Blog

Politecnico di Milano, in order to present the School of Design in its own stand at Salone del Mobile 2013, asked DensityDesign to realize a 4 mt x 2 mt poster showing the structure and the efficiency of the School of Design system at Politecnico. The visualization is a picture of the 2010 / 2011 academic year. We began with the visualization of the figures related to students.
On the left side you can start following the students path from the admission test to their bachelor degree, which is connected to data related to the type of contract one year after graduation (data referred to a 2010 survey).
We decided to integrate the visualization with informations realted to credits distribution. Every circle is a course of study and shows its typology of exams (theorical curses, labs, etc…) with related C.F.U. (university course credits). Inside it is shown the average of earned credits by students every year. In the right side you can see the same data related to master degree.
We also visualized how many teachers each department gives to the school of design.
The poster has been completed with informations about Ph.Ds, technical and research labs and the number of students for each school of Politecnico.
The poster was realized in one week by Gabriele Calvi and Sara De Donno with the supervision of Michele Mauri.

As new symbionts, tablet devices are part of our life by now. We are researching on data visualization and interaction on these devices and focusing on actual and future perspectives for dataviz.

Looking for mobile applications that convey information in a visual way, we found different tools for different purposes:

• Reference: applications that visualize data as tools for share knowledge about specific topics as well as encyclopedic information.
• Business: tools that allow users to visualize and control dynamics of data (mainly financial).
• Entertainment: applications created for show, group, share or collect information about music, sports, movies or social networks.

We noticed that reference and entertainment applications are more experimental than business apps, trying to take advantage from the specific types of interaction allowed by the device.

We present here a first selection of examples of these applications, grouped by the three main purposes. The short description highlights what kind of visualization and interaction are used for each app. Some of the cases already suggest novel forms of interaction and approaches, but certainly there is room for improvement and for opening new research lines.

REFERENCE:

Storytelling for baseball stats: Pennant by Steve Varga

Pennant is an interactive history of baseball available for the iPad. Pennant’s interface allows fans to browse and view data from over 115,000 games that have taken place from 1950 to 2010. Seasons, games and events are graphically represented and visualised in a manner that takes them beyond the numbers. The app consists of two main parts, the application itself that lives on the ipad, and the data, which exists on external servers.

Augmented reality: Homespotter by Mobile Realty Apps

HomeSpotter uses augmented reality coupled with a smartphone or tablet’s GPS and compass to overlay property information on a device’s live camera feed. As a home hunter points their smartphone or tablet down the street, they see a view of the street and info on all the houses for sale pops up. There’s even a radar display that show the direction and proximity of nearby properties for sale.

BUSINESS:

Visualize, interact with, and share data: Spotfire by Tibco

The Spotfire App extends the reach of Spotfire analytics to anyone with an iPad. You can visualize, aggregate, filter, and drill into data sets of virtually any size, so you can spot opportunities and risks buried in the data.

Analysis dashboard: Roambi by MeLLmo

Roambi Analytics turns data and business reports in visualizations. The application includes reports for mobile systems that allow to touch a scroll informations on the animated display.

ENTERTAINMENT:

Collecting real time data: AntiMap by Trent Brooks

Using accelerometer and compass sensors, Antimap allows to collect and create own data. The application visualize real time information  about speed, rotation and inclination using a dashboard style infoviz.

Exploration into Open Movie Database: Solyaris by Beat Raess

Solyaris is an “exploration into organic information design to visualise movies, actors, directors and their relationship”. The application for iPad made in Cinder allows you to search the entire Open Movie Database (TMDb) collection for movies, actors or directors. Expand nodes to gather information about their connections. Learn about the cast and filmography.

Explore your music collection: Planetary by Bloom Studio

Created using Cinder framework, allows to navigate dynamically through informations about recording artists. Every star in Planetary represents an artist from your music library. Albums are planets, they orbit around their artist star. The planet surface is derived from the album cover art. No two planets are the same. Tracks are moons, they orbit at a speed based on the length of the track. The size of the moon is based on the play count. Artist are filtered by Letter to create a constellation of highlighted stars.

read more…

An overview of the weather conditions during the last twenty years of the Design Week in Milan has shown that this has never been a lucky week for the meteorological weather. In 2003, infact, the Design week was even covered with snow and the average of temperature was 9°C: not really the kind of weather expected in April! The best Design week for weather was instead in 2007 when the average of temperature was 19°C: a really good time for an ice-cream. No matter the bad or good weather, we all know we’re gonna do a tour around the city during the Design week as it is one of the most important events for design in Milan.

Infographic made by Martina Elisa Cecchi & Gabriele Calvi

In the framework of our researches, we are focusing on interactive data visualizations, particularly on installations during exhibitions or special events. These sort of artifacts indeed offer a simple but effective way to make complex data understandable to as many people.

We’d like to share with you a selection of examples from 2004 on, among which you can find maps, interfaces activated by humans and real-time representations.

Floating.numbers (2004, Art+com studio)

Numbers are commonly seen as quantitative measures of entities. Depending on the context however, they often also have religious, historical, mathematical and philosophical meanings. Floating.numbers attempts to bring back this often forgotten or unknown layer of meaning into their interpretation in the age of digital determinism.

Documenta mobil (2005, ART+COM)

The largest art exhibition in the world went on tour in a 15 meters long truck as part of Kassel’s application to become the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2010 and to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Inside the truck in front of the original posters from the eleven documenta exhibitions so far is an 11 meters long interactive table installation.

Tech Stuff ( 2007, ToDo)

For the launch of the book+DVD Tech Stuff (a documentary made of episodes about techniques, artists and bizarre instruments that made the history of electronic music), ToDo was asked to transform the project into an interactive preview able to convey the identity of QOOB and ISBN Edition and through instant interaction and fun. To build a strong bond with the corporate images of QOOB and ISBN, they developed a concept of interaction based on cubic cardboard and barcode: 9 different types of cubes (one per subject) and an adhesive- barcode on each side of the cube.
Users could then explore the contents of a particular topic, one at a time by placing the 6 faces of the cube on a workstation equipped with a barcode reader, while a second location was possible to ‘tune’ with a simple potentiometer on several samples related audio.

Highly Adaptable (2008, Zum Kuckuck)

At the “Product Experience Center” of the Deutsche Telekom in Darmstadt, Germany, one can experience the productivity of the company’s network infrastructure through the visualization of data streams. Processing analyzes the international data interchange as well as the network traffic in real time, and reproduces it three-dimensionally, creating a cinematic sequence on a large size plasma screen, prominently placed in the room.

mæve (2008, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam)

The interactive installation “mæve” (MACE-Everyville) provides visual and tangible access to the social and intellectual networks behind architectural projects. The installation was part of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. mæve connects the entries of the Everyville student competition and puts them into the larger context of MACE content and metadata. By placing physical project cards on an interactive surface, users can explore the presented projects, embedded in an organic network of associated projects, people and media.

Interactive city map of Berlin (2009, ART+COM)

Within the scope of the image campaign “be Berlin”, the Berlin Senate Chancellery commissioned ART+COM to create a central installation for the town hall lobby. ART+COM developed an extensive interactive media table, on which visitors can playfully click through the city. The Berlin-shaped, four-square-metre table surface shows a satellite map of the city that displays information on history, interesting places and Berlin cultural sites. In addition to the sights, one can also find life stories about the ambassadors of the campaign.

Pro Aurum Interactive Lobby (2009, Envis Precisely)

Gold vendor Pro Aurum commissioned this visualization for the opening of the headquarters in Monaco It is a permanent exhibition taking place in their foyer and shows data about gold production, trade and about the company itself in a series of interactive animated graphs. All graphics are composed of little golden particles that flock together in order to form shapes, graphics and text. The user can toggle between various visualizations which are shown on a 3×3 monitor matrix using a touchscreen terminal.

London Design Museum Installation (2009, Chris Boardman)

Chris Boardman installation featured as part of the Super Contemporary exhibition, and illustrated the history of the digital industry across London from 1994 through to 2007.
He developed a dynamically-driven, physically-interactive timeline that allowed to collate agency data and then just drop it into the app as XML at runtime. The public were able to control the timeline using a little round knob attached to the wall underneath a plasma display.

Salt worldwide (2010, ART+COM)

The German Salt Museum in Luneburg updated its exhibition with an interactive installation, entitled “Salt Worldwide”. It vividly tells the story of the salt around the world by simulating a virtual world made out of salt: there are 34 touch sensitive salt crystals spreading over the map highlighting salt concentrated areas in the world. When touched the crystals start to glow and from underneath the crystal grains of salt pour over the table and merge into an information window, which displays details of the chosen salt mine through text, images and movies.

Agenda Italia 2020 (2011, ToDo)

In the framework of Stazione Futuro, ToDo did also Agenda Italia 2020, which showed a flow of data and statistics on the actual italian situation (education, job market, public health, elderly people, internet revolution and energetic strategies) and generated a choreography of LED-texts lightly dancing on dark and elegant steles. Not much interactivity, but still an interesting experimentation.

Stazione Futuro (2011, ToDo)

Stazione Futuro was an exhibition for the 150th anniversary of the Italian state. It celebrated the best in Italian creativity and innovation, focusing on the pivots of change in the next 10 years: energy, environment, recycling, chemistry, textiles, mobility, home, food, communication, work, robotics, space.
ToDo agency made an interactive map of future food, allowing to explore slow-food districts scatterd all over the country, including regional specialties. Also, there were other informative tables and severals graphic to tell the prospects offered by endless small concrete initiatives.

Streamflow (2011, Elvis Precisely)

Streamflow is a permanent installation at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. It represents AMGEN, the world’s largest biotech company, which is a sponsor of the museum.
The installation shows a flow of data about the company, text and images move along a stream of light that spans over four screens. You can interact with the data by accelerating and decelerating the flow; to do so, just move your hands along the surface.

Max Planck Research Network (2011, Moritz Stefaner)

This multi-touch installation reveals how Max Planck Institutes collaborate with each other, and with their international partners. Stefaner analysed data from SciVerse Scopus for over 94,000 publications over the last ten years. A dynamic network provides a high-level map of the Max Planck Institutes and their connections; the size of the institute icons represents the number of scientific publications, and the width of the connecting lines the number of jointly published papers between two institutes.

Interactive map at the Hamburg History Museum (2012, ART+COM)

The touch-sensitive installation is the central element of the section The Harbour – A Key Stimulus at Hamburg History Museum. It’s a 3.5 metre square table interactive table that allows visitors to undertake an interactive journey through time and space, exploring the development of the city from the Middle Ages through to the present day. Visitors use a mechanical time wheel to navigate their way through eleven epochs and discover how the structure of the city and the landscape were transformed over time. In each period the most important urban changes and incisive historical events are highlighted.

Prism (2012, Keiichi Matsuda)

Inside the cupola of the Victoria & Albert museum for the London Design Festival, data streams from all over the city were visualised on the faceted surfaces of Japanese/British designer Keiichi Matsuda’s installation. The Prism installation took live information including wind speed, air pollution levels, traffic updates, the number of cycle-hire bicycles currently in use and even the energy consumption of the prime minister’s residence, then represented it with graphic patterns to create a “live patchwork of London”.

Emoto (2012, Nand Studio)

Based on approx. 12.5 million Twitter messages which were aggreg­ated in real-time, Emoto captured trending topics and how they were discussed online in an inter­active visu­al­isa­tion which was running live in parallel to the Olympic Games in July and August 2012. Each Tweet was annot­ated with a senti­ment score by the project’s infrastruc­ture using soft­ware provided by Lexalytics. This data formed the basis for an extensive profiling of London2012 which was finally docu­mented in this inter­active install­a­tion and phys­ical data sculp­ture at the WE PLAY closing exhib­i­tion of the Cultural Olympiad in the Northwest.

Porto Maravilha exhibition (2012, Super Uber)

As part of the interventions surrounding the renovation of Rio de Janeiro’s Port area, SuperUber was invited to create the interactive multimedia exhibition allowing the public to explore the new urban project of the Port area. Called “My Porto Maravilha”, the exhibition is divided into three moments: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, with installations integrating the architecture, technology, design, and content created in partnership with Concessionária Porto Novo, Comunicação Mais, Arte 3 e Tecnopop.

From November 9-11, students around the world will immerse themselves in the field of data visualization, catch workshops and presentations from data visualization experts, connect with students from different cities, and collectively work to solve some of the world’s most complex issues. Students can participate virtually or at one of the hosted meetups, and visualizing.org will be awarding more than $10,000 in prizes.

Groups of students from the Communication Design Program at Politecnico di Milano and friends from the Bolzano School of Art and Design are already registered at the meetup hosted by Politecnico. Join us!!!

Here you can download the “Survival Kit” – everything you need to know about Global Marathon.

Our course at Politecnico di Milano started last Monday, and students are already working hard.
As first exercise, they were asked to visualize a story about Milano, using the new Open Data website www.dati.comune.milano.it
It has been a flash 48-hours exercise, have a look to results here!
Comments and critics are, as always, welcome.

On September 3rd I attended the first International Workshop on Theory and Applications of Process Visualization (TAProViz). The workshop took place in Tallinn, Estonia, within the 10th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM2012).
The workshop was organized by professors Ross Brown (University of Queensland), Simone Kriglstein and Stefanie Rinderle (University of Vienna).

The workshop constituted also an attempt of the organizers to create a scientific community around the topic of business process visualization: a fairly new research area emerging from Business Process Modeling which is intended to explore new possible approaches and representation models for business process data.

Although the topic has already been part of the BPM research for several years, most process representations have not developed beyond minimal and standardized workflow diagrams, and just lately scholars are discussing the opportunity to introduce principles and techniques typical of information visualization and user interface design.

The workshop was introduced by a keynote by professor Manfred Reichert, who made a point about the increasing amount of process data produced by organizations and brought out the importance of introducing visualization elements to help the users make sense and interact with data.

Many software tools exist on the market to analyze and visualize business process data, nevertheless most of the research community revolves just around disciplines such as computer science and management. Therefore most of the research on the topic so far applies to the standardization of notation languages (such as OMG’s UML), in order to facilitate the development phase.

Hence the exploration of new visualization patterns has not really brought into question. Even if process visualization strongly relates to information visualization and more specifically to communication design, there seem to be no concrete involvement of the design discipline (this also proved by the fact that I was the only designer of the workshop, and probably of the entire conference).

Interesting explorations emerged though from the workshop, particularly from a couple of speeches by Jan Claes (Ghent University) and professor Kazuo Misue (University of Tsukuba).  The first one presented a sort of meta-tool for process analysis, which is devoted to examine the way in which business processes are designed, through event logs used as input for PPMCharts (that is charts that describe graphically the process of process modeling).

Professor Misue’s speech had an even more designerly vocation, even if starting from a computer science – visual analytics approach. The paper suggest the importance of information visualization techniques to explore activities in large-scale organizations and introduces a panoramic view tool. The analysis tool called SaaG (Series at a Glance) permits the exploration of tasks (here defined as “tickets”) through both a hierarchical and temporal representation. The main view is constituted by a treemap showing the ticket groups structure and a timeline within each ticket (represented by cells) expressed internally through Gantt or Polyline charts.

SaaG: Representation of a Group of Tickets

Despite the absence of an actual design community, the workshop provided several stimuli that revealed to be very useful and productive also for the design discipline.