EXP: January 2010 Archives

Maison Hermes by Tokujin Yoshioka

By Craig Kanarick on January 27, 2010 1:05 PM | No Comments

Thanks to designboom and pixelsumo, I got to see this amazing video by Tokujin Yoshioka for Maison Hermes. The combination of digital video and fans make an incredible illusion that blends wit, grace, digital and physical. File under "I wish I had made this."

New Zealand Night Lights - Yes Yes No? Yes!

By Craig Kanarick on January 27, 2010 12:52 PM | No Comments

Night Lights is an interactive installation that uses the body, hands and a phone for a massive and colorful game of charades. Staged at Aukland's Ferry Building, the project is the upshot of a joint effort among four creative agencies and the public audience.

Using software created in openFrameworks by YesYesNo, the team projected a sequence of six scenes every hour onto the building's facade over the course of five days. Created for the rebranding of Telecom New Zeland, the project transformed the city's main transportation hub into an exciting display of lights.

The software created for the project is currently being prepared for Open Source release. Living in NY, with so many large buildings, makes me now see every facade as a canvas...

The 2009 Feltron Annual Report

By cool hunting on January 25, 2010 4:44 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Clearly a person who loves data visualization and thoroughly understands the power of illustrating personal tracking, infographic designer Nicholas Felton released his fifth annual report, the culmination of yet another year's worth of data accretion and (according to his Facebook status) well over 200 hours of labor. With The 2009 Feltron Annual Report, Felton stepped up his game a sizable notch by creating his first ever crowd-sourced report, enlisting the help of relatives, friends, colleagues and even his dentist.

Calling daily on the people he met who he felt "had discerned enough of my personality and activities" to submit a record of the encounter through an online survey, the designer tracked responses and used his own subjective analysis to come up with the data set. While Felton acknowledges the variations in accuracy his methods produce, he explains that he "strives to sort and collate the data in a clinical and repeatable manner that could be reproduced by someone looking for the same stories I have selected. "

Felton also notes that the volume of data was so unwieldy it could have easily spiraled into several more reports. To manage all of the information (and keep his sanity), he enlisted the help of such tools as Processing and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The final product once again makes an intriguingly elegant representation of an individual's activities over the course of a year--this time recorded under the surveillance of his peers.

La Vitrine by Moment Factory and Photonic Dreams

By Craig Kanarick on January 25, 2010 4:41 PM | No Comments

Created in August of 2009 in Montreal, this reactive video wall was designed and produced by Moment Factory, known in the industry for designing incredible productions for clients as diverse as Cirque de Soleil, the United Nations and Nine Inch Nails. Called North America's first large-scale permanent outdoor reactive wall, the project was originally supposed to be a temporary installation but was so popular, it has become a permanent fixture. I say that's a good move.

Tweeting Tasti D-Lite Earns Rewards

By Craig Kanarick on January 25, 2010 2:36 PM | No Comments

Image via Wikipedia

They won't tell you what it's made of, but Tasti D-Lite recently started a new program to reward customers who update their social networks with the brand name. The frozen dessert chain just launched which ties customers' current TastiRewards loyalty cards to Twitter and Foursquare by registering at new site MyTasti.com.

Each time a purchase activity is shared, the customer earns points. It takes between 10 and 50 updates to earn a free cup or cone. 10 of the company's 47 stores across the nation are using the program, with more to come as the weather turns warmer.

I Love My Fitbit

By Craig Kanarick on January 18, 2010 10:02 PM | No Comments

After about 7 months of patient waiting, my Fitbit finally showed up late last week. I've finally figured out how it works best for me and I couldn't be happier. It is tiny and elegant, just like the marketing copy on the website promised. As I use it, I'll start to convey my experiences. Now I just need to get a Philips Digital Life, Withings scale and Samsung MyFit and I'll be all set with my bioinformatics for 2010...

Below is my calorie-burning chart for today:

Ben Fry Hiring

By Craig Kanarick on January 17, 2010 11:11 AM | No Comments

Ben Fry, visualization superstar and co-creator of Processing started a new company a few weeks ago and is looking to hire people. His recent project, the award-winning "On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces," should give you an example of the types of things that his new company will be doing. He's looking for designers, programmers and more, so if you or someone you know is interested, get them in touch with Ben.

Early 2010 Articles on Visualization

By Craig Kanarick on January 14, 2010 11:44 AM | No Comments

2010 is starting off with some great articles about data visualization and their building importance to the business world. On the Harvard Business Review site, former HBS professor John Sviokla writes a quick post about three benefits of data visualization. What are they?

Great visualizations are efficient
Great visualizations can help people discover new understandings
Great visualizations can help create shared understandings

While his article is clear, it doesn't really go in to too much detail, which is unfortunate. With such a great pedigree and a great audience, he could do much more to help champion great data-driven stories.

A much more detailed and predictive article is entitled The State of Information Visualization over on the Eager Eyes blog by Robert Kosara. He (rightly, I think) predicts that interactive web-based data visualizations are going to grow in popularity and complexity and start to be implemented in JavaScript. Like me, he also thinks that bioinformatics will be the main area of growth -- data about people's bodies. He even thinks 2010 could be "The Year of Visualization Theory" where new academic discourse leads to a much better understanding of how visualization should work in the digital age. I sure hope he's right!

Hvass&Hannibal: Losing the Plot

By cool hunting on January 14, 2010 9:19 AM | No Comments

Taking data visualizing to a conceptual level, Danish design studio Hvass&Hannibal's upcoming exhibition "Losing the Plot" at London's Kemistry Gallery engagingly reinterprets info into artworks. (Click on all images for expanded view)

The Copenhagen-based duo created silkscreen prints, wooden sculptures and offset posters, beautifully and tangibly expressing data sets such as the probability theory or the registration of natural phenomena. Adding their own sensitivity to hard statistics, the multimedia designers imagine the data in bold colors, sometimes playing on traditional geometric shapes and at other times turning to more abstract imagery.

The unconventional approach isn't a stretch for Hvass&Hannibal who dropped out of grad school to design full time. Their broad spectrum of work includes album covers, illustrations, installations, music videos, art direction and the team recently offered their design knowledge as guest bloggers on "It's Nice That."

In addition to the works in the show, Kemistry will sell a series of silkscreen prints.

Losing the Plot
15 January-27 February 2010
Kemistry Gallery
43 Charlotte Road
London EC2A 3PD map
tel. +44 (0)20 7729 3636

via Cool Hunting

Blogging from CES

By Craig Kanarick on January 5, 2010 1:33 PM | No Comments

I am currently writing from 34,000 feet above sea level on Virgin America on my way to Las Vegas for CES. I will be posting finds from the convention floor as I find interesting things to write about...

January 2010 Archives