The Wikipedia entry on the 2004 film Primer provides this helpful diagram:
If I just had the time, I’d diagram Robert Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps.
May 12, 2008
How Time Travel Works
Posted by Henry Woodbury on May 12, 2008 at 3:42 pm
May 5, 2008
Harvard Business Review Discovers “Emerging Science of Visualization”
Posted by Mac McBurney on May 5, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, the two best-known creators of IBM Research’s Many Eyes, brief business execs on the benefits of collaborative information visualization.
Our research has found that the compelling presentation of data through visualization’s advanced techniques generates a surprising volume of impassioned conversations. Viewers ask questions, make comments, and suggest theories for why there’s a downward trend here or a data cluster there. That level of engagement could foster the kind of grassroots innovation CEOs dream of.
The article is available in the May 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review and for free online (at least for now): http://tinyurl.com/5btvem
You’ll also find Viégas and Wattenberg in MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition.
- History Flow, their 2003 visualization of changes in Wikipedia: http://moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/106
- Thinking Machine 4, by Wattenberg and Marek Walczak, shows a computer’s possible future chess moves. http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/283/
Finally, for even more info-vis star-watching, Fernanda Viegas and two other designers will join John Maeda (an info design rockstar if ever there was one) later this month for IN/VISIBLE: Graphic Data Revealed. From the event’s blurb:
The visual ethics required in information graphics increase the designer’s burden from faithful executor to editorial arbiter. How do design choices affect the integrity of the data being portrayed?
If you see me there, say hello: http://www.aigany.org/events/details/08FD/
May 2, 2008
A New (Old) Subway Map
Posted by Henry Woodbury on May 2, 2008 at 10:02 am
The New York Times City Room blog reports that Men’s Vogue will publish an updated version of Massimo Vignelli’s iconic 1972 subway map.
With its 45- and 90-degree angles and one color per subway line, the 1972 subway map by Massimo Vignelli was divorced from the cityscape, devoid of street or neighborhood names. It was criticized because its water was not blue and its parks were not green. Paul Goldberger called it “a stunningly handsome abstraction” that “bears little relation to the city itself.”
New:
Old:
Part of a continuing series:
April 29, 2008
Of Wii and waterproof mattresses: Hotels prototype new ideas with “test rooms”
Posted by Kirsten Robinson on April 29, 2008 at 12:06 pm
The New York Times reported today that hotels are using “test rooms” to try out new designs and technology before implementing them throughout the hotel, saving vast sums by discarding or improving upon ideas that don’t work. New technologies being tested include waterproof mattresses, digital door panels, customized Wii consoles, and even wireless electricity. But sometimes the greatest need is to make sure the existing features are usable. One guest who tried out a test room commented that he could not figure out the alarm clock or how to turn on the television. “All I wanted to do was watch CNN,” he said.
April 23, 2008
Charts, Unjunked
Posted by Henry Woodbury on April 23, 2008 at 9:49 am
For 100% applied Tufte you can’t do better than the Junk Charts blog. The author, Kaiser, takes charts that appear in mass media venues, analyzes how they go wrong, and redraws them for accuracy and easier interpretation (similar to what we did with Nightingale’s Rose).
Most interesting are the possibilities that arise when a chart has sufficient data to benefit from a variety of approaches. An active comments section provides sophisticated feedback to Kaiser’s posts.
In one recent post, for example, Kaiser redraws a chart of tertiary education by country that originally appeared in Atlantic. The original is shown below on the left, with the first of Kaiser’s redrawn versions on the right:
In the comments, zuil serip links to another set of redrawings, including this one:
April 4, 2008
Forget the Parachutes and Cheese: Meet Johnny Bunko
Posted by Lisa Agustin on April 4, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Many information architects and designers are familiar with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which explains the mechanics of the medium while shedding light on the principles of visual communications. Now comes Daniel Pink’s new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, a graphic novel that claims to be “The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.” The book follows the protagonist as he learns the six secrets to a satisfying career, courtesy of a sprite named Diana who can be conjured by splitting a pair of magic chopsticks. (I’m not kidding.) The book is written in the Japanese style of comics called Manga. Why? According to Pink:
Because most career books just plain stink. They’re too long, too boring, and too quickly outdated. Today most people get their tactical career information online – how to write a resume, what questions to ask in an interview, who to use as a reference, etc. What they want in a book, or so people tell me, are what they can’t get from Google. They want strategic lessons – and they want it presented in an accessible, to-the-point way.
It’s an interesting approach, newer in the U.S. than in Japan where, Pink claims, 22% of all printed material is in Manga, covering topics as diverse as “how to help you manage your time, learn about Japanese history, or find a mate.” Will the format work? You decide.
April 2, 2008
Where the Singles Are
Posted by Henry Woodbury on April 2, 2008 at 8:58 am
Author and researcher Richard Florida tells us where single men and women outnumber each other with a map and accompanying essay (originally published in The Boston Globe). The blog reprint gives commenters a chance to get into the discussion.
Tom kicks off the comment thread with a decisive point:
I think this map would be more informative if it was based on percentages rather than raw numbers.
One hopes Florida will respond. As he chatters on about the extreme cases of “greater New York” and “greater Los Angeles” I look at his map and wonder about Memphis and Miami. Why does greater Memphis, with a population around one million, have a greater singles-gender imbalance than Miami-Ft. Lauderdale with a population about five times that?
April 1, 2008
Standards vs. Compatibility
Posted by Henry Woodbury on April 1, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Joel Spolsky offers a look ahead at Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. What he foresees is a web developer flamewar.
Headed by developer Dean Hachamovitch, the MSIE 8 team has decided to move its default mode away from MSIE 7 compatibility and closer to web standards. Spolsky offers a long quote from Hachamovitch’s announcement of this decision, but it boils down to this:
We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.
This means that some HTML pages coded to take advantage of some of MSIE 7’s quirks will break in MSIE 8.
This is a problem? It shouldn’t be.
Barring the introduction of any new quirks (say a new way to misinterpret the box model), there’s no reason any Web site HTML and CSS should break in MSIE 8. If a web site has been tested against MSIE 6, MSIE 7, Firefox, and Safari (as are all of our public-facing projects), and if its developers have used a robust HTML structure and the subset of mutually-supported CSS styles (rather than browser-sniffing to write specialty CSS), then the odds of that site rendering incorrectly in MSIE 8 should be very small.
JavaScript-driven functionality, however, is harder to predict. Here, I rely on the folks behind Prototype and jQuery to handle MSIE 8 so I won’t have to. We’ll see how that goes.
Little People About London
Posted by Henry Woodbury on April 1, 2008 at 10:07 am
March 18, 2008
User Experience: Crash Test Version
Posted by Henry Woodbury on March 18, 2008 at 9:32 pm
One exhibit at the New York Auto show is a car like this:
The point is to show off the Ford Taurus’s five star crash rating. What makes this interesting as information design is that it’s literally a) a car crash and b) interactive:
Show goers will be allowed to sit in the post-crash Taurus to see what a crash test dummy sees after a 35-mph meet up with an offset concrete barrier.
It is easy to forget in the online world, but the best user experience is being there.
