taken care of from the packaging to candy-like GUI style to the consistency of the error messages. Ah, the error messages! If only my Macbook Pro showed me an error message before freezing and losing a couple of hours of work. If only the ipod showed an error message before its famously hard to replace battery died.
Of course, I'm falling into a different trap here by blogging that Apple products aren't perfect. People will find me and tell me they never had a problem with theirs. The fallacy of abundant anecdotes ("my friend had a problem with their mac", "our office runs on macs and never has problems") will be cited in both directions. The debate will be buried because people love their products - they look and feel so perfect, there can't be anything wrong with the reliability. Can there?
The problem is that under the veneer of consistent styling, beneath the packages of audacious world-changing product line-ups, is the same consumer hardware and fallible software and colourful pixels that drive all those other non-Apple products that we love to hate. And we think the Apple products will be better because the packaging is well thought-out and the buttons are consistent. Apple is bad for design because they only fixed half the problem. At least when a shoddy-looking Windows PC or iPod rip-off crashes it's behaving in a way that is commensurate with its appearance.
If a cheap-looking thing crashes, it's because you get what you pay for. It turns out the same applies if an Apple product crashes - it's still because because you got what you paid for, but it turns out you only paid for surface details. Same shit, different box.
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