'Looking back at the wake of my ship one day in 1917, I became interested in its beautiful white path. I said to myself, "That path is white because of the different refractions of light by the bubbles of water—H20 (not Hπ0). The bubbles are beautiful little spheres. I wonder how many bubbles I am looking at stretching miles astern?"
'I began to make calculations of how many bubbles there were per cubic foot of water. I began to find that in calculating the ship's white wake I was dealing in quintillions to the fourth power times quintillions to the fourth power or some such fantastically absurd number of bubbles. And nature was making those bubbles in sublimely swift ease!
'Any time one looks carefully at a bubble, one is impressed with the beauty of its structure, its beautiful sphereicity glinting with the colors of the spectrum. It is ephemeral—elegantly conceived, beautifully manufactured and easily broken.
'Inasmuch as the kind of mathematics I had learned of in school required the use of the XYZ coordinate system and the necessity of placing π in calculating the spheres, I wondered, "to how many decimal places does nature carry out π before she decides that the computation can't be concluded?" Next I wondered, "to how many aribtrary decimal places does nature carry out the transcendental irrational before she decides to say it's a bad job and call it off?" If nature uses π she has to do what we call fudging of her design which means improvising, compromisingly. I thought sympathetically of nature's having to make all those myriad frustrated decisions each time she made a bubble. I didn't see how she managed to formulate the wake of every ship while managing the rest of the universe if she had to make all those decisions. So I said to myself, "I don't think nature uses π. I think she has some other mathematical way of coordinating her undertakings.""
There's something here that I like very much (aside from how funny it is to picture the übernerd standing on the back of a ship counting bubbles); that there's a model of the world that we generally use and which is enough to get by, but isn't quite right, and that if you disregard that model and consider the qualities of the material itself, you realize that there's a whole different approach which can be much more fruitful. When Stamen's working on a project we start by taking a good close look at the data itself and seeing what conclusions emerge, rather than coming up with an external idea which we need to slot the data into, and doing it this way help us avoid having to come up with pi-like approximations which are awkward and inelegant.
It's this kind of thinking which led to things like Fuller's Dymaxion Map: why spend all your time trying to fit a round globe onto a single flat sheet, when it makes more sense to break it into triangles and arrange them however you need them? A while ago Mike made what I think is a particularly elegant interactive version of Fuller's project, which he's called the faumaxion map (and which you can read more about here):
Stamen's new work with awesome real estate powerhouse Trulia (who're going gangbusters btw) is live, at http://snapshot.trulia.com. It's an interactive map (of course!) showing photos of homes for sale, and lets you browse across several vectors: most expensive, least expensive, newest on the market, and longest on the market.
One of the things we strive for in our work is to get out of the way of the data that we're working with. The data is the real stuff as it were—and it should be allowed to sing on its own terms. Another way of saying this is that the world itself is much more interesting than any logos or graphics we could lay on top of it. Our faith is that the world is a fascinating place, and that revealing what that world looks like is both worth doing and fun.
What we've tried to do here is to make the photos of the houses themselves the thing that you interact with, and at the same time strike a balance with the map beneath, so that you can get an understanding of the ways that different kinds of homes relate to the landscape. We tried to go more glossy-real-estate-magazine than executive-dashboard; the results are here.
Oh! And there's a 'play' button (Trulia's suggestion; it's so nice to have clients that are smarter than you), so you can kick back & watch your dream home (or foreclosed shacks) stream by. We're' proud to have worked with Ryan Alexander on this one.
The slides are online here. It was an interesting format to try and get ideas across in; 5 minutes is not very long, and 15 seconds a slide doesn't give you much room to develop anything complicated. But sort of like when I stood up for 6 hours at PC Forum talking to people about Mappr, it's the kind of thing that really teaches you how to get your ideas across, and I'm grateful to Brady for the experience.
I'm particularly pleased to be able to talk a bit about Etienne-Jules Marey, a 19th century French physiologist, photographer and inventor who's something of a hero of mine, and whose work I'm increasingly starting to see as a source of inspiration for the work we do at Stamen. He was among the first to systematically investigate movement and how it can be captured and reproduced, and in addition to his work being scientifically revolutionary it's just plain gorgeous (that's him, below). Something to aspire to. And I have to confess that the pictures of him doing scientific experiments in snazzy suits and hats don't hurt, either.
I'm doing an Ignite session tonight at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame. I've never done an Ignite before: the idea is you have 20 slides and 20 slides only, and they auto-advance every 15 seconds, and 15 seconds only. Usually when I talk, I start warming up after the first 10 minutes, so it should be interesting to take my by-now-familiar caffeine-fueled ranting style about beautiful maps and condense it down into the essentials:
Mapping Now: Dynamic Realtime Maps and Other Pictures Maps are never pefect representations of reality, and increasingly they're out of date before they're finished. Complicating matters, mapping of live phenomena (geospatial or otherwise) is becoming more and more prevelant, and even expected. Looking back to earlier representations of movement can help us figure out how to represent the fluid spaces that mapping is moving in to.
The talk is open to the public, and is at the SFO Marriott tonight at 7pm.
Some Other Goodness:
Mike and Tom have posted notes from their Visual Urban Data: A Journey Through Oakland Crimespotting talk at the Berkeley School of Information. It was a different kind of format than we usually do, and it's great for me to see a whole talk given over to a single project (usually we do a more wham-bam overview of our work). Mike's slides are here, and Tom's are here. My favorite of the bunch is this one, where Mike shows all the different icons that the official Oakland crime map uses to show the different kinds of crimes:
Gotta love those 8-bit syringes!
Mike gave a followup talk at the ISchool to a group of journalists, and videos of that talk are online here and here, or you can watch them below:
"The Frank Sinatra of data visualization," HA! Thanks, Regine.
And finally, there's a Guardian article talking about how Boris Johnson, newly elected Lord Mayor of London, has made his promise of live crime maps for London a core part of his campaign. We'll be watching (and maybe participating in?) this closely, for sure. It's really happening...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
"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!
"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."
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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).
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.
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?
Following up on a series of map-based projects that improve on the full-screen tile-based system that Google Mapspaved 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:
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!
