In 2009 we should decrease our graphing addiction and increase attention to coincidences!
happy new year!

I read Kevin Kelly article on New York Times magazine and I found the concept of Visual Literacy very interesting. Even if our society it is getting aware of the importance of visual language for our contemporary communication, visual language need more research to get to the point of being totally accepted in artefacts where traditionally we use text.

A causal loop model has been developed in order to help understand the complex systemic structure of poverty in all its dimension. System diagramming is here a loose term used to describe the activity of conceptually representing and visualizing a system in its constitutive elements: the elements, the relationships and the system boundary distinguishing what does and does not belong to the set.
The assumption of this qualitative exercise is that poverty, and its dimensions, are the result of the dynamics between a wide variety of factors from macro-politic, to the personal behavioral patterns.
The key element of the visualization are the factors and the variables. They are the environment attributes and characteristics that have an influence level of poverty.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF A URBAN SPACE SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF MEDIA?
CityMurmur tries to understand and visualize how media attention reshapes the urban space and the city.

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.

It all began last week, in a city of huge grace.
And wondering how cool would have been
to look around through the eyes of “Media Space”,
we found in a great workshop the solution within.

Murmur, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

After a week of cañas, tapas, fried food and heavy work this is the first result of the Visualizar’08 Workshop.

More specifically this is the wiki page of murmur

Economic statistic concerns understanding complex, multidimensional, ambiguous and dynamic phenomena building formal representations (models) based on statistical data. Communication Design addresses complex phenomena to interact with them building multi-dimensional visual representations based (in some cases) on statistical data.
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.