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!
In Weblog on
30 May 2007 tagged conferences, Maps, san-jose, stamen, trulia, where2.0, Work with no comments
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!
In Weblog on
2 May 2007 tagged apple, Design, Hardware with 2 comments
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.
In Weblog on
29 April 2007 tagged conferences, London, paris, Talks, Travel, xtech with 1 comment
I'll be back in London in a couple of weeks, on May 18th right after XTech 2007 in Paris where Mike and I will be speaking about visualisations of time.
Some themes/highlights I'm looking forward to from the schedule:
- Aaron Straup Cope (Yahoo/Flickr) and Håkon Wium Lie (Opera) are both talking about paper and printing and the web.
- Blaine Cook (Obvious/Twitter) and Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Yahoo/Flickr) are talking about Jabber (IM) and social software for robots.
- I'm interested to see if Simon Willison can keep up his momentum on OpenID (I'm a skeptic).
- It will be good to catch up with Steve Coast and talk about OpenStreetMap
- Matt Biddulph is (sadly) talking about his work in Second Life but hopefully also about his recent shift to working full-time on Dopplr too.
Registration closes on Tuesday, so if you want to hang out with us, see all that, and hear keynotes from Adam Greenfield, Gavin Starks and Schulze & Webb, you should jump to it and register!
At some point I'm going to stop pretending that I'll write this blog with any regularity. In the meantime, if you're wondering what I'm up to you should know that life in San Francisco is great and that Stamen are treating me very well... If you want to know more you'll just have to grab me face to face, or at least wait for my current project to launch by which point I might find time to breathe. We'll see!
In Weblog on
4 April 2007 tagged croutons, del.icio.us, Links, sxsw, tumblr with 3 comments
In his now-famous style of ranting at SXSW this year, Bruce Sterling berated the incessant flows of information on the web, saying it's, "like watching you get beaten to death with croutons".
I'm inclined to agree that sometimes it can all be a bit much. But I also don't care - I've got a lot of personal enjoyment and utility out of posting links to del.icio.us, and it seems like a lot of other people get value from reading them - either directly, or on aggregate.
I've been trying out Tumblr recently and I'm thrilled that it's allowing me to do the same thing but with images and videos, and the occasional quote. It's a very free and easy way to keep track of things I think are noteworthy. It turns out I don't want to find most of these things again, so the lack of tags and other things is fine - a blessing, even. If you're the kind of person who likes a steady stream of croutons, feel free to read along at randometc.tumblr.com.
When life gives you lemons, suck 'em, honestly, lemons taste awesome. When the web gives you croutons - feast!
In Weblog on
6 March 2007 tagged quotes-politics-war-history with no comments
"An army may be murderers and unlawful.
If an army be raised to cast out kingly oppression, and if the heads of that army promise a commonwealth's freedom to the oppressed people if in case they will assist with person and purse, and if the people do assist, and prevail over the tyrant, those officers are bound by the law of justice (who is God) to make good their engagements. And if they do not set the land free from the branches of the kingly oppression, but reserve some part of the kingly power to advance their own particular interest, whereby some of their friends are left under as great slavery to them as they were under the kings, those officers are not faithful commonwealth's soldiers, they are worse thieves and tyrants than the kings they cast out; and that honour they seemed to get by their victories over the commonwealth's oppressor they lose again by breaking promise and engagement to their oppressed friends who did assist them."
— Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform
In Weblog on
22 February 2007 tagged new-york, surveillance, Video, voyeurism, Youtube with 2 comments
The videos on this I-Witness Video Blog about NYPD video spying techniques are fascinating. Chest-mounted cameras on undercover cops, infra-red/heat cameras on the critical mass bike ride, and creepy, awesome, weirdly detached blimp camera footage:
"The first scene on the clip shows people from the antiwar group Not in Our Name lying on the grass in Central Park, spelling out a giant "NO" with their bodies. Every so often the camera operator focuses on some young women lounging nearby who do not seem to be part of the antiwar event. The hovering blimp cam seems almost to float above this tranquil scene. It might even be a pretty picture if it were not for the fact that we are viewing this all through what appears to be a military targeting scope superimposed on the frame."
These shots show highlights of the blimp footage, note just how much of New York can be seen as it zooms out:
What strikes me is the one phrase, "Every so often the camera operator focuses on some young women lounging nearby who do not seem to be part of the antiwar event," — as I'm sure you would too if you had a camera like that. When implementing surveillance technology, what use is it if nobody is watching? But then how detached can one be from what's being observed?
Watching this stuff second or third hand on the web is also quite jarring. As part of a daily diet of often highly personal clips, parodies and skits on YouTube (and superb post-modern twists combining everything), voyeurism is becoming ordinary.
The scope of this surveillance reminds me of a great Matt Webb story, The Mirrored Spheres of Patagonia, where the inhabitants of a city can see everything through a network of telescopes and reflective spheres. Matt's vision is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
In Weblog on
19 February 2007 tagged blogosphere, charts, globes, Google-Earth, heatmaps, information-visualisation, Maps, screensavers, Weblog, Youtube with 6 comments
Over the last few weeks I've been collecting circular visualisations. This week, I seem to keep running into 3D globes and heatmaps. I'm all for 3D done right, but even with my fondness for circular visualisations I'm still wary of these things. (Of course I'm not denying the eye candy appeal of any of it!).
First up, Twingly, which I think is a Swedish blog aggregator/search site of sorts, but I came across it as a screensaver video on YouTube:
The person who posted it to YouTube helpfully describes the blogosphere for those of us not in the inner circle:
"The blogosphere is the total sum of all blogs connected into a social network. The term was cool a year ago but is too widespread now for the general blog crowd to use it. But since it's actually a useful term it is still referred to by the inner circle. From there it will work it's way back into the common language, acheiving a renaissance around febtuary next year."
So that's cleared that up then. Next up, an academic one, G-Econ from Yale (via Things Magazine), which plots geographically based economic data:
I admire their thoroughness in doing the whole world (check the site for country by country breakdowns), and their multi-megabyte eye candy movies. It's a shame it's all based on a GDP-like measure, which isn't the most intuitive or easy to visualise thing itself. I'm reading their papers now to see what the story is.
Lastly, I'm really pleased Dan Catt over at Flickr/Geobloggers can't resist plotting his interestingness heatmaps in 3D inside Google Earth. When the sky goes pink you know it's because Yahoo's Dubai office decided to build it for real.
Update: Eric found this one from ESRI:
In Processing, Weblog on
14 February 2007 tagged Design, Hiring, jobs, Processing, san-francisco, stamen, Weblog with no comments
Stamen, the company I work for in San Francisco, is hiring a designer.
If you're "someone who is a designer first and foremost, a coder a distant second, and who's interested in where these areas interleave" then please read the post on our site and consider getting in touch. I can't recommend us highly enough.
