jamin.org

Instead of doing an independent study on composition, or Research Methods with Dick Buchanan, or an introduction to industrial design fundamentals, I’m taking Making Furniture Interactive with Mark Gross. I’m working with a microcontroller, wires, LEDs, and writing programs with Processing. We’re using Arduino—an open-source electronics prototyping platform—for development.

I decided to take this course because it looked fun, it didn’t involve readings, and it gets me working in the physical world.

Our first project was to program the board with three LEDs and create a lamp. It took a while to get my head around wiring the board and the LEDs, but I figured it out with help from peers. I made the lights fade in and out randomly at random intervals. (I like random stuff.) I then stuck a paper candle holder I created last year over top of my creation (a cheap move, but I’m really pressed for time with Emergence two days away).

I haven’t talked much about my Information Visualization course with Ben Fry and Golan Levin. They are quite an amusing pair, a mix of design and art and nerdery.

Today we had our first crit, which only involved select projects. Mine was not one of them. And thank goodness for that, because it was dreadful.

We had to create either a map or a time series. We could use processing or not. We had no limits on data, except we could not use the stock market or the weather.

I had a couple ideas, and tried using processing for both. But I got tripped up on syntax in both cases. I thought my ActionScript skills would translate to processing because processing is layered upon Java, and Java is similar to ActionScript. I was 90 percent correct.

With a looming deadline, I ditched processing and did something in AfterEffects (of all things), and I’m not really sure if it was a map or a time series. After some reflection, I think it was just me floundering.

At any rate, my peers produced some sweet stuff. Definitely inspiring.

Before class and seeing what others had done, I told Golan and Ben I would do mine over. Seeing my peers work provided further fodder for that. To add even more incentive, I commit to posting my redo here.

Ben Fry visited our design studio class again, this time to give a presentation instead of critiquing our work.

He talked about the importance of being able to visualize complex data in order to gain a better understanding of what we’re talking about, for instance, when we say the human genome consists of approximately 35,000 genes.

Ben said mapping such complex data can help us bridge the gap between what we understand, and what we think we understand. Another interesting, but obvious, statement was that there is no trend toward less information. So true.

As one of the creators of processing, he claimed that the tools (Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc.) don’t tell us how to deal with this complex information. He it seems he believes the tools are constraints. But it’s hard to imagine people not using tools, and instead coding them themselves.

I asked how much of what he does is simply displaying the information versus making it look cool. While his goal is not about making these that look cool, he said, making something that people want to look at certainly helps in making the information accessible.

Some of the more interesting pieces of work that he showed has were mapping of old Atari and Nintendo game code. This he did for fun.

But he did state the importance of learning about data for real projects through experimentation or play. While possibly not practical or useful, it teaches you something about the data they perhaps will influence the final piece.

Overall, the project he presented were interesting enough for me to again consider whether to take a course with him next semester. It also made my curious again about processing, which I haven’t touched since I downloaded it for my data visualization project.

I didn’t use it. But I’m wondering if, as an experiment, I should.

After depriving myself of sleep and taking a chance that my poster would work it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s way through the print queue in time for class (we were told to allow 48 hours and I submitted my job at 2 a.m.), I gladly hung my poster on the wall with everyone else during grad studio this afternoon.

As this was our first big endeavor for grad studio, Dan Boyarski invited guests to check out the work and also provide an objective opinion on the results. Ben Fry, the 2006-2007 Nierenberg Chair of Design, was in attendance.

Part of my research into data visualization included many visits to visualcomplexity.com, which includes a handful of data visualization projects by none other than Ben during his time at the MIT Media Lab.

The way Dan conducts critiques with outside guests is he asks them what they?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re drawn to and to sort of think aloud what they?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re seeing. Ben was asked to go first, and he didn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t choose my poster.

Instead, he focused on a much smaller, hand-drawn sketch of the measurement of coffee versus sleep represented on continuous sine wave that corresponded to the days of the week.

The next guest chose my poster. After a few comments, Dan asked Ben if he had comments. Naturally, he did.

Having looked at his stuff for inspiration, it was really cool to have him point to the flaws in my visualization: the meaning of using spheres or circles; the length of the lines; the trouble with three-dimensional space. All good stuff.

During a break, I talked with him a bit and told him about seeing some of his previous work. He said he doesn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t really want to be grouped with the lot on visualcomplexity.com, because one, those projects are old, and two, he feels that complexity is exactly not the point. The point is simplicity.

In fact, his other comments during the critique reflected this mindset. He seems to want to simply rather than make something look complex?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùpossibly for the sake of making it look complex or for aesthetic reasons.

Some more of his criticism of my piece was that it was difficult to determine what the main connection was (my piece was titled ?¢‚Ǩ?ìMaking Connections?¢‚Ǩ¬ù), and that the meaning of the objects and placement of the lines was perhaps arbitrary (In fact, they were, somewhat, but not completely).

We talked a little bit about how he uses processing for his data visualization. He said that creating my lines would have required four lines of code. I downloaded processing last week, looked at some of the example code, but didn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t have time to dig in. But his comment gives me compelling reason.

He concluded our conversation by saying it would allow me to ?¢‚Ǩ?ìmake mistakes faster,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù which isn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t a Ben Fry original, but it’s still a worthy comment. Because making mistakes slow sucks.

Overall, however, I was happy with my progress. My initial idea was a bar graph (I told this to Ben incidentally, and he seemed to support the bar graph if it made it simpler). So I came a long way, and I feel I learned a lot along the way, even if my visualization wasn’t perfect.

For this project, unlike some of my summer projects, I think I stepped out of the comfort zone, and I feel good about that.