On 3rd and 4th June, CityMurmur project (www.citymurmur.org) landed in Paris to take part to HyperUrbain.2, a conference about Information Technologies and Communication in urban areas, which was at its second edition this year.
Theme of the symposium was “la ville cartographiée” (the city map), and to give our contribute to the discussion, we were warmly [...]

My PhD Thesis – Work in progress, year 1/3.
Throughout the centuries cities have been constantly changing, together with their image, their imageability. Therefore their graphic representations must be constantly ‘adapted’ to those changes too.
Classic cartography deals with the topographic aspects of the cities, without explaining what happens inside them, describing their element, whereas recent technological [...]

Our brand new PhD student Luigi Farrauto – one of the very first students of the Density Design Lab  – has been invited to give a conference at the “Ècole Biblique et Archéologique Francaise de Jerusalem” on the topic of cartography: “Vous êtes ici. Jérusalem dans l’histoire de la cartographie”. Luigi did his MA thesys [...]

From NewYork Times Interactive comes this simple visualization of the “common mood” during last SuperBowl.
As the Steelers and Cardinals battled on the field, Twitter users across the nation pecked out a steady stream of “tweets.” The map shows the location and frequency of commonly used words in Super Bowl related messages.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF A URBAN SPACE SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF MEDIA?
CityMurmur tries to understand and visualize how media attention reshapes the urban space and the city.

On-line newspapers, information agency, blogs and personal websites, thematic media are monitored to highlight the pattern of perceptions on the urban space. This monitoring activity leads to the creation of an atlas that will produce – in real-time – different maps based on news sources, themes, and time. The atlas allows users to understand the urban space as a function of media attention and biases and social and cultural diversity of the city itself.
The goal of the project is to show how different media differently describe the urban space through the attention that is payed on each street of the city. In the hypothesis of the increasing importance of the on-line presence in contemporary society, a media geography has been generated intersecting the media scape with the geographical reality of the city.

It all began last week, in a city of huge grace.
And wondering how cool would have been
to look around through the eyes of “Media Space”,
we found in a great workshop the solution within.

Murmur, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

After a week of cañas, tapas, fried food and heavy work this is the first result of the Visualizar’08 Workshop.

More specifically this is the wiki page of murmur

Density Design Lab, Knowledgecartography.org and ovrflw, under the nom de plume Writing Acamenic English, are proud to annouce that Murmur is one of the selected project for VISUALIZAR’08: DATABASE CITY.

The traditional monument is understood by its symbolic imagery, by what it represents. It is not understood in time, but in an instant in space; it is seen and understood simultaneously. Even in traditional architectures such as labyrinths and mazes, there is a space-time continuum between experience and knowing; one has a goal to work one’s way in or out.

I have been discussing a lot about quality of life in the last month in very different situations, and it made me thinking this is a key and imperative issue now.
I presented a paper in Changing the change conference in Turin. The conference was about design research for sustainability and was a very outstanding place for exchanging ideas and meet interesting people. I spoke with Chris Ryan