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.

Since we strongly agree with Kurt Richardson that «there exists an infinitude of equally valid, non-overlapping, potentially contradictory descriptions» for any complex system. And there is «the need for synthesizing a wide variety of perspectives in an effort to better understand the problem at hand, and how we might collectively act to solve it» and we strongly agree with Paul Cilliers that when: «dealing with complexity there are simultaneous roles for the natural and the human sciences, for both mathematics and imagination», we asked our student to model the Jules, Jim and Catherine System form their point of view, using the designer visual attitude, to better understand it.

We know that Complex system and chaotic one are not the same thing, anyway here are the diagrams resulting from our experiments

References
Rinaldi Sergio, 1998. Laura and Petrarch: An intriguing case of cyclical love dynamics.

http://www.siam.org/journals/siap/58-4/30592.html.

http://epubs.siam.org/sam-bin/getfile/SIAP/articles/30592.pdf

Strogatz Steven, 1998. Love affairs and differential equations
http://tam.cornell.edu/SS love dEq.pdf

Ivars Peterson:
http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek 9 7 98.html

Cilliers, Paul, 2005. Knowing Complex Systems.

Richardson, Kurt A, 2008. Managing Complex Organizations: Complexity Thinking and the Science and Art of Management.

Extracts from Italo Calvino’s “Collection of sand”, 1980

The simplest form of a map isn’t the one we consider the most natural today, that is the map which represents the surface of the Earth as seen by an extra-terrestrial eye. The early need of fixing places on a map has got references to the topic of “journey”: it’s like the reminder of a series of steps, the layout of a route. The simplest map is a linear image, which can only be drawn on a long paper scroll. Roman maps were in fact scrolls of parchment paper: today we can understand how they were designed thanks to a surviving medieval copy, the «Pautinger’s plate», which includes the imperial road system from Spain to Turkey.
The overall vision of the then known world looks horizontally flattened as a result of an anamorphic transformation. Since the map focused only on the land roads, the Mediterranean Sea was reduced to a thin horizontal wavy stripe between two wider areas (Europe and Africa), so much so that Provence and North Africa look very close to each other and so Palestine and Anatolia.
[...]
Halfway between cartography and landscape painting, a japanese paper scroll which dates back to 1700, is 19 meters long and represents the route from Tokyo to Kyoto: this is a very detailed landscape in which it’s possible to see where the road surpasses high grounds, goes through groves, borders villages, overcomes rivers crossing a little arched bridge, adapts its course according to the extremely variable land conformations. The outcome is a scenery which is always pleasant for the eyes, lacking in human figures although is full of signs of real life. (The starting point and the arrival, that is the two cities, are not in the map: their look would have certainly fought back with the harmony of the landscape). The japanese scroll invites us to identify ourselves with the invisible traveller, to cover that road bend after bend, to climb up and down the little bridges and the hills.
Taking a course from start to end, gives us a particular gratification, both in life and literature (the journey as a narrative structure) so we should ask ourselves why was the topic of “journey” so underestimated in visual arts where it appears only sporadically.
[...]
Understanding an image through time and space is essential in cartography. Time assumed as past story: I’m thinking of Aztec maps always full of visual representations of historical and narrative tales, but also of medieval maps [...]. And time as future: think for instance at the presence of possible obstacles scattered along the planned route [...].
Therefore a map, even if it’s static, requires a narrative idea behind itself, it is conceived for an itinerary, it’s an Odyssey.
[...] François Wahl once noticed how earth representation was a practice started only when men began to refer ordinary sky grid reference to Earth. Doing that, sky parameters (like polar axis and equatorial plane, meridians and parallels) became Earth parameters, positioned on the surface of our globe, that is the center of universe («the most fruitful error ever»).
[...] «We had chance to describe the Earth just because we have projected the sky over it». 

Calvino wrote this inspiring notes after a visit to the exhibition «Maps and figures of the Earth» held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris on 1980.
He had chance to see the biggest globe ever built, ordered by Louis XIV to Venetian friar Vincenzo Coronelli, which had been dismantled in boxes at Versailles for about two hundred years until then.
He describes it this way:

[...] But the greatest surprise of all was the globe, in shades of brown and ocher, with pictures engraved on its surface (like brutal practices of savage cannibals) and inscriptions coming from news brought by explorers and missionaries who filled the gaps where the shape of places was still uncertain.
To Coronelli, California was an island, so he commented in a caption: «Some fools are saying that California is a peninsula …» And in an another point: «Here it is said that there’s an island, but it is false and I do not put it ». As for the sources of the Nile, after having placed them in a precise area and later moved in order to a new witness, Coronelli ultimately wrote down a text near the river, which candidly concludes with these words: «I have found myself with a space to fill and there I wrote these words».
[...]
We must say that it is only with the progress of exploration that the undiscovered world gained the right to appear in a map. What was not seen before, simply didn’t exist. Paris exhibition highlights this aspect of knowledge in which each new acquisition opens new awareness of gaps [...].
The moral that emerges from the history of cartography is always a matter of reduction of human ambitions. If in the Roman map the pride to identify the entire world with the Empire itself was implicit, we see Europe becoming small in comparison to the rest of the world in the map drawn by Fra Mauro (1459), one of the first map of the world designed according to Marco Polo’s reports and to the experiences of Circumnavigation of Africa: in this map the reversal of the cardinal points accentuates the reversal of perspectives.
It’s as if the representation of the world on a limited area, would automatically set it as a microcosm, suggesting that there’s a larger world by which is contained. For this reason the map is often the border between two geographies, the one made of parts and the one made of the whole, the one of the entire earth and the one of the sky, which can be taken as astronomical firmament or kingdom of God. [...]
From all these aspects we can learn how much subjectivity is important in cartography, which usually is conceived as a purely objective task.
[...]

Regarding the reasons that lead us to design maps, Calvino wrote a clever observation that examines the relationship between cartography that looks at “elsewhere” and the one that focuses on familiar territory. To Calvino, there’s always a tight link between the two, as explained with this anecdote.

In the seventeenth century the French fleet expansion required a regular production of timber, but the forests of France were running out. Then Colbert (translator’s note: the French minister of finance from 1665 to 1683) felt the need for a comprehensive relief map of French forests, in order to have always under control the amount of available trees and to plan rationally refueling and transport of timber to shipyards. At that precise moment in France, just to support maritime expanding, geographical knowledge of the internal territory bacame the primary need.

A detail of the famous Cassini’s map of France. Here it is a part of Bourgogne.

As explained by Calvino, Colbert charged Gian Domenico Cassini with the design of this extremely detailed map which took him and his family (four different generations of Cassini’s) more than 60 years to complete. The final map was drawn to scale of 1 to 86.400 and was…

… shown in the exhibition in a reproduction that was spreading all over the walls and the floor. Each forest had been designed tree to tree, every church had its steeple, every village had been squared roof to roof, so one could have had the unbelievable impression of having every tree and every bell and all the roofs of the Kingdom of France under his/her eyes. [...]
Cassini’s map missed the human figures that Coronelli still felt the need to include in its globe; but it’s just the fact that these cards are deserted, uninhabited, that awaken in the desire to live them from within, to shrink ourselves to find a road into the thickness of signs, to cover it, to get lost in it.

I’ve found this gorgeous website by Didier Verlaque, who joined all the pieces of Cassini’s map (in high definition reproduction), rebuilding the entire France as seen with the eyes of the seventeenth century.
http://releves.hd.free.fr/cassini/
I’d like to thank him for the great work.
But if you are more experienced with flickr, this is a set of photos of the Cassini’s map with the same awesome high definition:
http://flickr.com/photos/derami/sets/72157594402072857/

Images and additional info for the post, was taken from:
http://www.cg78.fr/culturel/musees/dossier/dossier.asp?Id=21
http://www.groupe-bovis.com/article.php3?id_article=68
http://expositions.bnf.fr/globes/index.htm
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globes_de_Coronelli

I read Kevin Kelly article on The New York Times Magazine and I found the concept of Visual Literacy very interesting.

Even if our society is getting aware of the importance of visual language for our contemporary communication, visual language needs more research to get to the point of being totally accepted in artefacts where traditionally we use text. But maybe it is the same problem it was for text literacy that has required a long list of innovations and techniques that permits ordinary readers and writers to manipulate text in ways that make it useful and in order to make sense of it. (For instance, if you have a large document, you need a table of contents to find your way through it. And more: quotation symbols, alphabetic index, page numbers and a lot more. They have been invented in the 13th century. As it took several hundred years for the consumer tools of text literacy to crystallize after the invention of printing, we now need “visual-literacy tools” for fully understand something that is completely made of image.

]]> http://www.densitydesign.org/2008/12/visual-literacy/feed/ 0 http://www.densitydesign.org/2008/10/numbers-statistics-biases/ http://www.densitydesign.org/2008/10/numbers-statistics-biases/#comments Sun, 26 Oct 2008 09:48:47 +0000 Donato Ricci http://www.politecalab.org/densitydesign/?p=395 27 August 2008 Michael Bond http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926711.500-how-to-keep-your-head-in-scary-situations.html

This has led Slovic to suggest we need to imbue statistics with more emotional significance so that we take them to heart. "We learn how to deal with numbers from a young age as cold or abstract entities - to read them, add them, multiply them - but we don't learn to think about how they represent reality in a way that conveys feeling and meaning. We need to think how to teach people to step away from their intuitive response, which is insensitive to magnitude, and think more carefully about what numbers represent." [...]

Knowledgecartography.org, ovrflw, Gaia Scagnetti and some members of the Density Design Lab, under the nom de plume Writing Academic English, are proud to annouce that Murmur is one of the selected projects for VISUALIZAR’08: DATABASE CITY – International Workshop-Seminar, Madrid, November 3-18, 2008.

Data Visualization is a transversal discipline which harnesses the immense power of visual communication in order to explain, in an understandable manner, the relationships of meaning, cause and dependency which can be found among the great abstract masses of information generated by scientific and social processes.
The Visualizar project, directed by José Luis de Vicente, is conceived as an open and participartory research project around theory, tools and estrategies of information visualization.
Medialab-Prado issues a call for all those interested in taking part in the VISUALIZAR’08: DATABASE CITY  project development workshop (from November 3 through 18), by collaborating in any of the teams that will develop the selected proposals. Deadline October 31st.

MURMUR aims to visualise the media attention on the urban space, in order to redraw a map of the city based on what is being said on each street.
The goal of this project is to understand and visualise how different media describe the urban space trough the attention that is paid on each street of the city. Official news, blog and personal website, thematic media will be monitored to generate maps that highlight the patterns of perception of the urban space. This mapping will lead to the creation of an atlas that will monitor in time the changing perception of the city areas. The atlas will produce different maps based on different themes, sources and time.

For the project we would appreciate the collaboration of people with valuable skills in:
- Management of GIS data
- PHP+SQL programming. Preferably with experience in parsing of rss data and google queries
- ActionScript 3 scripting
- Spanish new/old media consultant

If you are interested, feel free to ask any questions. See you soon!

HANDLING CHANGES THROUGH DIAGRAMS
To change towards a more sustainable development could means to make decisions not only with a systemic approach, but also to be able to decide in the right time: the density. It seems that, when the discipline of Design integrate a systemic approach with the competences of designers in visualization, it can cope with dense situations, providing effective artefacts – diagrams – to improve the decision process and making profit from the richness of complexity. The prior findings of the Complexity Science are here assumed as a theoretical framework to have an interpretative model on how the knowledge about systems could be organized and depicted. Three tools to produce effective diagrams, framing, graining and scaling are here discussed though six case studies.

Have a look

Have a look at the presentation

The traditional monument is understood by its symbolic imagery, by what it represents. It is not understood in time, but in an instant in space; it is seen and understood simultaneously. Even in traditional architectures such as labyrinths and mazes, there is a space-time continuum between experience and knowing; one has a goal to work one’s way in or out.

In this monument there is no goal, no end, no working one’s way in or out. The duration of an individual’s experience of it grants no further understanding, since understanding is impossible. The time of the monument, its duration from top surface to ground, is disjoined from the time of experience. In this context, there is no nostalgia, no memory of the past, only the living memory of the individual experience. Here, we can only know the past through its manifestation in the present.
by P. Eisenman

“In architecture the diagram is historically understood in two ways: as an explanatory or analytical device and as a generative device. Although it is often argued that the diagram is a postrepresentational form, in instances of explanation and analysis the diagram is a form of representation. In an analytical role, the diagram represents in a different way from a sketch or a plan of a building. For example a diagram attempts to uncover latent structures of organization, like the nine-square, even though it is not a conventional structure itself. As a generative device in a process of design the diagram is also a form of representation. But unlike traditional forms of representation, the diagram as a generator is a mediation between a palpable object, a real building, and what can be called architecture’s interiority.” (Eisenman 1999, Diagram Diaries)

This is not an argument against calculation, but a justification for why formal models will always have to be supplemented by narratives which make the limits of the model explicit. At the same time, the narrative models are also limited to a certain perspective. It can thus be argued that there is an irreducible ethical component to our understanding of complexity. We have to accept the responsibility for our models although we know they are flawed. When dealing with complexity there are simultaneous roles for the natural and the human sciences, for both mathematics and imagination.

(From Paul Cilliers’ Abstract presented at The first World Knowledge Dialogue Symposium)

I have been discussing a lot about quality of life in the last month in very different situations, and it made me thinking this is a key and imperative issue now.
I presented a paper in Changing the change conference in Turin. The conference was about design research for sustainability and was a very outstanding place for exchanging ideas and meet interesting people. I spoke with Chris Ryan about giving example of a more quality base life to everyone as a power of change, with Banny Banerjee on design complex and I had a great dinner with Jogi Panghaal and a lot of other designers and research from all over the world.
Back to Milan I bought the issue 15 of Monocle a “special edition devoted to building better cities, neighbourhoods and residences” that present the world’s top 25 most liveable cities (there is no need to say that Milan is not in the 25).
I went to Pollenzo to participate the Designing connected places summer school. I worked very hard for a week, sleeping few hours and stressing out a lot, but having the possibility to eat excellence food in a slow natural environment and giving myself the time to swim in the sun for half an hour a day has changed the whole perception of the hard job we had to do.

Now this quality of life idea is constantly in the back of my mind, I only have to throw away all the junk food in my fridge… That’s quality of life!