Oh and, by the way, happy new year to everyone, trusted followers.

Related projects

Net@Work

The Map of the Future

Julia Sagar – Who did you create this for – was it a commission or a personal project?
Donato Ricci – Since DensityDesign is a research lab, we work both on non-commissioned projects, in which we put in practice innovative visual languages and techniques, and commissioned ones that give us the chance to apply the results of our findings to a wider audience. In these particular cases, the projects were commissions by the Italian edition of Wired magazine.

JS – What was the brief?
DR – Usually clients give us open briefs just because they know we are researchers; our contribution lies also in structuring the client’s communication needs, making these needs clearer.
Michele Graffieti – Regarding the ‘Map of the Future‘ the brief simply consisted of making the reading of the next future predicted by the IFTF (‘Institute For The Future’ of Palo Alto, CA) more fascinating, thoughtful and challenging.
In the second work, the brief was even more informal: the main requirement was to explain the current dynamics of the web, focusing on its innate collaborative nature and on its evolving trends, in both quantitative and qualitative point of view.

JS Who was the target audience?
MG – Our target audiences were Wired readers: they generally have good familiarity with technology and emerging languages of information visualization. What we were surprised of, is the great echo generated by these projects in more “traditional” contexts and websites.

JS Tell us about the design… Where did you get your inspiration?
DR – Producing a visual concept is a matter of truly understanding information, data and knowledge we are asked to communicate: then we choose the right language with which we can reach the audience. This path helps us to bend visual languages and expressive forms to data, and not vice-versa.
MG – To choose the right visual language we often take inspiration from the past. Instead of passively joining current trends of info-visualization driven by theme, we prefer to go back to the debut of that theme in social discussion, and look at the works produced when, for the first time, people were thinking about issues that are comparable to ours. Indeed, for ‘Net@Work‘ the inspiration came from the working class ideal of the Russian socialism and, regarding the inner structure, the inspiration came from the organization chart of a ’40s/’50s company, found on ‘Monogrammi e figure’ by Giovanni Anceschi.
To create the world of the ‘Map of the Future‘ instead, we decided to evoke the retro-futurism of ‘50s when everything seemed possible and the consequences of the smallest transformation were exaggerated on purpose to open people’s mind in wonder.

JS – How can you match your research activity about visual languages with editorial project on a large scale?
DR – We do that by mixing up the challenging perspective of the brief, the aesthetic representation skills of graphic designers, the analytical ability of researchers and the overall goal to communicate to a general public.
We use our expertise in graphic design to widen the concept of “speculative design” and visual epistemology, as a rhetorical strategy to raise social awareness in relevant social issues (the world of future and the new collaborative way of working over the net, in this case).
We use both the most innovative techniques of data visualization and graphic design to provoke new interpretation and discussion with our readers.
Typography, illustration and graphics are only part of a job aimed at generating an open discussion, not predetermined, nor anticipated in the design itself.

Page 15 of Computer Arts Projects, issue 141, published on October 2010.

JS – How much creative freedom did you have?
DR – As said before, we only work on project that allows us to be involved from the first step of concept-generation, so we had lots of creative freedom.

JS What was the hardest part of the project?
MG – The hardest part of these projects and, more generally, of our work is to make sense of all the ideas we generate, to let the analytical and the expressive approaches live together.
In the ‘Map of the Future‘ the trouble was not to do “Pindaric flights”.
In ‘Net@Work‘ the difficulty consisted of highlighting the single website data without compromising the conceptualized narration level.

JS What elements are you most proud of, or think are most important?
MG – In both the projects we succeeded in creating two landscapes enabling the observer to choose their preferred method to analyze the information. We think the most important aspect of our work is to let people wonder even in front of the most boring (at least, apparently) amount of data: storytelling is a very useful tool to reach this goal.
DR – And by the way, we think the human-headed-dog and the super-powerful-robot are outstanding!

JS – What programs/software did you use?
MG – Beyond the evergreen Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, we tend to use traditional collage, photography and hand-made elements to the utmost. In the ‘Map of the Future‘ the white buildings in the left hand side have been made out of paper, as well as the bridge.
DR – In addiction we often use software to fast visualize big amount of data or to automatically draw rough net. Sometimes part of the tools we need is created on our own: for example, in ‘Net@Work‘ we developed a small software to automatically generate every single robot according to four variables which defined their height, shoulder width, fatness and saturation.

JS – Given the chance, would you do anything differently?
DR, MG – No, we wouldn’t. We are always right, and if we don’t, who cares? Joking apart, we are proud of the results of these two projects and we are firmly convinced that nobody is able to correct his/her own work but has to be willing of re-think the concept when anybody else proves even one of his/her mistakes.

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.

This is a map of Europe as you’ve never seen it. It shows how people in the 27 EU states perceive the impact of the internet and mobile phones on their lives – and then contrasts this with their actual penetration in each country. We wanted to explore new ways to visualize such complex data. So we worked with a statistics team, under Marco Fattore, to crunch data from a 2008 Eurobarometer survey of 27,000 people. The result is this contour map, which makes use of the isobars of traditional cartography. Each panel above refers to a specific question in the survey. The higher a country, the more its citizens say the technology matters. The cartogram shows the tech’s actual penetration. A high penetration of technology doesn’t mean people see a real benefit in using it, the way we see the world is changing as more data is available. We wanted to show a new way to look at geography as Europe’s landscape gets reshaped.

THE EUROBAROMETER SURVEY LAST SEPTEMBER ASKED 27,000 EUROPEANS THESE QUESTIONS: (Numbers relate to the panels on the main map):

1 Has the internet improved how you do your job?
2 Has using a mobile phone helped in your work?
3 Has the internet made you more informed about current issues?
4 Has using a mobile phone helped you to be more informed?
5 Has the internet improved your opportunity to share views/access culture?
6 Have mobile phones helped you to share ideas and content such as photos with others?
7 Has the internet improved how you pursue your hobbies?
8 Have mobile phones helped you better manage your leisure time?
9 Has the internet improved your relationships with family and friends?
10 Have mobile phones helped you keep in contact with family and friends?

“Penetration” is calculated from the percentages of households and businesses with broadband access; and the percentage of households with access to the internet via PC, digital TV and mobile device.

Credits

Paolo Ciuccarelli (Scientific Responsible)
Marco Fattore (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Statistics – data analysis)
Donato Ricci (creative direction Project Coordination)
Michele Mauri, Giorgio Caviglia (coding)
Luca Masud (art direction)
Lorenzo Fernandez, Mario Porpora (designer)

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

October 9th 2009
10.00-13.00
International week of Design
PAN – Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli

“L’utente fantasma”

“Ghost user”

Next month i’ll take part to a conference in Naples, during the International Week of Design organized by AIAP, about the “Ghost user”, concerning the forgotten role of the final user of any design project and its relationship with design process.
I will discuss it together with the semiologist Antonio Perri and some graphic designers, like Silvia Sfligiotti, Max Gaeta and Carlotta Latessa.
My intervention will concern, in particular, the gap between some information design artifacts, such as diagrams, maps and signages, and the final user to whom the projects are meant. The basic statement is always the same: information design should show complexity of the world but making it understandable, clear and ‘readable’.
Sometimes design artifacts are a projection of the designer’s ego, in a sort of narcissistic, self centered vision of projects, disregarding the user needs; some others design processes aren’t even taken into consideration, designers give the goal of understanding for granted: the results are incomprehensible artifacts, where communication isn’t assured, leading to stress, lack of self-estimate, or even to dangerous situations.
Therefore the over mentioned gap is a complex element itself, which need at list to be analyzed.

This and much more in Naples.

http://www.aiap.it/documenti/11484/148

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.

Last Monday the Fifth Edition of Frontiers of Interaction took place in Rome, confirming itself as one of the most interesting event in the panorama of interaction design. A rich schedule -full of people and thoughts to share- and a wonderful location -the Aquario Romano- to talk about how technologies are changing our life.

The issue of complexity turned out as one of the frontiers that have to be explored. A first moment of reflection on that topic was given by Daniele Galiffa, CEO and co-founder of VISup, teaching assistant at Density Design Lab in 2004: he introduced the importance of using visualization methods in order to describe the complexity that is part of interaction design and information technology projects.

The tools and techniques coming from the world of information visualization can be adopted for analyzing, designing and also explaining complex phenomena such as a digital eco-system, taking advantage from the power of visualization to facilitate the observation, the ideation and the comprehension.

These thoughts became more tangible for the audience through the contribution of Andrea Vaccari, a research associate at the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory, who presented several techniques they’ve developed for giving visibility to social activities.

Again the visualization turns out as a basic support for the description of complex phenomena, augmented by the power of computer technology. They create software able to record and show data that are so complex that humans can hardly control and express.

Their use of technology together with the excellent control of the visual languages and the visual qualities conveying information is of course something that overcomes the frontiers.

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