Sankeys are indeed a great way to visualize flows and/or distribution: they are able to give back a general idea of the relative quantities of these flows.

Back in 2008 we did a similar work for DRM, a publication about the state of design research in Italian universities and schools.

In this case it is only a matter of distribution, but in another project,  done for Politecnico di Milano, we developed a visualization that represented students flows during their academic career.
In this way it is possible to analyze how students behave. Do they change specialization from the B.A. courses to the M.A.? What kind of marks do they get? Do they find internships in their same area of specialization?

We are now working on a flexible Sankey generator tool, capable of visualizing both distributions and flows. The project is still ongoing, more news are coming soon!

Data are everywhere.
Many disciplines are addressing the issues of giving access and making sense to all these data.
What can and should (visual) design do?

“VisualEyes / The Role of Design in Data, Information and Knowledge Visualization”
Open Seminar

Thursday 20 May 2010 | 10.00 – 13.30
Politecnico di Milano | Campus Bovisa | Facoltà del Design | Aula CT63
[Event's page on Facebook ]

10:00
“Understanding through Visualization: a Design Challenge?”
Paolo Ciuccarelli | Politecnico di Milano | dCom | DensityDesign
[ http://www.densitydesign.org ]

10:30
“Social Data Visualization”
Andrew Vande Moere | Senior Lecturer at University of Sydney & KULeuve
[Information Aesthetics | http://www.infosthetics.com ]

11:15
“Bootstrapping: use visualization to create visualizations”
Moritz Stefaner | Well Formed Data
[ http://moritz.stefaner.eu/ ]

12:00
“Web visualizations tools and trends”
Daniele Galiffa | VISup
[ http://www.visup.it ]

12:45
Open discussion

Here in Boston, we participated at the Art and Humanities Complex Networks satellite conference at the Northeastern University. We had the amazing opportunity to present the Map of the Future and to share with this remarkable audience the experience of creating a narrative approach for understanding complex systems. We got a lot of feedbacks and we discussed about the future of data and information visualization. It was a great day. We saw very interesting projects presented by other speakers, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, Michael Schober, Ward Shelley, David Crandall, Martin Warnke and Carmen Wedemeyer, Jane Prophet just to named some; we met Isabel Meirelles again after Siggraph09, we shared enthusiasm for visualization and humanities with Hyperstudio Executive Director Kurt Fendt, we finally met Noah Iliinsky in person after long time digital correspondence.

We want to thanks all the organizers in particular Maximilian Schich and all the people we had the pleasure to talk with.

Here the slides of the presentation.

Complexity is a journey to infinity, and beyond! (© 1995, Buzz Lightyear) therefore the story we decided to tell in Como begins from the universe, and goes through the stars and planets, down to Density-Earth, a great place where statistics become information aesthetics, visualizations reveal ‘big pictures’ and potatoes are in fact big problems to solve.
What?!
Seriously, it’s easier if you look at the presentation up here and read the story we’re glad to spread.

If you’d like to watch the official video recording of the evening (and you understand italian), play it below.
For the english-subtitled version, check it out in the next few days.

like making a movie building this perfomances took hundreds (mmm just some to be honest) smart collaborators:
Screenplay – Paolo ciuccarelli
Additional screenplay – Donato Ricci
Concept – Michele Graffieti
Drawings – Michele Graffieti, Mario Porpora
Storyboard Artist – Michele Graffieti
Animation - Michele Graffieti, Mario Porpora
Coordinator – Mario Porpora, Donato Ricci
Flashman – Mario Porpora
Title Designer - Michele Graffieti
Text editing - Eileen Bernardi, Lorenzo Fernandez
Catering – Giorgio Caviglia, Michele Graffieti, Mario Porpora

What challenges are we going to face in the next 10 years? And what kind of ideas are going to help us in overcoming them?
Even though predicting the future is not a game, a game is exactly what the Institute for the Future used to answer these dilemmas: 8 October 2008, Jane McGonigal, reasearcher at IFTF launched Superstruct (Su` per`struct ‘vt 1.To build over or upon another structure; to erect upon a foundation) , a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) that outlined the world of the future, thanks to the ideas and the collaboration of hundreds of users.

After six weeks the game came to its conclusion: Hundreds of ideas, superstructures for our future, guidelines to redefine the world of today and to improve and prepare it for the challenges of the next decade: From big new infrastructure projects to nanotechnology, from overcoming economies of scale to projects of “vertical farming”.

The final report of this first stage of the game was used for the design of our map: The editor in chief of Wired Italia, Riccardo Luna, asked us to visualize the complex net of ideas and assumptions that game’s users produced.

“The goal of the project is to engage a broad public in considering the dilemmas we face in our current, everyday lives and think together about resolutions that go beyond the familiar ways of dealing with problems”

Jane Mc Gonigal, Superstruct game designer

The research for alternative solutions – hence going beyond the more familiar approaches – also requires an alternative visualization.

A map for the future

We began analyzing the keywords provided by IFTF, at the base of which there are 7 key ideas: they are the guiding strategies for the creation of each new “superstructure”, and like satellites they revolve around our future world. They are:

Amplified optimism
Scale extreme
Adaptive emotion
Simulation as game
Evolvability
Collaboration environment
Reverse shortage

Under these, the verbal level, connecting words and concepts that make up the network of superstructures, divided into 5 macrocategories – policy, infrastructure, environment, economy and society- which in turn can operate in three areas:

Networks and individuals
Tools and knowledge
Practices and projects

The map is designed to overlap a semantic level (the network of keywords and groups of ideas) to the allegorical plan of the illustration. Each concept presented in the first level has been reconstructed through an illustration in the second one: the result is a collage drawing influences from the imaginary of the fifties. In this way mapping the future becomes an illustrated game where retro-futuristic imagery references are linked with words and concepts that foresee our future.

From left to right are presented the macro-categories formed by the supersturctures, from the most abstract, like policy and infrastructure, to those which concern more closely in the everyday lives, like economy and society. Amid the environment as a meeting point between abstract and current, with new ideas about global geoengineering and translocalism.

Even for the composition of the collage we want to keep the same sense of reading to level the narration of the world to come: indeed on the left the illustration starts with the abstraction of the map, then move gradually through info-graphics and illustration until reaching collage and photo on the right.

The map, thanks to the layer of allegorical illustrations, not only wants to disseminate the ideas generated during the project ‘Superstruct’ but also provide a starting point, a common imaginary, to start discussion and analysis on the world to come.

In this spirit, the meeting in Rome “A map for the next ten years,” within the cycle of meetings CapitaleDigitale organized by Wired, founding Rome Europe and Telecom Italy, has fully exploited the possibilities of this tool engaging in an interesting discussion on future developments of technology.

Involved in this project:
Creative Direction, Donato Ricci; Concept development, Gaia Scagnetti; Visualizer, Mario Porpora; Artist, Michele Graffieti; Designer, Luca Masud.

Flickr
High res version ‘We will be here’
High res sketch ‘We will be here’

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.

The main focus of DD4D Conference (Data Designed for Decisions) organized by OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and IIID (International Institute for Information Design) was to understand the process involved in the transformation from data to information and how to present them in order to facilitate the decision-making process. An impressive and variegated amount of ideas, discussions, solutions and, especially, new questions have emerged during this intense 3-days meeting.

Perhaps the most immediate consideration is the increasing relevance of storytelling aspects inside information design discipline. On this point, the main question is probably to figure out who will be the main narrators of these stories and which tools should they use. Are the foundations of Information Design still valid today? Should the statisticians think about a new vision of statistics, focused more on people, rather than on abstract figures? Do statistical data and information empower people?

An amazing collection of visualization tools and methods has been presented. In my personal opinion these are the most interesting talks.
Elizabeth Pastor of Humantific showed her amazing work on how to face the complexity of organizational contexts through the strategic activities of SenseMaking and ChangeMaking, involving the practice of visual and design thinking and the information design techniques. Nic Marks from New Economics Foundation illustrated the National Accounts for Well-Being project, a website where the multidimensional concept of well-being is measured, through both personal and social indicators. Seth Flaxman talked about city quality indicators and presented CityRank.ch, where people can create their personal rankings in order to compare different cities. Mikael Jern from NCVA explained the already famous OECD eXplorer, highlighting some new features, such as the possibility to annotate stories and create Wikipedia pages.

Other speakers pointed out the need of more insight on the effects of visualization techniques, asking for new valuation methods for Information Design. On this point the amazing work conducted by David Sless and his group of benchmark volunteers, all around the world, is particularly remarkable.

An enjoyable show has been engaged by Yuri Engelhardt and Raul Nino Zambrano about the role of animation and rhetoric, through a curious comparison between Hans Rosling and Otto Neurath. The presentation of Professor Kirti K. Trivedi on the concepts of self-evidence and interpretation of data patterns was also really engaging.

Topics like well-being, healthcare, safety, social justice, sustainability (some of the most wicked problems as Robert Horn calls them) have emerged as the next issues on which designers, visualization researchers and statisticians should focus their joint efforts. The concept of trust seems to be one of the main challenges we’ll have to face in the future (a design of trust? ), together with the need to involve people, institutions and governments into the process of fostering knowledge.

Density design joined the twitter community!
We won’t use any Plug-in to upload our posts, we care for handmade processes.
We won’t twit too frequently, we prefer low rhythms.
We will always answer your replies, we love to discuss and networking.
We will twit all the blog’s contents and even more, we prefer addition to subtraction.
We will let you know what our people are doing, we value the same the parts and the whole.
We will never use twitter as a marketing tool, we believe in the power of opinion.

Ops! That’s more than 140 characters…