jamin.org

A recent comment led me to Sketchcast.com, a tool that allows you to draw and record what you’re drawing, with the idea that the visualizations can help you communicate your ideas.

As a designer who is always open to new methods of visualization and communication of ideas, I set up an account and created the following, based on a diagram from How Designers Think.

Pretty neat, eh?

As you noticed, it was difficult to keep my lines straight. While this is due to the mouse being a less than ideal drawing tool, it detracts from the effectiveness of the resulting visualization.

But why wouldn’t I just create a static image to show the result?

Also, since this is essentially a virtual whiteboard, I asked myself why do we use whiteboards? How important it is during design sessions that the participants see the person perform the task of creating the visualization? Or is using a whiteboard about collaboration, rapid visualization, and iteration? I suspect it’s a combination. Watching someone draw does help everyone else see and understand their thought process. But can this work online where the thought process of what is being drawn is already contrived?

Granted, I did not take advantage of the sound recording aspect of Sketchcast. So perhaps if I were explaining something and drawing at the same time, the tool would be more useful.

While it has problems, it’s a notable effort. Makes me wonder if there are any collaborative online whiteboards that let remote groups create ad hoc visualizations and notes. It would be great to record the iterative process and use colors for each participant. Perhaps a such a whiteboard could also address the issue of one person controlling the board.

This project required me to visualize information space for the book Else/Where Mapping. It was to be either interactive or a time-based video. I chose the latter, because it is where I had the least experience.

In combination with sketches, I prototyped ideas in Flash and experimented with animation early.

I used the mapped structure of the book as my theme, and overlayed information on top of photos of each page of the book.

The resulting two-and-a-half minute video is a journey through the each page of the book set to driving music.

A still from the video.

The final video. (Size and quality reduced for Web.)

I sketched early thoughts on animation combined with notes from the content of the book for inspiration.

Another sketch shows early layout and transition ideas.

To get a sense of what areas of the book I would focus on in each of the four section of the book, I created a story board.

Today I went to Martin Wattenburg’s lecture on mapping the invisible, during which he highlighted some of his work, including:

• Shape of Song
• NameVoyager
• Apartment

I found the above three the most interesting. They’ve been around for a while, so there’s a chance you’ve already seen them. I can’t remember if I had been to NameVoyager, but you should go and look up your name if you haven’t done so.

I learned that “Jamin” came to rise in the 60s and died completely in the mid 90s as a name given to babies. Also, there are about 13 Jamins for every million babies born in the United States during that time period.

(Thirteen is my favorite number.)

As I was born in the 70s, this means I was not the first American Jamin. And if no one begins naming their babies Jamin again, at some point all the Jamins will be gone.

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.

Although I spent all day working on my data visualization project, I’m still pretty much at square one, if you were to measure my current results by means of a finished project.

I came into the studio late in the day to get some feedback to ensure I didn’t go down the wrong path and tweak all 682 paths that are supposed to represent the number of emails I received during one given week only to find out my vision was flawed. (Yes, I know I said 800 before. I was wrong.)

I got good feedback, which is one of the pluses of graduate school that I didn’t find so much in the working world. There is very little ego here. People ask for criticism and give it freely with the understanding that the goal is a better final result, no matter if it is yours or someone else’s.

If you were to measure my current progress in terms of what I have learned about Illustrator and what I have gained as far as direction, I have been very successful and very productive.

Now I just have to execute. I have 14 paths done, 668 to go, with 13 hours before my target completion time (24 hours before class on Monday to allow for printing).

As usual, I found time to blog. Without further ado, I think some Propellerheads are in order.

I’ve mostly been talking about my Design Seminar class with Dick Buchanan and my Interaction and Visual Interface Design with John Zimmerman because those classes involve more discussion of ideas, which are easier to write about.

My other two classes, Design Studio with Dan Boyarski and Graduate Type with Karen Moyer (and later Kristin Hughes), are studio classes where the focus is on producing work for critique.

Data as Self-Portrait

In Dan’s class we’re tracking data about ourselves over a seven-day period. We are going to explore visualizing this data as a form of self-portrait.

I collected data about my daily communications: email (sent, received, and spam for three different accounts), IM (sent, received), phone calls (outgoing, incoming), text messages (sent, received), and hours per day in front of a computer.

Type as Self-Portrait

On a similar vein, in grad type we were given a construct, “I used to _________, but now I don’t”to create a typographic self-portrait using our constructions in a 10×10 space.

These are in the order that I created them. Despite the text being all over the place, I felt the design was too conservative to represent who I really am. I moved to a more organic shape that plays with line breaks in a poetic way and has a sense of movement. The last one is a greater attempt to experiment.

My classmates seemed to like the first the best, with noted problems. I kind of like the middle for its poetics. But some said they liked the last. Design is subjective.

Next week we will explore using the same content for an accordian-type book. But I plan to continue working on these.

If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it.