Apr
24,
2008
Well, the Web 2.0 Expo is here in San Francisco this week, extending its delightfully O'Reillyesque tentacles into every nook and cranny of town—including a takeover of South Park—epicenter of the first round of Internet hilarity back in the late '90s. The town is full of nerds and marketing types alike, City Hall is all lit up, and you can't go near SOMA without tripping over all the discarded conference badges.
Stamen's part in these shenanigans was played by partner Mike Migurski, who, along with Twitter engineer Alex Payne, presented Design Your API: Learnings from Twitter and Stamen. Mike's got a post up about the talk, Matt McAlister has provided a nice writeup, as has Eric Nguyen at Mindtangle.
Aside from the tickle I get at seeing "Twitter and Stamen" on the marquee, the thing about this that makes me happy is that there seems to be a growing openness to the idea that it's the way things fit together that matters online—that it's all well and good to have an excellent site, but if people can't quickly and easily access the data on their own terms, you'll only be able to involve them so far. And I love that people are responding well to the idea that the simple Excel spreadsheets that Crimespotting makes available are just as important and useful for making data about cities available as the more complex APIs that projects like Cabspotting or Diggmake available.
Alex and Mike put their presentation up on Slideshare; you can get a sense of what they talked about below.
Continue reading "Mike at Web 2.0 with Twitter's Alex Payne"
Apr
14,
2008
We're glad to be participating in W(e are )here, a gallery show/series of events/map-making party in Minneapolis put on by Solution Twin Cities and Intermedia Arts:
Recent developments in technology are expanding the ways we communicate the concept of "where." Online mapping and info-graphic applications are allowing artists, amateurs, and armchair cartographers to chart the intangibility of "place," etching their own impressions, emotions, and experiences onto the physical world around them. Embracing this new paradigm, the artists in this exhibit are charting unique territories while working towards the development of an emerging visual language that connects place, moment, and emotion across varied scales. Where is expanding. W(e are )here.
Stamen's Tom Carden has put together a custom view onto the Twin Cities' unique pattern of housing development for the show (based on our work with awesome real estate aggregator Trulia), and I'm giving a lecture on "Visualizing Urban Data Streams" at the University of Minnesota this evening, delivered in my by-now-familiar rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness hand-wavy style. So if you like interactive animations where cities bloom and spread like some incredibly long-lived malevolent flower, go see the show; if you like watching a guy in a suit rave about why it's interesting, come to the lecture. Come to both!
Continue reading "New gallery work and talk in Minneapolis"
Feb
29,
2008
Tom and I are heading down to San Diego tomorrow for O'Reilly's
ETech. We're both speaking, but on separate mornings: Tom's running a
workshop and I'm giving a brief morning
keynote. Tom's taken on the demanding task of doing a three hour(!) workshop and providing a comprehensive review of what we've been up to for the last few years, and I've really enjoyed seeing a view on our projects as thoughtful as his. I've got the easy job; all I have to do is get up on stage and show 15 minutes of the sexy stuff.
ETech 2008
This will be my first ETech, so I'm not really sure what to expect. It's got a reputation as the ultimate nerd-fest, which is a bit intimidating, but means there'll be alot to learn. I'm optimistic that the O'Reilly people seem to be living up to their reputation as framing "the ideas, projects, and technologies lurking just below the mainstream radar." moving away from the straight up "Web 2.0" topics which seem to have moved well up above the mainstream radar by now.
My pals Alex Steffen, David Pescovitz, and Justin Hall are all speaking, & I'm curious to see what JC Herz will reference when she talks about Web Visualization: Beyond RSS Lava Lamps, which will provide "a 90-second blipvert overview of the shiny vizporn and kinetic data sculptures to date [and] why they’re not useful" :)
Continue reading "Stamen at ETech"
Feb
12,
2008
Stamen is proud to announce that Cabspotting, our project with San Francisco's Exploratorium, will be part of an upcoming show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind, opens to the public on February 24, 2008.
The show is a survey of work at the intersection of design and science, and from what I know, the roster of participants reads like a who's who of people I've admired for a long time (although I can't seem to find a list of them on the web anywhere - MoMA?). It's nice company to be in. From the exhibition catalog:
"In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user's interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.
"The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue."
While Cabspotting is going to be actually hanging in the MoMA (holy f**k!), I'm also gratified by the inclusion of our work with Digg in the exhibition's printed catalog, and that Graffiti Archaeology and Trulia Hindsight will be featured on the exhibition website. I've often dreamed of having a project featured in the MoMA; having four in one show is frankly a bit overwhelming.
For the exhibit, we've re-factored the project so that it works in a gallery setting—we didn't want to just put the website up on the wall and walk away. This is somewhat new territory for us, as almost all of our work is done from start to finish on the web, but I'm excited to see the studio growing in new directions (this is the whole point, right?). Over time, we're changing the piece's variables: taxi speed, trail length and dot size all grow and shrinking in a continously varying series of Brian Eno-type oscillations, so the piece is never quite the same from frame to frame and changes quite a bit when you look at it. A small screenshot:
Cabspotting at MoMa
Shawn has been heading up the project and is heading to New York tomorrow for the install, and we're very glad to have had Gabriel Dunne designing and developing the installation with us.
See you at the Museum?
Continue reading "Cabspotting in MoMA: Design and the Elastic Mind"
Feb
10,
2008
(cut and pasted from a mail that Mike sent out this evening):
Crimes mapped in Oakland
Hello Everyone,
We’re happy to announce that Oakland Crimespotting is back, thanks to the generous help of Oakland’s City Information Technology Department. After three months without access to report data, we’ve been granted a reliable, regularly-updated source of crime report information. This is great news: it means that the website is back up and running with current information, e-mail alerts and RSS feeds work again, and we at Stamen Design can explore new ways of presenting and publishing this important information.
Here are a few things you can do, now:
Visit the site at http://oakland.crimespotting.org/
View a map at http://oakland.crimespotting.org/map/
Sign up for alerts at http://oakland.crimespotting.org/alerts
We are also interested in what additions to the site you would find useful or interesting. So far, we’ve had a number of suggestions that we’re actively looking into: spreadsheet-friendly downloads, details on individual police beats, a search function, and more than one month’s worth of data. If you have any thoughts on these or other ideas, send us a mail at info@crimespotting.org.
Our return would not have been possible without the help of a few key people. Ahsan Baig, Ken Gordon, and Bob Glaze at Oakland City IT built and published a source of information for us. Ted Shelton, Charles Waltner, and others helped us navigate the difficult waters of City Hall communications. Jason Schultz, Ryan Wong, Karla Ruiz, and Jeremy Brown at U.C. Berkeley Law School helped us understand how to best approach city governments for information. Kathleen Kirkwood and Pete Wevurski at The Oakland Tribune helped us understand the journalistic context of the project. Dan O'Neil and Adrian Holovaty at EveryBlock.com were a valuable sounding boards for ideas.
As for me, I'm delighted to see it back online, and especially pleased that the City has given us access to the data. In particular, this notion that cities have an obligation to provide access to data about themselves over the internet is one that I think (and hope) we're going to see catching on more and more, and it's great that Oakland has decided to take a progressive stance on this issue. If you're reading this, and you're a city with a need to learn more about your data and how it flows, do give us a call, won't you?
Continue reading "Oakland Crimespotting is back online, huzzah"
Jan
30,
2008
I'm in Vancouver for the next few days at Web Directions North, where I'll be talking about Information Visualization as a Medium
Blurb:
"Information visualization is becoming more than a set of tools and technologies and techniques to understand large data sets. It is emerging as a medium in its own right, with a wide range of expressive potential.
"Stamen’s work in visualization and mapping is among the most high profile online today, with the live dynamic displays at Digg Labs and Cabspotting being just two of many examples. The studio’s approach is deeply pragmatic, always starting with real data and aiming to work with graphics on screen as soon as possible. Though all analysis is a work in progress, a project is usually finished when it shows something nobody has seen before, or builds a vocabulary for describing a system, or offers more questions than answers. And then the process begins again."
Update (Jan 31 2pm PST): The MySociety maps I talked about in my talk today are online here, and Tom has done a very nice writeup on his blog. I haven't had time to officially put the project on Stamen yet, and a few people have asked about it. Go look!
And then on Feb. 8, I'll be speaking in New York alongside Adam Greenfield, J. Meejin Yoon, and Christian Nold at the New Museum's Nextcity: The Art of the Possible:
Adam's blurb:
"Emergent digital technologies are rapidly changing both the face of our cities and our daily experience of them, whether invoked in the production of architectural form, the representation of urban space, or our interface to the locative and other services newly available there. Dynamic maps update in real time; garments and spaces deform in response to environmental, biological and even psychological conditions. We find our very emotions made visible, public, and persistently retrievable. Somewhere along the way, we find our notions of public space, participation, and what it means to be urban undergoing the most profound sort of change."
Continue reading "Two Talks"
Jan
13,
2008
Well it's a little late to be writing an end-of-2007 wrap-up, but perhaps that's OK. Last year I think I made my "plan for the year" in, well, May 2007, so things are moving in the right direction.
In any event 2007 was an exciting year for us here at Stamen: we delivered work to an outstanding group of clients, we travelled all over the place talking about our medium to audiences large and small, and we strengthened our bonds with several smart and wonderful colleagues who have changed the way we work and play for the better. The studio is growing in some important ways, and we're working hard to keep our eye on doing beautiful and innovative work as the demands of being known for this kind of work start to increase.
We're pleased and grateful to have been given the opportunity to work with smart, inspiring, and forward-thinking clients and collaborators. I'm particularly excited to see a demand for beautiful and useful mapping and data visualization in areas that we never anticipated, and I'm thrilled at the way Stamen is part of what happens as this incredible field takes off in a big way. A few examples:
Continue reading "Happy 2008!"
Jan
4,
2008
Digg Pics is a dynamic visualization of images as people vote for them.
Generally, when we work on a new visualization, we start with data that is already flowing, and look for interesting patterns or tendencies that already exist. In Digg's case, this is usually a particularly fruitful process because of the tremendous volume and interconnectedness of the data that flows through the site every day.
When it came time to visualize Digg's newly launched images section, though, we found ourselves needing to get started on it before the section was live and running. So we had to improvise. We decided to use images from ffffound.com, an image bookmarking service that we use alot around the studio, as a source for the images, and use general Digg traffic as the source for the continuous flow of interrelated content that people care about.
We started off by taking a look at the spread in the number of diggs that we could expect, and dynamically sizing and placing the images accordingly:
Size and position study
Continue reading "Digg Pics is live"
Nov
20,
2007
Our belated apologies to all the people who've been asking for the source code for splatter for the last month or so— we upgraded our publishing software and some loose ends never got resolved.
Splatter #1
The project page has been updated with a new link to the appropriate files, or you can download it here. Updates on what we've been up to for the last few months coming soon.
Continue reading "Splatter: now (re) available for download "
Aug
30,
2007
Digg Arc is the lastest addition to our continuing work for Digg Labs. The piece has seen several weeks of development and experimentation and three phases of development punctuated by two successive public releases. This is a visual diary of its creation, shared by Shawn Allen, Tom Carden, and me, Michal Migurski.
Arc began in Shawn's hands. We started with a few basic experiments in circular layout and basic arc geometry. At first, these took the form of simple interactive wireframes to prove that our math was right. We quickly attached these initial sketches to the Digg Flash Kit, and connected them to a source of real data.
Early interactive arc geometry experiments
Continue reading "Digg Arc History"
Aug
9,
2007
Craig Hartmann and Brian Lee, design partners in Skidmore, Owings and Merril's San Francisco office, unveiled their proposal for the new Transbay Transit Center and Tower in downtown San Francisco to a standing-room-only audience at San Francisco City Hall on Monday night. SOM asked Stamen to provide a series of potential live visualizations for the tower's main streetside entrance, to be curated by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Our Cabspotting project, which tracks the positions of Yellow Cab taxis in San Francisco in real time, was used to illustrate the potential of this exciting new urban site during the public presentation.
Cabspotting on Mission Street
Stamen created a series of additional explorations of the Transit Tower entryway, extending the possibilities of live data visualizations in two areas: live graphic train scheduling, and densities in the urban fabric formed by the intersection of various transit routes.
Continue reading "Data visualization, SOM, and the Transbay Tower in San Francisco"
Jun
27,
2007
I've been talking a bit with Eddie Elliott, local designer/technologist and all-around raconteur whose beautiful digitial work predates the web, about Cabspotting lately. We (Stamen) keep meaning to get back to the project and do some new investigation, but something else (i.e. paid work that we like to do) keeps getting in the way. Eddie's stepped into this gap, and been using the Cabspotting API to produce some really stunning work. You can read more about it at a page he made for it at http://cabs.lightmoves.net/—in particular I like the calculations of the center of gravity over time, and he's pointed out an error in how we're plotting latitude vs. longitude (ouch)—but it's the high-res long-term point maps of San Francisco that make me the happiest, and provide some interesting new ways to look at the city through the data it throws off.
So first of all Eddie's using dots instead of lines, which makes sense over longer periods of time. This image shows 5,744,623 cab-spots (what Eddie calls individual cab GPS locations), recorded over the course of 31 days (44,640 minutes) from March 21st to April 21st, 2007, and it's just lovely:
Continue reading "Eddie Elliott's Cab Spots"
Jun
11,
2007
Hindsight, our new project with Trulia, launched a week or so ago. Since then Tom and I have been slowly collecting particularly nice examples of interesting conditions as we find them, and Tom's been posting some of these on the Hindsight blog. We're starting to identify a certain language of development patterns as we go: some growth spreads out from a central core, some slides along a river or dances along a chain of islands, some areas switch from rolling fields to cookie-cutter suburbs in a matter of a very few years, and so on. We don't quite have a language for this kind of thing yet; we're working on it.
Tom came across one today that made us both sit up and say "wait a minute...", and told us a bit more about the world than we knew before: by comparing the home sales data to the map photos underneath, we can use Hindsight to tell us things about the world that aren't otherwise visible.
Washoe, NV
Continue reading "Hindsight's 20-20, as it turns out"
Apr
23,
2007
I'm back from Barcelona and London, and hope to be posting my impressions from OFFF and a talk we gave at the National Maritime Museum in the next couple of days. Things are a bit hectic; the studio has some new projects either just launched or about to launch (more on that later), and I'm off to New York in a few days for a few days, to do:
AIGANY: May 29, 7pm
I'm honored to have been invited to take place in an upcoming AIGA NY event: "Fresh Dialogue 23: Designing Audiences," which will put Stefan Bucher, Katie Salen and me on a stage with the amazing Ze Frank, of all people. We've been asked to talk about (and hopefully show) how our various projects open up an inclusive engagement with the people who use our work, allowing them to shape and impact the end product in a much more direct way than is normal with traditional design and media.
Postopolis: June 1, 6pm
Now this sounds cool:
"Postopolis! is a five-day event of near-continuous conversation about architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design. Four bloggers, from four different cities, will host a series of live discussions, interviews, slideshows, panels, talks, and other presentations, and fuse the informal energy and interdisciplinary approach of the architectural blogosphere with the immediacy of face to face interaction."
I'm a big fan and avid reader of two of the blogs mentioned above: BLDGBLOG and City of Sound—and am excited to find out more about the people and ideas behind Subtopia and Inhabitat, who are also presenting at the conference. So if you're in New York during either of those times, please do let me know and/or stop by, the events are both open to the public.
Being asked to speak in New York City has a special poignancy for me (thanks, Mike and Dan!); the city and I have a somewhat, well, checkered history when it comes to design and architecture and I'm really looking forward to something of a homecoming. Stamen has been talking to architects and about architecture for some time now, and we're really looking to start thinking more publicly about urban spaces and data flows, so I have the feeling this is going to be the first of many conversations like this.
Continue reading "Going back to NYC"
Mar
29,
2007
Spring's here! The flowers are a-bloom all over the place in San Francisco, and so is Stamen :) Here are some notes about upcoming events we'll be participating in:
MoveOn Town Hall Meeting:
MoveOn National Town Hall
The US presidential election is a year and a half away, but the campaigns are already in full swing. Stamen is working with MoveOn.org on a new and improved version of the online map-based live conference tool we built for them in '04, for a series of three upcoming national town hall meetings.
The first live online meeting, on April 10, will bring the upcoming presidential candidates together for a conversation about Iraq. The next two will focus on global warming and health care. You can vote on which candidates you'd like to see participate until midnight EST tonight, so if you're interested in participating in this conference, please do so today. There's also a set of conference slides from our presentation on the Town Halls which we gave at Where 2.0 in '05, for those who'd like to know more about the map and how it works (and why we think it's cool).
OFFF in Barcelona
OFFF in Barcelona
Shawn Allen, Ben Cerveny and I will be in Barcelona for OFFF, talking about some of our more recent work and showing an enhanced suite of projects in the main hall at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. We'll be presenting alongside people like: John Maeda, Eric Natzke, Graffiti Research Lab, Josh Davis, Neville Brody, Universaleverything, and more, so it should be alot of fun.
xTech in Paris
xTech in Paris.
Mike Migurski and Tom Carden will be presenting "You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older, and now you're older still: a talk about time." at xTech in Paris, on May 18. This is another good one: they'll be there alongside Aaron Straup Cope, Håkon Wium Lie and Simon Willison, so we're hoping some interesting conversations come out of this trip.
Where 2.0 in San Jose
Time and Maps
Following the xTech presentation on time, I'll be talking about how the time-based visualization issues Stamen has been dealing with in many of its projects at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, on May 29.
Phew. Busy around here! Of course, you could head over to Matt Biddulph's fascinating new travel-sharing project dopplr and figure out our schedules, but you'd have to find each of our profiles, and who has time for that...hey Matt, can we have a Stamen group on Dopplr?
Continue reading "Stamen, coming right up"
Mar
23,
2007
Stamen's Mike Migurski announced today the release of the mapping library that he and Shawn Allen and Darren David have been working on: Modest Maps.
Following up on a series of map-based projects that improve on the full-screen tile-based system that Google Maps paved the way with (haha!), Modest Maps is an open source project that lets designers and developers use any map-based tiling system they choose, instead of being constrained by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft's maps. Want to use Microsoft's photo maps with Yahoo's road maps laid over them? Pull in Open Street Map tiles into a sexy flash display system that you control? Modest Maps does all these things really well, and has the benefit of being open source, so outside developers can contribute to the project as they see fit.
It's pretty:
Related Projects:
This work comes out and extends of a series of projects that Mike and Stamen have been doing with tile-based, non-google-centric mapping systems:
GSV 1.0 (Giant-Ass Image Viewer) (which for a good long while now has been the top google search result for "giant ass):
Cabspotting, which tracks the GPS positions of taxis in San Francisco:
And most recently, Mike's mapping of crime locations in Oakland, and the times they happen:
We've been using the code in a series of client projects we're currently working on, which is great, since it gives us alot more flexibility in how we represent geographic data moving forward, and we don't have to start from scratch every time. Yay, Mike, yay, Modest Maps!
Continue reading "Announcing Modest Maps"
Mar
9,
2007
Stamen's Tom Carden will be at South by Southwest in Austin, TX this weekend (along with half of San Francisco, it seems), speaking on a panel with our friends Dan Catt and Aaron Cope about Mapping: Where the F#*% Are We Now?.
While Tom's there he's going to continue our search for the perfect designer to work at Stamen, so if you're going to be at the conference and think you might fit the bill, feel free to talk to Tom about it there.
Continue reading "Tom Carden at South by Southwest"
Feb
27,
2007
As a follow-up to the first visualizations we made of user activity on Digg (posted to the digg blog in 2006), we've widened the scope of our visualizations to show an entire day's worth of digging activity on the site in greater detail. The resulting images, made by Tom Carden, illustrate some general patterns, and one controversial story immediately becomes visible; more about this below.
Continue reading "A day of Diggs and a thin blue line"
Feb
23,
2007
I was first introduced to IBM's new Manyeyes project when Fernanda Viegas spoke about it at Adaptive Path's excellent IDEA conference in Seattle back in October. We presented too; it was a "morning of visualization" :) .
Mike Migurski's Digg friends
Since it launched, the site has deservedly gotten a ton of attention and seems to be growing every day. The focus on "democratization of visualization" is absolutely right on. What clinches the site's utility for me is that it allows you to basically screencap the particular way you're looking at the data, so what you make can be shared and referenced.
Visualization (and flash and java generally) have been historically terrible at this aspect of things; data flows through, the framework responds, you get it looking just great, and then... you're done, unless you want to take a screengrab, post it to flickr, yadda yadda yadda...and then you lose the ability to interact with the data and draw your own conclusions. The chain of reasoning gets broken any time you try and do anything with the material. Manyeyes solves this problem by generating thumbnails of whatever aspect of the data you're looking at, and provides links back to the original data, so you can make your own graphings; it's just great. This ability to handle a specific slice of visualized data is becoming more and more of an interest to us here at Stamen; look for more on time and visualization here in the next few months.
Continue reading "Stamen on Manyeyes"
Feb
20,
2007
It lives:
The 2007 Amgen Tour of California started this weekend. It looks like some of my former colleagues at Quokka who are now at Macromedia Adobe have been working on the realtime race tracker.
Live Race Coverage
Francis Potter from Adobe sent over the annoucement from Yottapixel:
An engineering team at Adobe has been working for a few months on the Tracker. Many of the team members worked in 1998-2001 at Quokka Sports, a dot.com-era startup which pushed the envelope at the time with live sports coverage. In many ways, the Amgen Tour Tracker represents the culmination of what that team was trying to accomplish years ago.
Some of the stylistic elements in the Tour Tracker pick up where Quokka left off. The live video feed resizes to fit the user’s browser — even if that means the video is pixelated. Data, commentary, and image thumbnails are overlayed on the edges of the video, sometimes obscuring the action. There are lots of shades of grey in the interface. The end result delivers a rough, cluttered look which emphasizes the liveness, urgency, and experimental nature of the medium.
Continue reading "Amgen: Quokka redux"
