Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.

Archive for December 2007

Proof that narrative is hard: A 3 month Flickr summary

In Weblog on 24 December 2007 tagged 2007, Flickr, Photos with 2 comments

(I started posting to Flickr again, after almost a year without photos. Lots of these shots are thanks to Ben's magic powers, the convertible dérive.)

One or two dinners and brunches at Suppenkuche:

One or two games of Settlers of Catan:

One or two nouns too many:

Artists messing with tissue cultures:

The canals of Venice, Los Angeles:

Downtown Los Angeles, from afar:

A Korean Temple on a coastal hilltop:

The port that sustains the sprawl:

And the cranes that keep it moving:

Meanwhile, I learned a language that nobody knows:

But not the one that this city prefers:

Reflections on their reflections:

Bill Clinton has a library:

The Northern Irish peace process has a chess set:

Hillary wanted to be a nuclear scientist:

Bill wanted to be a cowboy:

People have a very different attitude to animals than I do (part I):

People have a very different attitude to animals than I do (part II):

San Francisco has secret pockets...

... full of junk:

And views!

But fog! And palm trees!

I have seen a Hitler teapot:

Having palm trees outside the studio still stuns me:

As does the radical change in building style, one hour away:

I have seen the Bay Bridge from a funny angle (part I):

I have seen the Bay Bridge from a funny angle (part II):

That fog again, a curious accent:

A curious contrast:

And in between colours:

Now live music is rare:

But epic:

The transport is suprisingly European:

Meanwhile, brief returns to London take me straight in at the top:

Accidental Visual Resonance

In Processing, Weblog on 16 December 2007 tagged Design, disaster, dopplr, ffffound, Fire, information-visualisation, Mapping, oakland, Processing.org, stamen, trulia hindsight, Work, yahoo with 5 comments

In my post about the good people at Yahoo's design research group in September I suggested that some of their visualisations remind me of the movie War Games. I love the movie, but I continue to think that certain kinds of accidental visual resonance should be avoided. The 'incoming' visualisations by the good people at Dopplr have this problem too.

Today, Mike sent me the above image that Gem ffffound showing the devastation caused by the Oakland Hills firestorm in 1991. It's shocking, stunning and scary all at once to see so many homes ablaze like that. Mike pointed out that it looks like some of the work from our Trulia Hindsight project at Stamen.

Thankfully I think Mike was referring to the early prototypes I made in Processing using additive blending and a red-through-blue colour range. I've uploaded a movie of one of these prototypes to Vimeo so you can get an idea of what we're talking about:

San Francisco Property Prices, Animated from Stamen on Vimeo.

The fact that certain parts of the movie looked like San Francisco was burning, or being bombed, was definitely a problem we had to avoid for the final piece. It's something I wouldn't want to be thinking about addicentally if I was trying to find out about real-estate in the area. What we want is to make something that can illustrate the effects of real devastation if we want it to, without emotionally swindling you if you just want to think about urban growth. That's why we knocked out the red and orange hues in the colour range, added a drop shadow and ditched the additive blending. Ultimately, it was more appropriate to show data on the map than in the map.

So, if you want to you can look up some of the areas of Oakland affected by the fires in 1991, such as this example, and spot the clear rebuilding activity in 1992. With luck, the animation will illustrate some of the devastation caused by the fires, without looking like a simulated disaster.