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!

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.

http://www.theafghanconflict.de/

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.

The listener (in fables or music) or the observer (in cinema and theater) plays a fundamental role in the narration process. The narrator evokes whereas the observer interprets through his imaginary. The more qualitative is the narrator evocation, the more the observer becomes co-author of the story.

In the visualization of complex networks, the designer should use a narrative mode of though, giving to the audience a good story more than a sound argument. As the movie director, the designer aim to choose the visualization that more preserves the complexity of the environment. As a result he takes a political stance: he directs actors (the elements of a system), he decides the light design (the choice of the elements to visualize), the set designs (the imagery to evoke), the different optical lens (the power of focusing) and most important, the critical point of view of the camera (intentionality).

We will present our research in the visualization of complex systems. The paper “Tell them anything but the truth: they will find their own. How we visualize the map of the future with respect to the audience of our story” focuses on the emerging need for a narrative approach for the understanding of complex networks. We consider narrations as tools with the paramount function of myths <to find a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience>.

We are proud to present it at the Arts | Humanities | Complex Networks — a Leonardo satellite symposium at NetSci 2010 taking place at BarabásiLab — Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University in Boston, MA, on Monday, May 10, 2010.

See you there!

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)

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

The ending is quite evocative:
” Maps don’t change the world – but people who use maps do.”

We couldn’t agree more.