More than the sum of the parts
2008-09-10 11:47:14 - by Nicolas Malevé

In his PhD’s dissertation, Ben Shaw discusses «how shared representations enhance design collaboration. I draw on examples from my field study at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where real-time teams have radically accelerated the design of next generation exploratory spacecraft and science missions to Mars. My results highlight the roles representations play in generating possibilities, synthesizing perspectives and consolidating commitment to action, thereby helping collaborative groups bring about preferred futures.»

For his dissertation he created a few network animations of the Nasa designers team meetings.
«The behavior of these networks reflects important aspects of the interaction taking place in a design meeting at any given time, including the level of support and commitment expressed for different proposals, the extent to which participants engage one another’s points of view, and the degree of integration of shared representations in conversation. This behavior can be visualized using animated layout diagrams such as those below (produced with a program called SoNIA and viewed in Quicktime movies). The qualitative information conveyed by these diagrams can be complemented by applying numerical metrics to the network structures, as described in the dissertation.»

Read more

software commit visualisations
2008-07-22 11:02:46 - by Nicolas Malevé

Codeswarm by Michael Ogawa.

«This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.»

http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/ ogawa/codeswarm/

The code:

http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/
http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/wiki/GeneratingAVideo

It is worth looking also to the VIDI group of which Ogawa is a member.

http://vidi.cs.ucdavis.edu/publications
http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/...treemaplayout-final.pdf

Thanks Wendy for the info.

Information design patterns
2008-05-16 14:13:00 - by Nicolas Malevé

A website that parallels a thesis titled The Form of Facts and Figures from Christian Behrer at the University of Postdam. It contains "a collection of 55 design patterns that describe the functional aspect of graphic components for the display , behaviour and user interaction of complex infographics ".

For each of these patterns, there is a description, a layout example and a real world example. It is a bit unfortunate that this interesting and carefully designed information is embedded in a flash application, but reading from the homepage of the website, this will maybe change in a near future.

Mapping Me / Mapping You
2008-04-06 19:44:14 - by Nicolas Malevé

April 25, 18:00 - 20:00, in Recyclart

A roundtable meeting about cartography between An Mertens (and other members of Saturdays, Woman and Free Software) , Liesbeth Huybrechts (Cultural studies PHD KuLeuven, researcher, curator), Nicolas Malevé (Tresor software, Towards.be) and Peter Westenberg (Routes + Routines) investigating GEO data control, different layers and perspectives on the art of mapping, subjective cartographic perception and /Home as private territory.

• w h e n : April 25, 18:00 - 20:00
• l o c a t i o n : Recyclart, GARE BRUXELLES-CHAPELLE, Rue des Ursulines 25, Brussels

Human Brain Cloud
2008-03-26 10:16:01 - by Nicolas Malevé

A massively multiplayer word association game, by Kyle Gabler.

Gli esclusi
2008-02-22 13:22:57 - by Nicolas Malevé

«Decisions are normally taken from the high, by a minority of players, leaving out those more related to the territory. How we can get them in? Through four steps: awakening, aggregating, activating, complaining»

Gli exclusi is a map/diagram created by density design to illustrate a scenario to organise citizens response to the Italian National Action Plan.

Read more about this map (and many more )on the density design’s website.