For a quarter of a century, two archaeologists and their team slogged through wild tropical vegetation to investigate and map the remains of one of the largest Maya cities, in Central America. Slow, sweaty hacking with machetes seemed to be the only way to discover the breadth of an ancient urban landscape now hidden beneath a dense forest canopy.

They yielded 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands. In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~dietmar/MappingContext/

“We usually consider space as being structured by absolute units. A meter is considered to have a constant length regardless of its position in space. However, in our daily life we often use units that are relative in nature: we measure space in minutes, costs or memories.

Wegzeit is a project about Los Angeles and how it is transformed when brought to relative space. Asking someone in L.A. about the distance between two locations usually prompts a response in minutes. It seems paradoxical that people rely on subjective parameters for their spatial decisions in a city with a largely regular, cartesian layout. But especially here, where the influences of physical space are leveled by this regularity, the importance of subjective, relative spaces become visible more strongly.
The project consists of six dynamic virtual environments that propose models of how to visualize three-dimensional relative spaces. They deal with certain properties and effects caused by the nature of relative space such as the asymmetry of temporal distances.”

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.