Visual designers and data engineers have built interactive visualizations of out of all sorts of Mozilla data. Now we think it would be cool to create a visualization that attempts to demystify the collaborative process of making software, while celebrating our contributors. We’ve gotten some early input and design help from the talented team at Stamen Design, but to take this to the next level, we need your help.

If you’re a visual designer, data visualization guru, student or just interested in hacking on a cool project, join us to generate concepts and prototypes.

see the call

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.

A Relevance issue was a criterion for deciding which factors belonged to the system. In this case, relevance was determined by a open discussion between the students and the board of the course.
The system has been visualized in a particular format: a causal loop model (or diagram).

In a causal loop model, the system’s elements (factors, variables) are represented by boxes, and the causal relationships between two variables are represented by arrows. The variable at the tail of the arrow has a causal effect on the variable at the point. In addition, a distinction can be made between positive and negative causal relationships. A positive causal relationship implies that both variables will change in the same direction: if variable, a (at the tail) increases, then also variable b (at the point) will increase (and if a decreases, then b decreases). A negative relationship, on the other hand, implies that variables change in oppositedirections (if a increases b will decrease and if a decreases b will increase).
The causalities discussed so far are linear causalities (from a to b). Circular causalities (e.g. from a to b and from b to a) in systems maps are called feedback loops. They are an important feature of causal loop models because they help to explain the dynamic behavior of the system.

On-line newspapers, information agency, blogs and personal websites, thematic media are monitored to highlight the pattern of perceptions on the urban space. This monitoring activity leads to the creation of an atlas that will produce – in real-time – different maps based on news sources, themes, and time. The atlas allows users to understand the urban space as a function of media attention and biases and social and cultural diversity of the city itself.
The goal of the project is to show how different media differently describe the urban space through the attention that is payed on each street of the city. In the hypothesis of the increasing importance of the on-line presence in contemporary society, a media geography has been generated intersecting the media scape with the geographical reality of the city.
CityMurmur aims at addressing maps and diagrams not as passive representation of realities but as tools for interpretation and action. It wants to build a time-based narration, an historical archive of media coverage of the urban space which is able to reveal some hidden dynamics useful for city policy support, critical media analysis, and sociocultural research.
CityMurmur is an on-going project that will be performed in several cities. The first one is Madrid thank to the possibility given by Visualizar’08 workshop.

The media space is composed by a RSS feeds pool containing 733 sources (so far).
Starting from an official list of Spanish media we classified all the sources and their RSS feed through denotative categories (topic, type and impact).
We tagged the RSS feeds also with connotative categories.
Once the RSS downloaded in depth scanning of the texts is performed in order to identify if a street, a place of interest or a district is mentionated.
When a news is related to a specific element of the city, a Murmur comes to life.

In order to reduce the possible divergence between the tags of the news item and their actual topic, a specific content analysis to gather more connotative (and possibly more accurate) tags, is performed.
The news tags and the content analisys results are mixed up to produce a list of georeferenciated semantic keyword.
Accordingly to the amount of Murmurs that each street, places of interest and districts have, the real topography of the city is deformed to produce a series of new maps from the more related to the real geographic space to the ones that ignore the geographic space and focus their interest on the semantic relationships: the result is a combination of an-exact overlapping pictures.

When the network of maps, diagrams and texts, are combined together the media geography appears and it is possible to understand its multifaceted reality.

The DensityDesign Lab approach, partially modified despite past editions, tries to foster this alliance in order to explore socio-economic phenomena that present both representational and visual problems. In fact they could be:
- complex;
- multidimensional;
- dynamic and evolutionary;
- not numerically measurable if not qualitatively;
- ambiguous and fuzzy;
- not dichotomous;
- of great impact on people and society.

The goal is to contribute to the construction of representation and visualization model respecting and preserving the inner structure of the analyzed phenomena, allowing users to know (see) them as a whole. This is not primarily a design issue, but an epistemological one; the aspect of visual representation and communication is only one part of a bigger topic. The broader aim is helping in build a cognitive process that integrates and combines different disciplines and skills.

The theme: poverty and social exclusion – conditions
Exclusion is a socio-economic status where people are placed on the margins of society, because of their economic, psychological, physical, cultural conditions.
To evaluate its forms and intensity requires models that consider a multitude of dimensions: the determination of poverty status cannot be reduced to simple and single indicator.
The study of poverty should be multidimensional being related to material deprivation, where the non-availability of certain goods, the lack of access to specific services establish a state of social discomfort.

Limits of representations
Traditional tools used for communicating the official data, about social issue, seem to be inconsistent with the characteristics of the phenomena:
- they produce only analytical views;
- the phenomena is over simplified and all the aspects that are blurred and ambiguous are neglected;
- an over-simplification often contains half truths;
- they do not express the approximations and uncertainties inherent to the data elaboration.

It is clear that, the more this kind of phenomena become subject of communication, the more the user should be aware of how the information is treated. We are not pretending everyone to be an expert in economics and statistics; we must build communication processes able to bring the user closer to what he wants to know.
The representation of socio-economic problem is not reducible to a problem or purely algorithmic technology, but not because of the quantity of data: complexity, multi-dimensionality and ambiguity are difficulty reduce into algorithmic computations.

This research area requires developing new visual grammars and communication tools that do not superimpose artistic or vaguely appealing elements over the representation of the phenomena, but should be able to build narratives deeply consistent with its inner structure. Visualization artifacts, diagram and maps, have to respect the robustness of scientific approach on phenomena while remaining consistent with the structure of cognitive and logic capability of the observer.

The first exercise conducted by DensityDesign students is seeking to intervene in this context: starting from 2006 official data (provided by the Istat) they build visualization about the poverty in Italy.

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!

About Complexity Maps
Torino is a city on the move. The tradition forms of representation are obsolete or inadequate to depict the current reality and the dynamics in progress. How can the city be made legible and comprehensible, understood as a complex organism and as a web of physical and social networks? The urban territory is a system whose complexity is growing, in which a multitude of tangible and intangible flows (people, goods, information) stratify and interconnect.
Faced with all this, the traditional modes of mapping and representing the city appear entirely inadequate: the representations of the new physical and social networks, like that of their individual and collective life, are a new challenge for the design of communication. The representation of the phenomena demands the gradual abandonment of classical visual languages, i.e. of maps that lay their trust chiefly in the topological and geographical metaphor.
Overcoming these limits means building a new representation of the city: a collective vision capable of defining and visualizing the new concept of urban space and, more in general, social spaces. The theme, proposed in collaboration with the Urban Center Metropolitano of Torino, aims to produce visualizations in the form of diagrams and maps of relationships that induce a new way of viewing human-city interaction, and also useful for outlining new criteria for its development.

Workshop leader : Christian Nold
Workshop assistant : Jim Segers
MetaDesign team: Paolo Ciuccarelli, Donato Ricci
Commitment : Urban Center Metropolitano – Torino

Brief
This project has a specific target area as well as a partner organization. The focus is on a socially deprived area in the north of Turin, earmarked for future development by the Urban Centre our partner organization. Our challenge is to complement the Urban Centre’s long term and strategic understanding of this place with the complexity of views and agendas of local people. We will experiment with the concept of the ‘Actor-Network’ and treat our site as a complicated entity made up of a range of competing actors with different interests.

Challenges
Consultation
How can we develop a range of ad hoc ethnographic techniques to engage with local people and get past the language barrier and collect holistic ‘data’ about the local actor network? We suggest to organise a community event that will draw in skills and resources from the local community, while at the same time establishing a meeting space where local actors come together. The setting up of the event will provide an opportunity to contact different stakeholders in the community, and to gather data on their role and visions of the future of their local area. The event itself is an opportunity to bring together and collect different visions of the future.

Visualizations
How can we analyze, visualize and communicate the complicated local networks to our project partner, the local participants and a wider public?
The students worked in small groups on a broad range of themes that overlap strongly with the other workshops: People, History and Future, (In)security, Environment, Mobility.
This workshop has been ambitious in attempting to create a very broad way of looking at a very specific place, so we benefit from connections with the other workshops that create more detailed analyses of a particular topic. We also generated a lot of new data about the project area. Since the aim of this workshop is to develop visualizations we focused on the final presentation and communication of our results. The aim was to have a whole wall that will represent the target location from a multiplicity of perspectives.

Output
Environment Group
How are the local people engaged with their surroundings? What effect does the environment have? Who uses the river area? Why is it being used? Are there environmental pollutants in the area? How could we measure them? Who holds the data for this sort of thing? Who is resoponsible for dealing with it? What could local people do to engage with possible pollution? How do we visulise all the relevant actors in this network?

Main Research Conclusion:
The lack of communication between different kinds of actors (people, media, administration) overshadows the environmental and pollution problem of the project area.

History / Future Group
Who decides the future of this place? What do local people think will happen? How involved are they in the planning processes taking place? What affect will the proposed changes have on the local area? How can we communicate some of the proposals? How can we make the Golf Course proposal physically imaginable in the space? What might be the unexpected effects of these proposals? Can we come up with better ideas? What plans do local people have? Are there any temporary interventions that might change the place? How can we visualise alternative local visions of the future?

Main Research Conclusion:
In the past social systems like the illegal allotments kept the connections between local actors alive. The place has been disconnected through top down design actions.

Mobility Group
How do local people move about in the area and where are they trying to get to? Where do people work? Are people using public transport? With all the planned changes how will this impact their future travel possibilities? Who is responsible for planning these sort of things? How will the people who use the Golf Course get there? What impact will this have on the local area? How is mobility affecting the local sense of place and quality of life? What do people think should be done? How can we work with the other mobility workshop taking place?

Main Research Conclusion:
The current use of the park has been entirely determined by the a series of external factors that suggest its future dynamics

People Group
Who are the different groups of people who use and/or own this place? What different uses do they make of the space? What completing needs and requiremetns do they have? What are their aims, wishes and desires? Are the concepts of ownership or stakeholders the right way to change the area? How can we visualise these power relations?

Main Research Conclusion:
The locked loops of local policy and money perpetuate a situation of local abandonment which feeds illegal activities and social & political exclusion.

(In)Security Group
What does security or insecurity means in the local context? What are people’s local fears? Is it really about the drug dealing or about jobs or whatever? Who is creating these feelings of security or insecurity? Are the planned developments going to help with this? Are there particular groups being targeted in the local area? Are the local allotments under threat? What do the local newspapers say about these issues? Do the local shops have a different opinion from the local residents? Are there differnces of opinion? How can we visulise these differnces?

Main Research Conclusion:
the perception of safety in the area changed between 2003 and 2008.

TWDC – Designing connected places Summer School -
Thank you all, it was amazing.
It was about people.
It was about discovering a no-where place.
It was about wishthinking. No insurance flip flops in a landfield needles-covered.
It was about trust. No clear ideas of final results; but they emerged!
It was about talking eachother. So many different culture eating the same watermelon.
Thank you for inspiring an idea of designing not only spoons, buildings or nice color palettes.
It was discovering a new meaning for communication.

Ops… all the results of the summer school will be visible here and on the official blog as soon as possible.

DR and GS

The suggestion by IXDA forum about basic user interaction design concepts gives us opportunity to make clear an intrinsic paradigm to complexity.

As in, if you can accurately predict what’s going to happen next in a System, it’s because the Action you’re taking is understandable, clear, logical and above all brings ameliorations to the main subject. If you can accurately predict what’s next, It means the System has high ameliorability.
If you can’t accurately predict what’s next, the System has low improvement perspectives.

Thus, Predictability derives from the Actions you’ve chosen to improve on going System and how many data you collected to draw it are relevant choices. However, collecting data and selecting Actions moments are going to be a background where develop tangible solutions, just before and after system visualizing process. Inside both, we might understand some emerging questions.

It’d be a right thesis, in fact according with Ben Fry (2008), the most important part of

“[...] understanding data is identifying the question that you want to answer. Rather than thinking about the data that was collected, think about how it will be used and work backward to what was collected. You collect data because you want to know something about it. I you don’t really know why you’re collecting it, you’re just hoarding it.”

In conclusion, predictability derives from past data still working in the form of governmental statistics, demographical reports, corporation quality manuals, etc. They’re getting us as information as possible to become new topical visualizations to builds ameliorations in order to the society.

So, let’s plan our future.