Brought to you by Better Nouveau, it will feature a partnership between the NodeBox — Experimental Media Research Group and DensityDesign.

Inspired coders, designers but also viz-amateurs are welcome with their knowledge, skills and creativity for a full-immersion visualization experience.

All the details can be found here.
See you in Turin from December 12 to 17.

The main difference between Fineo and ParSets is the way they manage the relations between data dimensions, from one axis to the other. Fineo works by comparing two dimensions at the time without caring about other dimensions (the previous and the next ones). The other way around (the ParSets’s one) more information is shown at the expense of readability. But this is the same old trade-off.

Here is an example with a simple data-set with 5 dimensions (here you can find the csv):

Fineo:

ParSets:

ParSets works by continuously profiling data, starting from a leading dimension (the first one).

ParSets Ramification:

Fineo’s flows work much more like rivers – once they flow into each other, you can’t distinguish them. This feature is useful when users are more interested in relating different data dimensions next to each other, than centering the visualization around a leading dimension.
The ParSets techniques visualize a specific tree structure. Differently, Fineo has a network-like underlying structure, the diagrams are constructed on a node-edge model: individual categories are nodes, grouped under the dimension they belong to. The number of nodes belonging to the same couple of connected categories provides the weight of the flow. Dimensions, nodes and edges are respectively visualized as axes, rectangles and connecting flows.

Let’s take a closer look. By filtering the first dimension on a single category, it’s easy to perceive this conceptual difference.

Fineo Filtering:

ParSets Filtering:

In the next image we highlighted the number of in/out ribbons in ParSets (4/6) and the in/out flows in Fineo (4/3) – dimension F/category 1.

Model comparison:

These are the reasons why ParSets is stemming from Parallel Coordinates and Fineo is inspired by Sankey diagrams.
Furthermore, when the dimensions possess a temporal connotation (periods of time like months or years), Fineo comes really useful and easy to read: using the flow metaphor taken from Sankey diagrams, Fineo is able to represent a system with changing states over time.

As a last note both of the visualizations are weighted bipartite graphs, which exists long before any interactive software development.
On our part, Fineo was developed to automatize the design of visualizations like the ones featured in the DRM and CPF projects. The projects are dated back to 2008 (which, incidentally, is before Parsets was released to the public) and no available program existed able to answer our needs. So we made our own, which subsequently developed in an interactive analytical tool.

With this being said, nothing comes from scratch, as Dr. Sagan said.

Three years ago (almost), I discovered an interesting comment about the Places and Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition (2006 edition), curated  by Katy Börner (Indiana University, Director of the InfoVis Lab), and I found particularly interesting the quotation of John Thackara (author of In the Bubble: Designing for a complex world. 2005. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), talking about Macroscopes. In fact that metaphor is, in my opinion quite compelling if you want to talk about the quest for the ‘big picture’ (that actually is often our aim at DensityDesign).

So I investigated a bit and I found a previous book by our colleague (and friend of Thackara) Ezio Manzini (1989. The Materials of Invention: Materials and Design. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) where the concept of the macroscope is used: «The quality of the mental image, which is the point of departure for the problem setting, and the overall map of the possible, whence one can progressively derive more detailed maps upon which to trace the path of the problem solving, originate with the macroscope», and finally I went back to the book of Joël de Rosnay (…), where the author hope for new tools to face the complexity of the world: «Microscope, telescope: these words evoke the great scientific penetrations of the infinitely small and the infinitely great […] Today we are confronted with another infinite: the infinitely complex. We are confounded by the number and variety of elements, of relationships, of interactions and combinations on which the functions of large systems depend. We are only the cells, or the cogs; we are put off by the interdependence and the dynamism of the systems, which transform them at the very moment we study them. We must be able to understand them better in order to guide them better. […] Now a new tool is needed by all those who would try to understand and direct effectively their action in this world, whether they are responsible for major decisions in politics, in science, and in industry or are ordinary people as we are. I shall call this instrument the macroscope (from macro, great, and skopein, to observe).»

Then we start using the idea of macroscope in our presentations (TEDx Italy 2009 – 11:00 – and Better Software 2010) and in some of our papers (itAIS 2010).

Now is quite interesting and even more motivating to see on one of the very recent paper from Katy Börner (2011. Plug-and-Play Macroscopes. Communications of the ACM. Vol. 54(3), 60-69, ACM Press) the concept and the metaphor of macroscope taken (again) into consideration!

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

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.

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)

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