designswarm thoughts

Something that’s starting to tick me off in the world of information visualisation goes back to why people found it interesting to begin with. When we didn’t know any better, we’d leave information visualisation to Powerpoint and Excel and only insiders and people who’d been to the right schools were able to make any sense of it. The meaning of the information was hidden behind a layer of understanding the average person lacked.

In an age of obsession with visually displaying information (thanks Mr Tufte) that is not directly accessible to us (such as how much carbon is being emitted, information is more accessible to the masses of course, but I’m wondering if that’s all there is to it. “Oh, wow, thats all lot!” is pretty much where information visualisation leaves me at the moment or “Oh, nice!”

We are at a pivital moment where we are collectively starting to suffer from doom’s-day fatigue and our ability to see into the future and observe the consequences of our everyday actions is trumped by these constant visualisations of the depressing “now”.
Part of being a responsible adult is supposed to be about taking responsability for our actions and understand that they have consequences is it not? Why can’t our technologies help us with that? I would like to see us move towards a world full of little everyday objects that give me a glimpse into the future if I keep doing things the way I do, total yearly bills based on my current usage, predictions about how much I’ll have to spend on food and how much weight I’ll gain if I keep at the current pace. It’s not prescriptive and I don’t think it’ll be depressing. It’s just making information I need to lead a sustainable life, more easily accessible and more empowering than simple clever reporting.

I guess that used to be on the next slide.

How to cater to an audience…

via Asian Pacific Headhunter

When everyone does happy-go-lucky-let’s-just-pretend-everything-is-fine Alejandro Zamudio Sanchez tells it like it is.

via Flickr

Spending time in New York is always a story of compromises. I planned to go to the MoMa but didn’t get a chance to. Nice people were in town but triangulating was a nightmare. I think it has something to do with the scale and the spread of urban life there. In some cities, you clearly have a “downtown” area where you’ll eventually bump into people (Milan is a good example) but in New York, you can go from one end to the other really quickly and there are interesting things to do and visit at pretty much at every corner. Making plans with other people becomes an odessey.

So the trip consisted of hanging out in the West Village, getting great coffee at Jack’s Stir Brew, eating at some nice vegetarian restaurants that Daverecommended, going to see Design Life Now at the Copper Hewitt Museum, breifly dropping by the venue for Postopolis and getting my new favorite ice-cream in America: Green tea Pinkberry topped with coconut flakes.

In any travel plans however there’s also a little bit of work involved and so Matt and I went to see Designing Audiences an AIGA talk at the beautiful Fashion Institute of Technology.

The panel was lead by the infamous Ze Frank with guests graphic designer Stefan Bucher, game designer Katie Salen, and head of Stamen design, Eric Rodenbeck.

They each made a short presentation of their work, Stefan with his daily monsters, Katie with her Ice Karaoke project and Eric with the work that Stamen does (presenting Trulia Hindsight for the first time).

Each spoke about their relationship to audiences both offline and online and I must say I was at first skeptical about this wide array of experiences in drawing a set of conclusions but 2 themes seemed to emerge from the conversation nonetheless:

1. Setting rules is key: Not unlike a school teacher, the designers, apart from Eric perhaps, all spoke of the need to set rules to grow a good community. If you left things too open, people would start wandering away from the “goal” of the community and produce what Ze referred to as “crapucopia”. This is a social phenomenon that teachers, babysitters and mothers all know too well. Makes me wonder if these designers haven’t all turned to become design teachers handing out briefs. The tighter the restrictions, the more creative you are forced to become in order to impress your peers and win the love of the teacher. Is this web2.0 all just an extension of school then? Strange notion worth exploring. In a way this has nothing to do per se with designing a community but more to do with maintaining one and maintaining the conditions that will make every participant feel special and look great by rewarding even their most meager attempts, and keep them interested in contributing. Seen under such a light, “web2.0″ seems almost a maternal activity, closer to real life than a truly unique “internet phenomenon”.

2. Platform makers: I asked them during the Q&A whether they thought that designers would become simply platform makers and their value would come from how great a platform they would create for people’s enjoyment. This is a question that I myself struggle with as a designer in an age that pushes us to think more and more about services and less about “stuff” more particularly in product design. The answers they provided pointed to a balance between these 2 roles for the future designers. Yes we will be building more platforms but the content creation will still be important to launch that community and gather people’s reactions around an initial body of work.

It seems almost impossible to think that most designers will not be following this trend even if it means more maternal maintenance work and less ego-driven creation.

Tom Klinkowstein will be exhibiting a visual projection of what it will feel like in a connected world in 2030, a project he worked on with Irene Pereyra:

“The project, a large digital “diagrammatic narrative”, portrays a day in a designer’s life in the year 2030 and her relationship to the objects and environments around her (now infused with powerful communication, sensing and artificial intelligence capabilities). The project is tentatively scheduled to premiere at the Singapore International Design Festival in November 2007.”

After his well known piece about the life of a designer from 1990 to 2090, I can’t wait to see this one.

via xkcd

I will write more extensively about Luminous Green this week and what it feels like to be in a room full of artists, advertisers and cultural types talking about sustainability but for now i’ll concentrate on a smaller anecdote around the event that links nicely to the recent conversations about the use Powerpoint.

In order to make the event more sustainable, the speakers were asked to reduce their reliance on technology ( projector and therefore powerpoint) and several of them found this extremely demanding. Others requested to present in powerpoint anyway as they couldn’t possibly fathom not using their presentation (one of which was from the world of advertising of course). This resulted in weaker presentations as the speakers came unprepared for image-less descriptions of their projects and I found that they were struggling to perhaps mentally remember what their slides said.

This then poses the question: is that intellectually sustainable? If the content that you might have been exposed to relies on the speaker being able to be prompted by some sort of tool, this I suppose says a lot about speaker’s independence. As a member of the audience, you don’t have to prepare, you’re a white sheet of paper that someone either artistically writes on or awkwardly scribbles on with their hand in a cast.

Had the speakers been told in advance of this restriction, I think they probably would have absorbed their talk very differently, brought cue cards and orated like a priest in a church, or politicians did before technology’s presence, just like speakers used to when people just read books. Think Gandhi (who was referenced several times times during the event) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I think our reliance on Powerpoint has ultimately made us poorer speakers and we handhold our audience much more than it needs to. Inspiration doesn’t come served on slides.

Found on an editorial review on Amazon.

Glitches on Twitter. Rather amusing.

Can we maybe assume that people born in 1910 don’t have Facebook accounts or stop with the drop down menus for year of birth?

People have lost their manners, even on Flickr.

From the always delicious Adverbox.

I need to visually entertain myself most days, so in between a bit of innovation work during the day, i created this one evening…enjoy!

Italian advertising company…. some disturbing images (even if work safe).

What if this could spell check you as well? “No no, you’re using the wrong De Stijl building again!” that would be high-larious… or maybe I’m just easily amused.

Via Core 77.

It’s a well known fact I have way too many Stickies which over the weekend I managed to reduce to 15 (i think i had at least double that) and found this lovely list of vegetables with the wittiest names.
Since I can always use a bit of typeface practice, I thought I’d do something more interesting that make a ta-da list out of it.

From Stamen design.

So I’ve been thinking of redesigning my website to cater more to my freelancing career and thought I’d post this up to see what people thought. Basically I’m trying to make it more “swarmy” and this just might be the incentive I need to learn Flash (the oh so dreaded and essential tool in my field). I thought it might be nice to have different views: client, type of work, as a way to build a kind of “tag cloud” of activities so that people would have an idea of the type of work I get involved in (a lot of different things) and where my interests lie.