Last November Density Design has been invited by the School of Art and Architecture of Stockholm to organize a workshop of data visualization with the student of a master. They were working on the same topic, the city of Pune in India, trying to understand how to visualize some data about the city.

Students had different background studies, none of them was a graphic designer, mostly architects and artists, so data visualization was a challenge for them all.

Groups had different themes to work on about Pune, different questions to be answered “graphically”:
- How the city of Pune is Green? analyzing the environmental changes of the city,
- How accessible is Pune? exploring the ways of transportation from/to Pune,
- How the IT technology affects the life of the citizens? showing why Pune is the IT Capital of India,
- What is growing in Pune? trying to understand how urban landscape is changing through the city-expansion.

During our week in Stockholm we had some design talks with the students, trying to understand the graphic issues linked with their data about the city of Pune. They had a week to produce a poster, so it has been a nice challenge for everybody. All groups produced very interesting visualizations, if we consider that they had no experience with graphic languages, and especially with information design.

During the first day i’ll talk about the history of wayfinding and maps, then we’ll start a short workshop about the visualization of the city. The students will be asked to think of their relationship with the city, their imaginaries, landmarks or key-points. So Bari itself will be mapped from a subjective point of view, in order to obtain and to visualize a kind of “Personal Geography”, using mind-mapping, diagrammatic languages or photographic surveys.

It’s an experiment we’ll start on that event and try to continue in the future, with the same students and maybe new discoveries.

Everybody who’s gonna pass by Bari is invited to the event.

More info to follow

A very interesting set of conferences will take place in Bari, October 22nd-23rd

La Città senza nome – Nameless City
Signs and Signages in the contemporary landscape

The conference will be a good opportunity to discuss about the city, its shape, its function and its identity, together with many different experts, from semiotic or anthropology to information design.

October 22nd

Session I: Reading the city
with Marc Augé, George Ritzer, Enzo Mari

Session II: City edges
with Augusto Ponzio, Giulia Ceriani, Antonio Somaini

Session III: Informing the city
with Giovanni Anceschi, Paul Mijksenaar

October 23rd

Session IV: Highly imaginative horizons
with Franco Federici, Ugo La Pietra, Roberto Casati, Scott Burnham, Sébastien Thiery, Antonio Romano, Renato Nicolini

More information on the website:
http://www.cittasenzanome.com/?page_id=53&language=it

We have been officially invited to present the CityMurmur project at the Emerging Technologies conference at SIGGRAPH09. Citymumur NewOrleans will be launch on the 3rd of August on the occasion of the first day of the conference.

For those who have never heard anything about the SIGGRAPH (short for Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques), here is a short description: now in its 36th year, the SIGGRAPH conference is the premier international event on computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2009 is expected to draw an estimated 25,000 professionals from five continents to New Orleans, Louisiana. The SIGGRAPH conference attracts the most respected technical and creative people from all over planet Earth. The SIGGRAPH community includes people everywhere who are excited by research, science, art, animation, gaming, interactivity, education, and the web. The SIGGRAPH conference and exhibition is a five-day interdisciplinary educational experience including a three-day commercial exhibition that attracts hundreds of exhibitors from around the world. SIGGRAPH is widely recognized as the most prestigious forum for the publication of computer graphics research. In addition to SIGGRAPH’s leading-edge technical program, the conference’s installations provide close-up views of the latest in digital art, emerging technologies, and hands-on opportunities for creative collaboration.

But what people told me about it? The first time I heard about SIGGRAPH was described as the Woodstock of computer graphics and interactive techniques and I thought about half naked people interacting with muddy computers; then someone said it was the dream of lot of digital kids, where everything is possible and everything is future and in that Woodstock vision I added genius little kids playing with futuristic devices; then I heard there were someone giving relief massages to people over working on computers and this idea completed the picture with awesome transhuman masseuses.
Maybe this vision is a little too much, but I don’t care and to free myself from fears I booked a room in a very nice hotel with a swimming pool on the roof, to keep on feeling on top of the world!

We keep you updated on this adventure, be back about CityMurmur New Orleans soon.

Both the organizing committee (who selected CityMurmur project in March) and the audience (composed by journalists, professionals, students and researchers) expressed their interest after our “poetic” presentation (as it was called), pointing the attention on the effective results we collected from the beginning of the project on November 2008 in relation with the reality of the actual/traditional media scape. Most of the questions, were about the perspective of CityMurmur in journalism world or as a tool for policy or security tasks: we were pleased to answer that the project is absolutely on-the-making and any interest in new developments (and funding, why not?) is appreciated.

The “french trip” represented of course the opportunity to meet lots of kind and interesting people like Prof. Khaldoun Zreik (University Paris 8 ) who is the president of the organizing committee of HyperUrbain, Paul Girard (research engineer and member of R&D Committee for SciencesPo Médialab) and Christophe Leclercq (CITU, Université Paris 1). We take here the opportunity to thank them once again.

Our next “murmur” is going to born on August, in New Orleans (US). We’re preparing the energies to implement CityMurmur for the “jazzy-city”: Dixieland, we’re coming… (and “Yes”, we know: stereotypes are hard to die. Tell the media! Not us!).

Till then, here you are the Paris slideshow, embedded in it two videos…don’t miss them

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 elements, whereas recent technological approaches (MIT Senseable City above all) are using the city as a data to analyse, elaborating flows, activities, habits, offering new images of it, but somehow discarding any cultural aspect of the city.

During the middle age, cartography was a way of conveying sense, maps were not so closely linked to the territory, they were most likely a tool for understanding a vision of the world. Some city maps were only a symbolical artefact, people didn’t use them to find their bearings; sometimes map-makers hardly knew the mapped city itself. They were conscious of the meaning of the city, that was enough.

“To ask for a map is to say, Tell me a story” said Peter Turchi.
It’s only a matter of deciding which story to tell: design is choice.

My PhD research aims to identify new ways of looking at the city, in order to find a graphic language that can show cultural aspects, telling a different story about the city, showing its sense, its values, its history.
A kind of archeology of sense.

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.

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.
CityMurmur aims at addressing maps and diagrams not as passive representation of realities but as tools for interpretation and action. It wants to build a time-based narration, an historical archive of media coverage of the urban space which is able to reveal some hidden dynamics useful for city policy support, critical media analysis, and sociocultural research.
CityMurmur is an on-going project that will be performed in several cities. The first one is Madrid thank to the possibility given by Visualizar’08 workshop.

The media space is composed by a RSS feeds pool containing 733 sources (so far).
Starting from an official list of Spanish media we classified all the sources and their RSS feed through denotative categories (topic, type and impact).
We tagged the RSS feeds also with connotative categories.
Once the RSS downloaded in depth scanning of the texts is performed in order to identify if a street, a place of interest or a district is mentionated.
When a news is related to a specific element of the city, a Murmur comes to life.

In order to reduce the possible divergence between the tags of the news item and their actual topic, a specific content analysis to gather more connotative (and possibly more accurate) tags, is performed.
The news tags and the content analisys results are mixed up to produce a list of georeferenciated semantic keyword.
Accordingly to the amount of Murmurs that each street, places of interest and districts have, the real topography of the city is deformed to produce a series of new maps from the more related to the real geographic space to the ones that ignore the geographic space and focus their interest on the semantic relationships: the result is a combination of an-exact overlapping pictures.

When the network of maps, diagrams and texts, are combined together the media geography appears and it is possible to understand its multifaceted reality.

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.

“That’s the flow of the news,
the humans in the world diffuse!“,
said somebody jumping out from behind:
“Yes of course! … but where the hell this could be find?!“.

And silence in the room suddenly fell down.
Because, as you may have understood,
this somebody didn’t even figured out.
Thus we were shot forth to our desk made of wood.

But something out there was going to meet our needs.
Two simple words: RSS feeds.
We should have only searched for streets and places name,
skimming through blogs or online newspaper to please our aim.

“So let’s begin to choose the sources“, Mr. Somebody says now.
And he is right but once again he’s missing to say how.
He desperately wants to be useful, and so he goes a little chitty:
“I will collect manually a list of all the sites which talks about the city!”

Well, at the beginning it sounds fool:
how could a person work like a mule?
But actually it was the only way we figured out
so: “Thanks Somebody! It’s great, no doubt!”

After three or four days, he’s coming out a little slimmed down,
but who cares?! We’ve got a media panel ready to redraw the town!
Here it goes: people select the most influential sites,
based on what an other on-line-human writes.

But from all the media-flow that remains
can pass only the ones with RSS brains.
And last, the ultimate bounce
is only for those which “city” pronounce.

In the microscopic world of information spores
the technology allows us to suck any news cores.
Then we store: carefully handmade bottle are able
(you’d never guess how much) to contain and to label.

And then there’s a map of the street,
and the bottle of news is filling up!
We should make them meet.
How could we ever fill this gap?!

Could be a work for a mule, that’s for sure!
But no! We can’t ask Mr. to do something like before.
The engine we produced will read all the information
and will give the Murmur his own configuration.

That’s it! Now everything has started running faster
and lots of things will be implemented the days after.
Stay tuned on designdensity.org, because it’s worth to.
And this verses are to let you know: we too.